Into One's Own
From Youth to Adulthood in the United States 1920-1975By John ModellUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1989 John Modell
All right reserved.ISBN: 97805200764191
Defining One's Own Sylvia's Choice At sixteen, Sylvia rejected the hand of the boy next door. Her mother made the decision easy, reminding her that she was too young to know what love was. When Sylvia was eighteen, her mother prompted her to reject the suit of a poor but ambitious young man with whom Sylvia thought she really was in love. At nineteen, Sylvia considered but finally rejected the proposal of a young man of wealth and family, whom she did not love. "When Sylvia was twenty-five she was much lovelier than she had been at nineteen. At least, so her mother said. . . . Somehow, the men she met [now] were not so eager for matrimony. Most of them were earning smallish incomes, most of them had someone dependent upon them, most of them, when they did consider marriage, looked for a girl who had some earning power."1 For a period, Sylvia rejected the logic of this proposition but eventually acceded. Her rebellion was episodic and individual.
This story in The Ladies' Home Journal in 1941 presenting the workings of the marriage market was typical of the genre that was a staple of the monthly woman's fiction mill. Marriage at some age, Americans held and still hold, is clearly too young; love at sixteen is either impossible or empirically unrecognizable. The winnowing process of courtship, however, rapidly reduces the pool of eligibles to those with special demands or disqualifications. The corrosion of age on woman's physical allure begins its cruel work; and the great, if lessening, social disadvantages of the single female allow even the bachelor dregs to demand not only beauty but economic resources. In this account, the events leading to marriage are presented as essentially a learning process. The literary token of the accomplish-
ment of this process was a recognizable expression of true love, and marriage was the melodramatic climax or humorous resolution toward which the action tended. The protagonist's uncertainty about marriage was followed by a declaration of intention to marry, after a learning process in which both sexuality and some kind of nonsexual "rightness" were discovered to unite the couple. This learning process was formally analogous to the "search" phase of the "marriage market" as abstracted by economistic model builders.2
In 1941, Sylvia knew that her mother knew the rules of the game all too well. But in more recent decades, the path has become obscuredindeed, contestedand in many of its particulars. Most obviously, it has become an embarrassment to present marriage itself as a happy ending, not so much because marriage is not a happy event but because so often it is no longer an ending. The impact of divorce and serial marriage on parenthood, on children, indeed on the kinship system as a whole, is under wide debate today.3 The search for "the" husband in women's fiction today has dissolved into a variety of quests with less-determinate patterns: for physical gratification, for love, for self, for security, for "fulfillment." These may take longer to find; and both men and women may gain the capacity to contribute to them only slowly and, indeed, may develop them only rather late.
At the same time, entry into marriage in American society, no less than earlier in the century, is still said to depend on love, which in our culture is understood to be spontaneous. But love ordinarily has an explicitly age-graded aspect: "puppy" love is different from "mature" love. "If you've never been kissed, you've never been ardently loved, before you are twenty-six, then beware! Love, at eighteen may be just a lark, a game, but at twenty-six, the starved senses, suddenly aroused, whirl with a giddiness that blinds clear thinking."4 A second culturally defined dimension of marital love, roughly distinguishing "fleshly" from what might be called "obligational" love, has also usually been thought to be influenced by the chronological ages of the lovers and their ages relative to one another.5 Thus have age norms of marriage been intertwined, as in Sylvia's case,
with the ways people are supposed to feel toward each other and the forms these feelings are encouraged to take.
Two decades after the exposition of the conventions by which Sylvia finally learned to live, two best-selling books roundly condemned contemporary patterns of early marriage as a special bane to American middle-class women. Debate over the shape of the way young people should approach marriage had moved from the personal to the political. Today we view Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl as a period piece and honor Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique as the opening (or reopening) gun in a heroic battle to realign the genders. Both books offered arresting arguments that women's personal fulfillment was sabotaged by early pursuit of marriage and parenthood. But their prescriptions differed radically.6
I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off! . . . Finding him is all she can think about or talk about when . . . her years as a single women can be too rewarding to rush out of. . . . I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don't need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.7
The problem that has no namewhich is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacitiesis taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease. . . . If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity. . . . we are committing, quite simply, genocide, starting with the mass burial of American women. . . . We need a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity to reach maturity, identity, completeness of self, without conflict with sexual fulfillment, . . . to stop the early-marriage movement, stop girls from growing up wanting to be 'just a housewife.'8
At the time these tracts appeared, the age at which women were marrying had already been moving upward for half a decade. What is important is not demographic precision, however, but the passion with which the authors spoke to and as women, yet
from startlingly different perspectives and with such contrasting tone: one recalling the coyness of such Hollywood confections as the Tony Curtis-Natalie Wood Sex and the Single Girl , the other foreshadowing changes we even now are assimilating. Women who faced the world quite differently sensed that there was something wrong with young women's life course and that as women they had a stake in rectifying it.
Brown took on herself the major task of promoting an open and enthusiastic recognition of female sexuality, so that in its various guises it is seen as suffusing the life of the "mature" single woman. "Theoretically a 'nice' single woman has no sex life," she remarks. "What nonsense! She has a better sex life than most of her married friends. . . . Since for a female getting there is at least half the fun, a single woman has reason to prize the luxury of taking long, gossamer, attenuated, pulsating trips before finally arriving in bed. A married woman and her husband have precious little time and energy for romance."9 But Brown's transvaluation is accomplished by promoting the single-girl phase as a period of almost single-minded focus on fun with men, however varied, exquisite, and (but for that last time when the right man comes along) transitory. "Liking men is sexy. It is by and large just about the sexiest thing you can do. . . . And there is quite a lot more to it than simply wagging your tail every time a man pats you on the head. You must wag your tail, or course, . . . but there are about five thousand more aggressive ways to demonstrate liking. . . . You must spend time plotting how to make him happier. Not just him . . . them! "10 Sexiness, practically, inheres in plotting, luring, tempting, challenging, especially at the workplace, and, above all, enjoying men. All this is a learned skill, one substantial enough to rightly command a longish time in its practice, a period brought to an end only by a marriage on the terms that Brown understands it.
For Friedan, this kind of sexual triumph, on the ideological level, is no solution; it is part of the problem. Once, she argues, women did have to liberate their sexuality from the pedestal, but postwar gender ideology had already changed this before she (or Brown) wrote. "The split in the new image opens a different fissurethe feminine woman, whose goodness includes
the desires of the flesh, and the career woman, whose evil includes every desire of the separate self."11 And this separate self is exactly what Friedan believed women deserved as their birthright, and needed for their mental healthcontradicting the popular psychology of the day that (like Brown) saw women's problem in sexual neuroses. Education and then employment would save women, not lustier, more extensive courtship habits.
Contemporary married life seemed dreary to both Friedan and Brown, and both believed that it would be far less dreary if it were entered into later. The postponement of marriage had for both authors the secondary advantage of superior choice of mate, and the primary advantage of prior "fulfillment" for the woman. "Those who glom on to men so that they can collapse with relief, spend the rest of their days shining up their status symbol and figure they never have to reach, stretch, learn, grow, face dragons or make a living again are the ones to be pitied. They, in my opinion, are the unfulfilled ones." (And this is Brown speaking.)12 The two authors each sought to revise the life course of American women, in the belief that the content and value of marriage (and, explicitly in both cases, parenthood) are in part determined by the courses women took on the way there.
