Hard To Do by Kelli María Korducki

Author:Kelli María Korducki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2018-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

6

Life’s Short. Get a Divorce.

The twenties roared, until they didn’t. The stock market crash of 1929 put an end to Jazz Age frivolity and, for a time, kept people from severing their relationships and the security those relationships provided. Pragmatism had always lurked in the wings, but the desperation of the Depression thrust it to centre stage.

The century leading up to the crash was one of pure momentum. Technology advanced and cities grew; slavery ended and women across racial lines became legally recognized as individuals. Circumstances were far from perfect – far, for many, from satisfactory (it’s worth noting, for one, that Black women were blocked from voting in some southern states through the 1960s). But, by and large, women gained rights that cleared a culturally unprecedented plane of legal and logistical autonomy. The redistribution of capital across gender lines was its primary driver. With the scarcity of Depression came precaution. The divorce rate, which had risen steadily for the last half-century and spiked over the 1920s, dropped by 25 per cent in the US between 1929 and 1933. The rate of marriage correspondingly plummeted by 22 per cent, as a lack of employment disincentivized the creation of new families. And then the Great Depression was followed immediately by war. Women again surged into the workforce, some by supplanting newly appointed servicemen in traditionally male industries like aviation and munitions. An estimated 40 per cent of American women went to work. Women who had never before imagined themselves in the position of supporting their families as wage-earners got a taste of economic agency, which historian Alice Kessler-Harris has pointed out remains an enduring legacy of World War II. Then the war ended, and the servicemen came home. All but a few of the women who had taken wartime jobs left their positions. The rate of marriage climbed to new heights.

On the whole, the 1950s were a complete aberration in demographic trends before or since. The average age at first marriage fell to a record low, and the divorce rate levelled off for the first time since the Civil War nearly a century prior. Eighty per cent of couples who married in the 1950s stayed together, and many of them were genuinely happy. My own paternal grandparents married in 1952 and proceeded, almost immediately, to have seven children with whom my grandmother stayed home while my grandfather worked long hours as a well-respected obstetrician and hospital chief of staff, serving a prolifically reproductive Catholic community through the height of the baby boom. My grandmother, now in her late eighties, still regards those years of family life as her happiest. A gentle woman of resolute faith, she found comfort and purpose, I imagine, in the cultivation of a united, worshipful clan. And maybe that was a part of it; while Western European houses of worship saw their flocks dwindling throughout the postwar era, American church attendance in the 1950s reached an all-time high.

In 2009’s The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, the sociologist Andrew J.

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