Both authors would extend schooling, the extent of which both saw as far too subject to foreshortening by women in the interest of early marriage. Both would make the occupational life a far lengthier and less casual part of women's life courses, although Friedan advised that women seek vocation in the classic sense, while Brown advised frequent job changes or at best a shallow careerism to facilitate the pursuit of fun with men. And they agreed that sexuality must be recognized and accepted outside of marriage, lest it drive toward one that was poorly timed. While the prophetic quality of these prescriptions may (in hindsight) be more a matter of simple observation, the fact is that the scenarios Friedan and Brown proposed do describe in many ways how life was to change in the next decade and a half. How people grow upthe life coursehas been a subject for debate through much of our century. The debate, however, more commonly addresses directly the content of phases of the life course rather than their proper timing
or sequencing. Recent debate on marriage provides a case in point.
How to Marry Typically, pre-World War II fictions played with the age norms of marriage by setting youthfully eager wishes off against essentially external hindrances, which delayed marriage. The culmination of true love was postponed because, while the flesh was eager, the economy often made it impossible for couples to fulfill with sufficient certainty the obligations of true love. In the prosperous postwar period, however, the willing flesh of the enamored arrived at marriage (younger) after conquering not external hindrances but the actors' own doubts and confusions, characteristically placed within the sexual realm. A typical didactic fiction in a 1957 issue of True Love Stories , "Engagement Jitters," provides a case in point.
Diane Glazer had met Raymond Tappan eighteen months before. Their courtship was in no way unusual; as their interest in one another grew, so did the number of their dates. They'd been going steady a little over a year when Ray asked Diane to marry him. He was twenty, his military training was behind him, his future as a clerk in the post office promising. Diane had suffered no doubts when Ray proposed. She loved him, he loved her; what could be simpler? Of course she'd marry him! In six months, a June wedding? Of course! . . . But as the date of the wedding grew nearer, Diane found some of her excitement dying down. . . . Before, when Ray had kissed her, she'd always had to fight her raging emotions. Now sometimes, she wanted to run when he drew her into his arms. Oh sure, they'd talked frankly about sex. . . . but talking and doing were two different things! And the doing part was only a few weeks away.13
Correspondingly, when Hannah Stone and Abraham Stone added a new section on ideal marriage age to their virtual catechism on health in marriage in the "completely revised" postwar edition of their well-known Marriage Manual (1937), their prescription moved the offset against premature lust from the external realm to the internal. "The best age for marriage is the age at which emotional and social maturity is attained. In gen-
ral . . . the early twenties are the best years for marriage." But "the extent of a person's maturity in thinking and behavior" outranked both "chronological age" and "the economic situation" in indicating when to marry.14
In retrospect, we are hard put to determine whether the ideal marriage age had shifted downward because people grew up emotionally quicker, or vice versa, or whether the removal of material hindrances to marriage allowed many people to marry younger, encouraging a simultaneous change in the age people considered best for marriage and the way people at a given age felt about themselves. In fact, one cannot say in the abstract, for material circumstances, values, feelings, and institutional arrangements are all thoroughly intertwined. Transitions like marriage often demand a certain material wherewithal, and under some conditions, changes in material circumstances may be granted a certain primacy, on the assumption of institutional constancy, as in the matter of parental underwriting of marriage. But just as this volume will discern changes in the material environment, it will also show institutional changes as well as normative and even emotional ones. My purpose is not to disentangle cause so much as it is to portray in some richness the way in which the push "into one's own" was repeatedly revised over a half-century.
A series of life course transitions , including marriage, similarly freighted and indeed interrelated, are the subject of this book. Sequentially, marriage is at the center of the events I will explore; it is preceded by the inception of what roughly can be called dating and by the initiation of sexual intimacy.15 As courtship "leads to" marriage, so marriage "leads to" parenthood, the fourth transition treated here. (First marriage is by no means ultimate marriage since the 1960s; thus, my account of "family-building" also treats divorce.)
The path into one's own is somewhat vaguely bordered, but it is no less bordered for that fact. In twentieth-century America, for instance, as elsewhere and at other times, powerful social forms have gathered about life course transitions which are distinctly but not precisely prescriptive in content.16 The most obvious is the wedding, a ritual that in twentieth-century America has always seemed somehow anachronistic,
but which, as "tradition," has always seemed to renew itself. Bride's Magazine 's 1973 revision of its Bride's Book of Etiquette instructs readers that "most wedding customs evolved from a wish to symbolize all the good things the union meant to the couple and the community. . . . Those that continue to symbolize the same good intentions . . . will flourish. . . . Other, older traditions are gradually outgrown and eventually abandoned. . . . Do look over some of these time-honored customs and choose those that appeal to you and your families' sentiments."17 The wedding is the particular ritual whose form symbolizes compliance with widely held values, including those regarding appropriate timing .
Religious weddings, especially large church weddings, constitute in the contemporary American context a form of communal ritual oversight of the marriage.18 Couples marrying in religious ceremonies have been markedly more concentrated in the modal age-at-marriage categories than those marrying in civil ceremonies. This pattern, if anything, intensified over time between 1961 and 1974.19 Reeves's data on marriages in New Haven indicate a marked trend toward a somewhat enlarged proportion of civil marriages among all marriages from 1870 to 1940 but rising only to about 18 percent.20 Long-term annual observations for the city of Philadelphia indicate a slow, gradual increase in secular weddings from an initial figure of about 2 percent around the turn of the century to a peak of around 8 percent in the early 1920s, followed by another decline, to about 5 percent in 1937, at the end of the series.21 National data for 1939, 1940, and 1948 show that at this time about a quarter of marriages were civil.22 When the national vital registration system began to regularly record type of ceremony in 1960, the proportion of civil marriages was slightly lower than this. The trend since then has been a very gradual increase.23 The data, taken together, indicate that during the twentieth century, there have been modest changes in fashion in type of ceremony, but nothing more than this. In view of the dramatic changes in the timing, structuring, and terminability of marriages during this period, the stability in the ritual is remarkable. As a passage from one stage of life to anotheralthough both stages may have developed new contentmarriage contin-
ued to matter, to the community as to the bride and groom. Continuity in ritual provided resources that in part offset circumstantial changes in the way young people came into their own.
Obtaining systematic information on weddings themselves over time requires a certain resourcefulness. Newspaper reports of weddings offer such an insight into trends in ritual surrounding the entry to married life. Wedding notices are stylized, their contents partly editorial whim and partly the preference of the family member who reports the wedding to the paper, so we read not so much a report on what happened as an account of what should have happened .24 But exactly this quality is what interests us about the wedding as a ritual , and from this perspective, stylized stories in local newspapers serve nobly. To respond to the indeterminate but not improbable inclusiveness bias of wedding notices, and especially the possibility that this has changed over time, I have drawn clusters of wedding stories from consecutive late spring and early summer issues from 1925 to 1975 of three newspapers from places varying in population size, on the grounds that the smaller the town, the likelier the incorporation of people of lesser means. The three newspapers, all from Minnesota, included a metropolitan but localistic newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press , a small-town daily, the Albert Lea Times , and a small-town weekly, the Thief River Falls Tribune .25
As though in response to the plasticity of marriage timing a central theme of this bookthere has been a distinct secular trend toward increasing elaboration of the rituals surrounding these events. One of the more prominent aspects of this trend has been a growing emphasis (in the wedding notices) on large ceremonies. To accommodate expanded attendance, weddings have been shifted from weekdays (6 in 10 in the 1920s in all three towns) to weekends (8 in 10 by the 1970s). Newspaper accounts more and more have included the names and origins of wedding guests from beyond the vicinity. By 1957, they often listed "honored guests" from afar.
Concurrently, the number of named offices in the wedding expanded markedly, as formalities became more elaborate. And the reception has emerged as a central part of the wedding story. "A wedding is a solemn ceremony and the reception that fol-
| |
| Table 1. Wedding Receptions in Minnesota Newspapers | | | | Where Place of Reception Is
Mentioned, Proportion Held in
(in percentages) | | | | % with Reception Mentioned |
Private
Home |
Hall, Club, Restaurant | Church-
Related Building |
Number of Articles | | St. Paul | | 192526 | 72 | 90 | 10 | 0 | 105 | | 193233 | 78 | 66 | 25 | 9 | 58 | | 1941 | 80 | 43 | 47 | 11 | 61 | | 1946 | 79 | 33 | 35 | 33 | 58 | | 1957 | 92 | 20 | 58 | 22 | 60 | | 1969 | 92 | 6 | 66 | 28 | 57 | | Albert Lea | | 192526 | 78 | 95 | 5 | 0 | 27 | | 193233 | 63 | 61 | 28 | 11 | 30 | | 1941 | 86 | 63 | 22 | 14 | 58 | | 194647 | 88 | 27 | 28 | 47 | 60 | | 1957 | 98 | 10 | 16 | 75 | 59 | | 1975 | 96 | 9 | 24 | 67 | 50 | | Thief River Falls | | 192225 | 79 | 96 | 4 | 0 | 33 | | 194041 | 87 | 67 | 18 | 15 | 39 | | 1946 | 93 | 70 | 11 | 19 | 30 | | 1957 | 97 | 15 | 21 | 64 | 35 | | 1973 | 100 | 6 | 24 | 70 | 54 | | SOURCE : See discussion in text. | |
lows should be joyous. It's traditional to gather friends and relatives to celebrate the happy day."26 Table 1 details two aspects of the reception trend. The first shows that gradually (in each newspaper) the reception became an obligatory part of the story, and thus, putatively, of a ritually complete wedding. At the same time, the reception moved from the home of the bridal family to church parlors in the small towns and to private clubs or restaurants in St. Paul. The reception's rise points to
the secularization of the wedding ritual (even as the proportion of religious ceremonies has remained roughly stable) and its increasingly public orientation. Surely, this shift does not bespeak a lessening of social oversight over the marriage but a shiftor, more properly, a broadeningin its focus. Indeed, nuptial couples now were twice on inspection, twice required to be grave, then joyous and sociable before they left on their honeymoons, symbolic of their separateness.
The trend of officiants within the formal portion of the wedding has been distinctly toward the masculine, a tendency tied to the move toward elaborate weddings, and also their increasingly public orientation. A marked rise in the prevalence and number of ushers represents the most striking instance. Ushers, typically, were of the generation of the couple who saw fit to affirm the value of an orderly passage into marriage. In Albert Lea, for example, wedding stories in 1925 mentioned an average of three wedding officiants but in the period from 1973 to 1975, no fewer than nine. Girls and women, however, have increasingly filled a burgeoning, imaginative list of reception roles"coffee pourer" and the likethat scarcely ever were assigned to men. In the case of both wedding and reception officiants, nonrelatives have gained in numbers more quickly than have relatives, but there have also been growing numbers of relatives in official roles. When we categorize relatives with stated wedding roles according to whether they are relatives of the bride or the groom, we find consistently heavier participation from the brides' side. The wedding in American cultureno less so in 1975 than in 1925was to be arranged by the bride's side of the family, as etiquette books insisted. As ever, the bride had more at stake, and she accordingly convened more of her kin. But at the same time, the community's ritual stake had seemingly grown.
Although the rather steady trends in ritual oversight do not correspond to the ups and downs in the fragility of marriages, at least as registered by divorce rates, it certainly is plausible that a growing awareness of the voluntary nature of both entrance into and departure from the married state occasioned the evidence of enlarged ritual communal concern.
Defining Sylvia's Choices The timing of transitions in lives is individually determined in our societyto a degree, probably increasingly so (as in the case of marriage), but not entirely. At the same time, the location of the transition point along the life course is socially recognized, monitored, and sanctioned, although the timing of some transitions is obviously more strongly sanctioned than that of others. When I was of an age to protest such matters, a popular song lamented that "they tried to tell us we're too young, too young to really be in love." "They" cared not because they believed that young people's emotions were of real concern to them but because "in love" has been a significant marker in twentieth-century American lives, with attendant rights and privileges, with consequences for related and subsequent action.27
Analogously, if less sublimely, the licensing of automobile drivers, which at two distinct points in the course of life has been a matter of concern to me, is and has long been an age-graded, gender-differentiated, societally sanctioned phenomenon. It is also a phenomenon with an unremarked recent history that is indicative of the ways the life course may change. For boys initially and increasingly for girls, the capacity to drive virtually defined a life course stage. That is, driving was not simply a privilege with obvious utility but also definitive of a stage in one's life , although admittedly one without a particular name attached to it. Excellent national data since World War II on drivers' licenses by age28 reveal that the growing availability of automobiles encouraged more and more boys, younger and younger, to take out licenses. The steepest increase was at age fifteen to seventeen, when most American boys in the late 1940s became licensed drivers. For girls, the age-grading pattern was always less steep, taking more years for an entire cohort of girls to become drivers. But over time girls, have increasingly approached boys' pace of transition to licenseship, the convergence occurring initially at the older teen ages and more recently at the younger ages. Over time, the steepness of age-grading for girls has come to approach that of boys. This narrowed the age span during which in any boy-girl couple the
boy alone would possess this legal, practical, and symbolic competence, a point of some symbolic and perhaps practical consequence for gender relationships.
There is more to the story than adolescents' own choices, as in the case of many of life's highly freighted transitional moments. For adults controlled the governments that licensed drivers, and their response to adolescents' increased material resources was symptomatic of the often quiet debate over the nature of the adolescent years that has been carried on in twentieth-century America. In the early 1960s, there was a broad movement to limit the freedom of children to drive by raising the legal age for licensing. Some states came to offer two age-graded licenses, a full and an aptly named "junior" license. By the late 1960s, at just about the point when adolescent boys were about as completely licensed as they would become, adults relented and began to add their full normative sanction to an early transition to driverhood. Often, adults now inserted the completion of school-sponsored drivers' training courses as an intermediate stage of adult-organized socialization to the road.29
In American society, as in most societies, although with varying emphasis, age is an important social marker. Yet age (even in combination with gender) is not ordinarilyin our societya status to which in and of itself particular rights and privileges are due, certainly after early childhood and before retirement. Rather, chronological age provides the most important single cue for a series of transitions that mark the departure from a prior status or relationship to a major social institution and the entry into a subsequent status or relationship. Two major American institutions affecting young adults, formal education and the armed forces, are explicitly age stratified. Many occupations build age increments of income into the normal careers they imply.30 The paths through life have been, accordingly, marked by traditions, entered into by individuals attendant on more or less clear cues and sanctions.
On the one hand, on-time transitions are, as a matter of course, culturally prepared, cushioned by anticipatory socialization and by supportive institutional arrangements.31 On the other hand, and correspondingly, individuals moving too slowly or too quickly through a particular transition are often admon-
ished, where they are not restrained by administrative regulations or by positive law itself: a too-early retiree will receive no Social Security benefits for some years; youths seeking to marry too young may be told by the state to get their parents' permission, or they may not be allowed to marry even with their parents' consent; school "dropouts" are so stigmatized that they will feel they have failed to complete an expected transition rather than having simply chosen to spend those years at work instead of in school. The violation of these norms may be quite powerfully sanctioned. School dropout offers an example of a norm for which strong sanctioning has developed recently and rapidly. In 1964, 9 percent of white male high school graduates ages 16 to 24 not in college were unemployed, compared to 14 percent of like high school dropouts. Among blacks, the comparable figures were 19 percent and 18 percent, respectively. But by 1976, this "price" of dropping out had risen from 5 percent for whites and 1 percent for blacks to 11 percent for whites (9 percent vs. 20 percent) and 10 percent for blacks (22 percent vs. 32 percent).32
The life course perspective holds that while biographical sequences are not by any means wholly determinate, they are determined to a degree, and in two senses. First, the steps one has already taken make more probable particular future outcomes: if I marry at 21, I am more likely to have a child by 25 than if I marry at 23. Second, both the timing and the sequencing of important life events are to a degree socially determined, whether structurally, normatively, or both: if married men, or fathers, are deferred from military service in their early twenties, and military service is a life stage neither greatly honored nor highly rewarded, there will be added incentive to marry at 21 rather than at 25.33 The life course perspective argues that the determinate elements of these patterns constitute objective "social facts" and, no less, that individuals live and experience their own biographies as aware actors, who do not merely receive these patterns as in the nature of things, but construct and evaluate them as they move along , looking both forward and back. Culture, in this view, although both a set of symbols and a structure of belief and thus not equal to the sum of individual outlooks, is in substantial measure responsive to this sum.
Under current assumptions, conformity with the social and
cultural cues promoting timely movement through the life course is expected to be directly satisfying to the actor. When, on balance, this seemingly does not happenas has been documented commonly happens when married couples first become parentstroubled commentary is heard. In 1926, Margaret Sanger expressed the conventional understanding of the motivation to parenthood among happily married wives in terms of a "maternal desire.., intensified and matured, . . . the road by which she travels onward toward completely rounded self-development, . . . the unfolding and realization of her higher nature."34 A decade later, however, Lewis Terman was embarrassed to report on the basis of his extensive empirical investigation, Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness , that "the widespread belief" that Sanger and others reflected was not on the average borne out by the facts. Nevertheless, it was "reasonable to suppose that the presence of children is capable of affecting the happiness of a given marriage in either direction."35
Another decade later, Evelyn Millis Duvall and Reuben Hill reasserted that "for the couple ready for this step, having a baby is a supremely satisfying experience," a position for which at least one fine height-of-the-baby-boom study found some empirical justification.36 But data from the late 1960s and 1970s showed that this was no longer trueif it ever wasfor the average American couple. Summarizing the results of many studies, including a soundly based study of their own, Norval Glenn and Sara McLanahan concluded that in view of the fact that "in American society children tend to lower their parents' marital and global happiness," it was "ironic that most Americans want to have children" and that they do so.37 The irony, of course, hinges entirely on the individualisticand arguably hedonisticassumptions governing our interpretation of life course transitions. Such assumptions, however useful they may be in simplifying interpretation of motivation, fly in the face of evidence that even in a relatively short number of years, contraception, by changing the material circumstances of choice , has participated in a redefinition of the "should" that has surely always played a part in the motivation to become a parent.38
Some transitions are typically more age determinate than others. On the whole, transitions earlier in the life coursewhere state bureaucracies are given greater swayhave tended
to occur more uniformly to members of a given cohort than those occurring later.39 And for some elements of the population, some life course transitions have been relatively more loosely timed. An instance of this, relevant to the account to follow, has to do with the timing of marriage, which has always been considerably more closely supervised (and, correspondingly, more nearly uniform) for women than for men. Intuitively, one can see how this fact is related to other aspects of the asymmetry between the genders. And thus it should not be too surprising that the gender differential in this regard has been declining recently. How culturally influenced the marriage transition is, for both men and women, is attested to by the near-disappearance of the category "bachelor" as a culturally recognized (if not universal) life course stage for men and the development during the past two decades of a closely parallel popular understanding of a rather extended unmarried adult state"living with"for members of both genders.40
Indeed, the very concept of a life course "stage" like bachelorhood implies cultural notions about the content of that stage and about its place within one or more of the trajectories its occupants are presumed to be working out. We here witnessed, for instance, the passing of one strongly supported middle-class norm, that of men's economic independence at marriage.41 It must be remembered, however, that if culture sets some of the terms for the staging of the life course, it does not set them allcertainly for individuals, but perhaps for whole cohorts. Gunhild Hagestad's insight, that "some of us find ourselves in life stages for which our society has no clear culturally shared expectations" is important for understanding the recent social history of the American people and useful for interpreting the materials presented below. "Demographic change [for instance] may have been so rapid and so dramatic that we have experienced 'cultural lags'" in the construction of normatively defined "stages."42
Constructing a History of the Life Course Increasing attention has been given to the life course over the past two decades by an interdisciplinary grouping of scholars.
Their concerns have evolved from a focus on the cohort among demographers,43 the relevance of the notion of age stratification to social gerontologists,44 and a concern for life span psychology among students of human development.45 Somewhat more recently, it became evident to workers in several of these fields that if they were genuinely to import a processual orientation to social science, historical change could no longer be ignored, as was so characteristic of American social science at the time. "Career lines are structured by the realities of historical times and circumstance; by the opportunities, normative pressures, and adaptive requirements of altered situations; and by those expectations, commitments, and resources which are brought to these situations."46 Both historical events and trends affect individuals differently according to life course stage, sometimes affecting the life course itself in the process. "Processes commonly denoted as [individual] development . . . [are] social products to be understood within the particular features of a specific societal and historical context." In that context, the analyst seeks "the causal bases of age stratification within the social system that lead to some level of age-graded events for a collectivity at a particular historical moment and to broad similarities in individual life courses or psychological biographies during that period."47
From a historical life course standpoint, structure maysometimesbe seen in dynamic perspective. "The important contribution that historical research makes is in specifying and examining diachronic changes, which often have a more direct impact on the life course than macrosocial changes. Most importantly, historians can identify the convergence of socioeconomic and cultural forces, which are characteristic of a specific time period and which more directly influence the timing of life transitions than more large-scale or long-term linear developments."48 Children of the Great Depression (1974) is justly viewed as the pioneering empirical exploration of this fundamental insight.49 It examines life courses of children who in varying ways faced the Depression's rigors and provides an acute treatment of many of the theoretical issues. Especially eloquent has been Elder's insistence that the historically oriented life course approach be explicitly connected with the
agentic perspective on individual experience and choice carried within the sociological discipline by the "Chicago school" variant developed by W. I. Thomas and carried on by Herbert Blumer and Everett C. Hughes.50
Martin Kohli has argued in an exceptionally thought-provoking essay that not only have particular stages changed historically but also the salience of the life course itself .51 The "chronologization" of life, he maintains, has grown apace with modernity (or capitalist development), as "part of the more general process in which individuals are set free from the bonds of status, locality and family." Such a process is of quite long standing, of course, and yet there now appear signs of reversalsthe kinds of indefinition that individuals themselves must resolve, which Hagestad refers to. Kohli admits there are many hints that individuation , not chronologization, has become the dominant trend over the last decade or two. Nevertheless, he maintains, "the successful institutionalization of the life course is the basis for the present individualizing departure from it."
Presented narratively, the burden of my account is to demonstrate concretely the power of such insights as Kohli's. The chapters that follow show a life course segment rendered (somewhat ironically) more salient and, in some respects, more determinate by the increasingly explicit debate that has emerged over its construction. The number of contestants in this debate has been progressively enlarged, so that over the twentieth century, teenagers qua age group have come to articulateand to have articulated for them, especially in musica distinctive view of how they wish to grow up. This is not to say that teenagers differed from adults in what they wanted to grow up into , but, instead, about how and when. I show, thus, how dating, a contested institution constructed by "kids," was connected with the institution of marriage in a way that by the 1970s seemed decidedly conservative. As I also show, increasingly self-conscious considerations of gender played a part in the debate about dating, marriage, and the youthful life course as a whole. It is apparent, too, that a distinctive organization of the youthful life course has more lately emerged among the inner-city black poor, a subject for debate within the black community and for denunciation outside it.
We currently are witness to an adult effort to condemn large portions of American youth as a "postponed generation."52 Explaining the inappropriateness of youth's hesitant passage through the life course by "scarcity," Susan Littwin describes a generation of middle-class young people who had learned to "paint or run a mock constitutional convention or jog six miles," only to learn that in the hard world beyond adolescence "no one cared." "It is hard enough to establish an adult identity, even in the best of times," she argues, employing a characteristic translation of roles into a psychological state. "What today's twenty-to-thirty-year-olds have elected to do is continue the identity search while avoiding reality," that is, the signals of the current job market, "and that makes it exceedingly slow work."53 The reader can hardly fail to detect like themes in neoconservative condemnation of the mutual failing of one another by schools and students.
My examination of transitions is embedded in a more inclusive study of the life course in which transitions are seen from the perspective of their sequence . Determinate sequences underlie the "career," or, in the less evocative terminology that Elder for that reason prefers, trajectories . Within a given culture, those transitions seen as part of the same trajectory commonly have a normatively prescribed (or at least preferred) sequence. "Through cultural and structural forces, established career lines present individuals with particular constraints, incentives, and options as they work out their trajectories."54 Through this perspective, one is led to link the examination of the socially and culturally structured circumstances individuals find themselves in, with their chosen responses to those circumstances. Individuals understand their own situations in terms of the processtheir relative efficaciousness in it, the extent of positive or negative sanctions they have receivedby which they have arrived at their present stage.
Often quite prominent in popular debates about the life course are disagreements not about timing but about the sequencing of transitions, about the appropriate shape of trajectories, about what it means when a handful of actors, or growing numbers of actors, violate what is ordinarily done in relating one change in their lives to another. Such an argument often has a less arbitrary sound than that over the timing tran-
sitions, being couched in terms of "competence" rather than "maturity"something presumably an attribute of the individual rather than something substantially derived from the social definition of the individual's chronological age. Consistent with the individualistic trend of our times, however, sequencing arguments have commonly faded on the demonstration of effective "competence" by those claiming the right to out-of-sequence transitions.
An important example is the blurring of the once well-guarded normative sequence of leaving school and entry into the labor force. The decades since World War II have seen a massive expansion of the employment rate (and the hours of work) among high school (and college) boys and girls, at the same time as out-of-school boys and girls of the same ages are suffering increasing unemployment. In the interest of reducing the risk of "dropping out"a distasteful transitionschools have adopted a number of mechanisms that permit and even encourage tentative entry to the labor force before graduation.55
The increasingly embarrassed giggle that accompanies contemporary use of the term "virgin" (in the context of persons, not derived uses applied to materials) is likewise evidence of massively lessened vigilance regarding the sequence of coitus and marriage, especially for women. To recur to popular music, whether one wishes to take "love" literally or metaphorically, it is apparent that the "love and marriage . . . go together like a horse and carriage" sequencing formula of my adolescence has been uncoupled, to be reassembled every which way. Many hope that the fear of heterosexually transmitted AIDS will return this sequence to its earlier state.
The life course perspective brings together historians' concern with experience and the recognition that aggregates like "populations" do not have intentions. It allows us to take advantage of the fact that samples of populations leave accounts of how they feel about their actions. Obviously, this is a very broad perspective, and not one that proposes a singular methodology. But it does propose that students of the life course focus their attention in a number of ways.
1. As a necessary step toward simplifying, we reduce what is in fact a continuous moment-to-moment development to a series
of what, a priori , are defined as transitions: marriage, parenthood, and military service are typical.
2. These transitions are seen as involving changes in individuals' social roles, to accord with changed statuses as defined by social institutions. Thus, becoming a father involves acting in a particular kind of reciprocal relationship with an infant and involves being known publicly as one who should perform a certain set of obligations that pertain to occupying the status of "father" in the institution "family."
3. The cultural meaning attached to such roles and statuses is not fixed, but, in part, changes according to the experience of the actors who are living in them. That "fatherhood" no longer brings draft deferral somewhat changes what it means to fathers.
4. The experience of a given status is not divorced from the other sets of roles and statuses occupied simultaneously by the actors: the experience of "motherhood" is different for mothers who are simultaneously wives and those who are not.
The empirical emphasis of students of the life course has been substantially, although not entirely, on concerns usually associated with social psychology, especially having to do with the learning of life stage roles. A number of scholars within the discipline of sociology, however, especially in its more demographic reaches, have worked with life course concepts in such a way that they move toward aggregate concerns that are in some ways more akin to the kind of questions posed by historians (which I emphasize in the chapters that follow). Sandra Hofferth, for instance, has apportioned the aggregate experience of recent cohorts, subdivided by race, to time in childhood spent in incompleted, completed, and broken families.56 Peter Uhlenberg, in a number of superb studies that take up particular transitions and sequences, has estimated the prevalence, timing, and variation in timing of these transitions over historical time, alerting scholars to the truly marked changes in the modal life experiences of historical populations.57 Dennis Hogan's ambitious Transitions and Social Change 58 is based almost exclusively on a single large retrospective interview survey of the transitions of American men from youth to adulthood, covering in a very different way the same general subject of this volume. Hogan has looked closely at the individual level at both
the timing and sequencing of transitions and is as concerned with the amount and sources of variation within the single-year birth cohorts he examines as with central tendencies . In addition, he has sought to explain these statistically with a number of independent "historical" variables characterizing succeeding birth cohorts.
My interest has long been in the Janus-faced relationship of these changes in the aggregate to the choices as faced by the individuals making them. In reviewing Elder's path-breaking Children of the Great Depression in 1975, I argued that for all Elder's concern to place individual development in historical context, in the end he was most interested in the one-way relationship between the twoin the impact of large-scale historical change on the way individuals' lives were lived. I argued that a social-historical approach to the life course might be no less interested in the way those altered individual experiences aggregated to constitute a new context for others living through these changes. I maintained that when Elder examined the impact of the Great Depression on the subsequent lives of children and youth at the time by comparing those whose families had suffered substantial declines in income with those whose families had not suffered declines, he implicitly assumed that the direct impact of economic deprivation markedly outweighed the indirect impactthat which might be felt by all families who observed others' plights, who anticipated hardship, who compared their situations not with the period before the Depression but with what might have been. That Elder found differences on the level of individual families implies nothing about the existence or magnitude of universal, contextual effects.59 Even "kids" can make history, as their choices aggregate into behavioral patterns and, rationalized, become normative. It will be shown how dating, in the 1920s a liberating invention largely of girls' making, became by the 1960s a vehicle that often constrained girls in the choices they now were permitted to make.
The amount of certainty and determinism in the environment of individuals has varied historically,60 and I find it a fascinating paradox that the relaxation of certainty in the material environment may possibly give one's community the freedom to impose a regime of individual decision-making that in fact
may be more, rather than less, externally determined in the perception of the individual.61 The early commitment of young members of the postwar cohort to marriage or childbirth had not in itself committed other members to similar prompt action. Rather, change in cohort behavior was essentially the sum of annual responses to period phenomena: That is, memory was not cohort-specific. But the kinds of period phenomena I show to have had an impact on the timing of vital events were sometimes subtle enough that actors did not always understand themselves to be responding to them. In fact, their response was not to them directly but to changed circumstances underlying the balance of prudence, idealism, and optimism that characterizes individuals' decisions to form a family. As environments have gradually shifted, so have Americans' sense of how one "ought" to form a family, but these shifts did not affect particular cohorts uniquely, bringing about a society that on the level of belief was stratified by date of birth (or marriage, or parenthood) about values regarding family formation. Yet environment did not impinge uniformly on people of different ages, and herein lay the mechanism by which characteristic timing patterns in the life course changed.
Were these kinds of changes over time in the experience of cohorts a product of some initial cohort characteristicwhether predisposition or powerful early experience or radically different upbringingor did historical experience occurring over the life course of the cohorts produce the distinctive life course curves? This question amounts to trying to decipher the impact on age-graded behavior of "cohort" and "period" processes.62 The original impetus for this line of questioning came from the discovery in the early 1950s63 that the accelerated birth schedules of that period were not a reversion to older large-family norms but instead constituted a long-lasting revision of the tempo of Americans' childbearing, a new style of family formation possibly related to a new style of family.64
"Period" effects were overall the most important in explaining those aspects of the life course that concern me here. In no instance did the kind of circumstances that typically have differential effects on persons of different agessay, the unemployment produced by economic depression or the severe dis-
location of a large call to military conscriptionset a whole cohort into a distinctive timing pattern that was sustained through its life course. Social history does not exclusively study cause and effect, but it ought to sort them out when possible. I am arguing here that a set of environments promoting early marriage and childbirth (for example) made possible the articulation and, no doubt, the practice of a variety of normative schedules that were not themselves innovations but rationalizations. Indeed, as we shall see, these rationalizations typically were drawn from elements already present within the set of ideas explaining (and, admittedly, setting outer limits to) family-formation behavior in recent times.
Even though it is apparent that the marriage and parenthood "schedules" of cohorts changed very markedly, it also seems to be the case that it was the environment for marriage and childbirth that changed lastingly, that this changed environment eventually affected members of virtually all cohorts undergoing either of these transitions, and that new life course schedules tended to come into effect which influenced all subsequent birth cohorts at least until another "period" phenomenon contributed to the establishment of a new pattern. This is not to say that the heightened early pace of vital events had no impact on the lives of cohort members in subsequent years. It does mean, however, that the sets of actors' perceptions, values, and understandings that arose as part of these new schedules were not unique to particular cohorts but were shared by all of an age to be married or become a parent.
Demography and the Social History of the Life Course This volume is about the summing up of multiply caused, individually engaged lines of action that altogether amount to a change in the way a whole cohort of individuals face the world. I would like to know with certainty whether (as I suspect, and as I will argue based on admittedly modest evidence) as dating became an institutionalized stage in the adolescent life course, an introduction to heterosexual physical pleasure became a more rapid and more certain concomitant of courtship.
This must inevitably be "latent history," in Bernard Bailyn's sense, history that emphasizes themescertainly the aggregate themesthat were not necessarily important or perhaps even present in the minds of the participants. The debates over aspects of the life course that I discuss as often as not followed behavioral change; or, a quietly institutionalized pattern like engagement may change with no explicit cultural debate at all. The justification of writing latent history is that the themes it takes up are important in some sense that contemporaries did not recognize but that we can now recognize in hindsight. The justification here is that the life course, as a socially organized process of growing up, is an abstraction that allows us to focus a variety of simultaneously acting demographic, material, and cultural developments on one coherent aspect of experience of contemporaries. I hope this effort will enable us to see how sometimes subtle shifts in the way the sequence of life course events has been organized have brought individuals to the stage of parenthood, and to antecedent stages, differently prepared and with different understandings of what that stage entails. "One's own," along with the process of achieving it, has changed.
At the core of this book lies a demographic approach, sometimes applied unconventionally, one not massively different in its logic from that employed by the aggregate-level, neatly demographic empiricists, like Hofferth, Uhlenberg, or Hogan, although far more informal. In this vein I seek to discover, and thereafter to explain, group and over-time variations in rates of transitions for example, annual rates of marriage among the unmarried, of first parenthood among those married during the previous year, or, by extension, of first premarital coitus among single virgins. Around this core, as much as evidence and imagination have permitted, I have tried to build a double contextual frameworkof the fit of the individual transitions into the socially constructed life course and of the fit of this life course into the material and institutional imperatives of the day, as they impinged on individuals.
My commitment is to understand the life course as a series of individual decisions that are not determined but are nevertheless structured by external phenomena, including the prior
behaviors of others in the same cohort. I argue that in the twentieth century, the youthful life course of Americans has been quite malleable. This is not so startling, however; in early modern England, the age of marriage moved sharply downward in response to the shift from a landed to a protoindustrial economic base.65 What is special about the American situation in the twentieth century is the variety of forces to which life course timing responds, most notably, in the realm of beliefs. Especially striking in this account are the subcultural and institutional structures erected by young people themselves, which have played a substantial part in setting the timetable for coming into one's own. This underlines much of the enlarged salience of the youthful life course and explains, too, some of the heat of the on-and-off debate over it. For the way one grows up is closely related to what one becomes.
Demographers proceed by confining their measures as much as possible to those "at risk" of experiencing that which is of analytic interest, as I try to do here. Thus, although Alfred Kinsey's extraordinary data on sexual behavior permit me to measure a fair amount of important information on "petting," enabling an estimate of annual rates of transition into the status of "having petted," for instance, they unfortunately do not permit me to estimate like rates based only on those who are datingeven though (with some exceptions, of course) only those dating are really "at risk" of petting. Likewise, demographers proceed by progressively "refining" their measures. As much as possible, they measure what they are interested in for narrower and narrower groups, so that they may discover differential rates and seek reasons for these. So do I, although I am often constrained by the modest evidence available.
Because two of the transitions centrally treated in this book are commonly understood as demographic phenomena, and because my most secure and therefore more primary methods are demographic, this book focuses more than it otherwise might on marriage and parenthood , and somewhat less on other elements of the youthful life course. Marriage ("nuptiality" is the demographers' technical term for its study) has been widely studied and in recent times has been well documented. I focus
on first marriage, with some reflections on departure or non-departure from it by way of divorce.66
My treatment of parenthood is something of a twist on the best-studied, best-documented aspect of demography, "fertility." While demographers are mainly interested in one particular product of the act of giving birth, the babies who will eventually replenish the population, I am interested in a different product, the parents who came into being with the birth of their first child. This means that only nonparents are at risk of becoming parents and that only firstborn children can be counted when I compile the rates according to which those at-risk couples become actual parents. Although most demographers' analysis of fertility is thus of no direct use to me, fertility data has been commonly enough tabulated by parity (birth order) that I can base my argument about the transition to parenthood quite solidly. Unfortunately, only in recent years has reliable information linking first-parity birth data to time since marriage been widely available, for where this is available, it permits me my preferred way of examining fertilityas the subsequent transition of a married couple, after however many years of marriage, into parenthood.
On the whole, marriage serves as the centerpiece around which I array other life course transitions, especially as I work to establish the relationship of the timing of one event to prior and subsequent events. In this account, then, divorce is by and large examined in a demographer's life course style as an event terminating a marriage after however many years, or, more in keeping with the marriage-centric tendencies of this book, non-divorce in any given year after a first marriage is seen as indication of the survival of that marriage. By the same token, the intent of my perspective moves me toward seeking to make statements about the extent to which coitus and other, less culturally freighted aspects of sexual exploration have preceded marriage. Were there consistent, reliable data, I would wish to know (changes in) the proportion of dating couples who had already petted who went on to coitus, as well as the proportion of individuals who had dated by ages 12, 13, 14, and so on, who had petted by ages 14, 15, 16, and so on, and who had had
coitus by 16, 17, 18, and so on. I have to make do. By and large, I have chosen to relax my standards of certainty rather than my descriptive and analytic ambitions. But because the data are invariably weak as they approach the edges of my account, I use the solid core as an anchor.
Because this is a social-historical account, not a demographic one, the circumstances in which transitions are accomplished are of particular interest. Especially interesting are the institutionalized structures and rites that commonly surround transitional events. In a subsequent chapter, I make an effort to study engagement at a particular historical juncture at which the partly institutionalized life course stage was under pressure. Because of that pressure, I believe, documentary materials were produced from which the historian could discern at least a speculative account. But engagement also proved one of my most conspicuous failures in research, for I hadquite erroneouslyimagined that both secondary and primary sources would be readily available. In fact, neither are (again apart from the normative, and even these are slim).67 Perhaps we can take this lack of interest as indicative of a lack of importance placed on engagement by twentieth-century American culture, but both the Kinsey data and a variety of studies of marital happiness indicated that both the fact and the length of an engagement have mattered to the kind of marriage that eventuates.68 This suggests that the event has a place in the analysis of the life course.
The preponderance of evidence presented here is quantitative. At first glance, this may not seem to be consistent entirely with my shared focus on material, institutional, and cultural considerations facing individuals constructing their life courses or with my wish to imaginatively reconstruct the contents of life course transitions, but I believe that it is. The reason for my having made a more determined search for quantitative materials than for (say) diaries and letters that might directly reveal individuals' own constructions of their situation lies in the nature of the life course as I understand it. My first concern here has necessarily been to describe in considerable detail and with as much precision as possible the range of options that individuals might have taken and the distribution of the options actually elected. Only after having assessed the overall, aggregate struc-
ture of "experience" in this sense do I move to the macroscopic level, to the level of material circumstance, institutional arrangement, and cultural prescription.
The optimal kind of document for my quantitative use sometimes exists, for it is a kind of document that has come to be in exceptionally high demand as social science has moved toward seeking processual views, namely, the individual-based, longitudinal record that allows one to describe transitions, sequences, and, sometimes, actors' perspectives on these. With such records, one can examine the delicate weave of individuals' trajectories through the structures that, from one perspective, help form them, and, from another, that they help to create. But such data do not exist, not remotely, for the earlier periods that I treat in this book. Therefore, I must use a variant of the historian's craft, must make do with all sorts of unconventional and admittedly imperfect evidence, usedsometimesunconventionally.
And to do this, I must proceed first by pressing hard against the available aggregate , quantitative materials to pull from them plausible suggestions of portions of the careers of the individuals. To try to read the behavioral options of individuals out of the observed behavior of a cohort (or, worse, a cross-section of individuals at different ages viewed at a single point in time) is, formally speaking, a perversion of the data.69 But, then, historians always pervert data. An operational definition of a historian's methodological skill, I believe, would be the ability to find in the shards of the past something that their creators did not intend to express by having created them. One can do so as responsibly as possible, seeking, as would a demographer, the most precisely constructed "at-risk" measures that can be discerned there. The quantitatively sophisticated reader will recognize that I am using many kinds of data here as though demographic, around which interpretation will be arrayed.
The story I am telling is a national story. Regional variation is not one of the phenomena I am particularly interested in exploring, even where the data are available, except where such variation allows inferences about change at the national level. But often I must have recourse to local data, for, very often, that is all that is available. Most census data, but not all, pertain
to the national level, but it has only been quite recent that vital-registration data have been uniformly available on this level. A good deal of the social research that I cite or on which I carry out "secondary analysis"70 in pursuit of my story is local. My assumption is that good samples that are representative of identifiable local populations preclude thereby the largest dangers, but sometimes I have been forced even to relax these cautions. Usually, however, I use local datalike the Minnesota wedding reportseither to provide time series information that otherwise is not available where the trends are presumably produced by responses to the same kind of macroscopic changes affecting the nation generally or to examine systematic variation within the data. Insofar as national trends outweigh place-to-place variation, I believe I am generally on safe ground, that the range of phenomena I find out about is important, and that we can informally take into consideration the fact that my materials are derived from wherever they could be found. But I have regularly taken the more aggressively interpretive path in preference to the more cautious.
The variety of social science data sources that are available to the resourceful historian of the twentieth century is surprising. Wherever possible, of course, I have attempted to reanalyze the original data, not because I mistrust previous analysts but because many of my purposes are "perversely" demographic, or to make close comparisons to other materials of no interest at the time of the first analysis, or in some other way run athwart others' purposes. More of such raw data tend to be available the more recent the period on which one seeks information and, generally, the richer the survey, although I was fortunate to be able to use the raw data from three superb and very old studies: an extraordinary commercial survey of youth taken in 1939, the Indianapolis Fertility Study of 1941, and Alfred Kinsey's Study of Sexual Behavior, gathered from the late 1930s into the early 1960s. More often than not, however, raw data are not available,71 but often enough even published data-arrays reveal other things than initially seen, or of interest. In this category, large numbers of publications of the Census Bureau have been most useful, as were, also, a number of social inquiries carried out under WPA aegis in the mid-1930s.72
While I have, where possible, utilized public opinion survey research as an important clue to cultural change and relied in later chapters rather heavily on others' syntheses of such materials, I have also carried out a fair amount of primary research in a number of unconventional nonquantitative sources. In the examination of the changing nature of wedding ritual, presented above, I quantified a type of "belletristic" evidence. In another instance, I systematically examined another stylized belletristic sourcelovelorn letterswith respect to the evolving vocabulary for describing "dating" relationships of young people. And in surveying a substantial amount of imaginative but tasteless short fiction describing courtship, I read with an eye closely attuned to the formal structuring of courtship problematics in those stories and the diction used to engage readers' emotions in the events of the fiction. But I sometimes simply read "culture" as historians ordinarily doin a nontechnical sense in which descriptive, hortatory, normative, and personal documents are intuitively scanned for "what was at issue" at that time and place. In this vein, the documentation pertaining to cultural conflicts and difficult-to-resolve issues related to family formation was of particular interest to me. My reliance on such materials lessened with the greater availability of social science data for more recent periods.
On the whole, I feel that such informal procedures as I used with the cultural materials are justifiable in the main because I have assessed them in the light of the behavioral, "demographic" core of my account, which was independently gathered. This, of course, was the evidentiary strategy of my research in the first place. But neither author nor reader should blink at the fact that the fundamental criterion for accepting the interpretation that this book constitutes is that it is intuitively plausible in view of a large and varied body of evidence. That is, despite all the numbers, this book is history, not social science; it is a piece of conventional history about an unconventionally chosen subject, employing unconventional evidence. It is an effort at writing a history of an aspect of social change the conceptualization for which is drawn from social science and the data for which have typically been provided by social scientists.
I had initially hoped to explore three aspects of differential experience systematically: by gender, by race, and by social
class. It is apparent that males and females, blacks and whites, working-class and middle-class people grew up according to somewhat different schedules at any given time, and often with somewhat different values. But my account has not turned out to be systematically comparative in this sense. I have succeeded best with regard to gender, which is the most important differentiator and also, happily, the one for which evidence is easily the fullest.
But demographic data is not always available broken down by race, and belletristic evidence is slight for blacks. Indeed, because Afro-American history is now beginning to develop the broader outlines of a social history, the kinds of relatively intimate questions raised in this book are as yet quite obscure, the evidence required to elicit answers to them not in the least obviously available. Where I have been able, I have made racial comparisons, interpreting these differences in the light of the broader general trends (pertaining, I am often afraid, especially to the white majority). And the evidence on social class, while often more readily available than that on race, is also more difficult to interpret, with a variety of indices of class rolling the question about exactly whom one is talking about. Again, where possible, I have detailed and discussed socioeconomic differentials, but, as with blacks, I have never felt confident of interpreting these within the distinctive social history of particular classes , rather than as somewhat simple comparisons to more aggregate trends. The largest reason, in life course terms, to have developed the race and class differentials fully is to test the intuitive hypothesis that while class differentials are declining, the experience of the two races in this important aspect of social and personal life is becoming more distinctive . But to carry these accounts beyond the essentially demographic terms in which scholarship so far has taken them is beyond my capacity at this point.
This book is conventionally historical in that, after two general chapters, it uses periodization, not just to define chapters but to allow me to focus attention on different portions of the life course at different historical periods and to argue for varying causes, from period to period. Obviously, "periodization" is a radical simplification, subserving stylistic purposes no less
than more analytic purposes. The formal assumption behind periodization is that the periods can be treated as more or less internally homogeneous with regard to some important underlying dimension or trend, or at any rate as more alike in this regard than they are like the periods that precede and follow.
The 1920s, not unusually, are treated as a distinct period. The Great Depression serves as a second period for my account and World War II as a third. The "baby boom" constitutes a fourth period, one a bit more unconventional than the others in that it is periodized according to somewhat uncommon criteria. A fifth chronological chapter treats the period that runs from the end of the "baby boom" to 1975, at which point, roughly speaking, many of the family formation phenomena under study began to change once again. The "periods" I treat are short, far shorter than those in most social-historical accounts. I have arranged the account, first, to emphasize my substantive argument about just how malleable the youthful life course has become and how subject it is to a shifting debate. But I have periodized also to highlight the ways in which material or institutional changewhich largely defines all but the most recent periodintertwines with the more manifest and more commonly remarked cultural change. And I have exercised my historian's right to leave the most recent phase of development to others.
I have emphasized in each chronological chapter a single contested or sharply modified transition around which to organize a larger part of the story than might have been available to contemporaries. Frankly, I do this partly for the modest drama it brings to the longish and complicated story I tell here. For, despite this selective emphasis, it is the argument of the life course approach that the sequence of events is cut of a single cloth. In the first "period" chapter, focusing on the 1920s, I elect to emphasize the evolution of an institution that governed (and brought progressively earlier into the lives of individuals) the transition to heterosexual erotic and emotional exploration: dating. In the chapter on the Great Depression, as dating continued to develop and diffuse, my emphasis shifts to a phase of the life course that lost much of its meaning: engagement. The following chapter, dealing with World War II, looks closely at
the way military service affected entry into marriage. In turn, the focus shifts to parenthood, appropriately enough, in treating the baby boom decades that followed World War II. The final chronological chapter, dealing with the challenge to and repudiation of the baby boom in many of its salient aspects actually has several emphases, notably, the freeing of sexuality from the "timing" elements previously contained within the institutions of dating and marriage.
Continues...Excerpted from Into One's Ownby John Modell Copyright © 1989 by John Modell. Excerpted by permission.
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