Marriage, a History by Stephanie Coontz

Author:Stephanie Coontz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-08T04:40:36+00:00

Chapter 13

Making Do, Then Making Babies: Marriage in the Great Depression and World War II

In September 1929, twenty-year-old Cora Winslow was not worrying about the future of marriage. Newly engaged, she looked forward to quitting work and giving dance lessons on the side until she had the first of the three children she wanted. “Which just shows you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch,” then eighty-two-year-old Cora told me wryly when I interviewed her in her retirement apartment in Lacey, Washington.1

Cora was a teenager in Seattle during the Roaring Twenties and loved every minute of it. When she was sixteen, she started teaching the new jazz dances after school, and soon she was giving exhibitions of the tango and Charleston at local grange and community halls. At eighteen she took a secretarial job near the waterfront. There were lots of men to date in those days, she told me, and she played the field for more than a year before accepting a marriage proposal from a man who worked in the same firm. He popped the question on September 15, and they decided to marry after he got the promotion he’d been promised in the spring of 1930.

But the month after they got engaged, the Jazz Age ended abruptly with the stock market crash and the ensuing worldwide economic collapse. By November, both Cora and her beau had lost their jobs. She was forced to move back in with her parents, while he headed for California to follow up on a job lead. He’d send for her when he got settled, he said, and they’d get married in the Golden State. She never heard from him again.

Over the next few years Cora held several jobs, none of which paid enough to let her move back out on her own. In 1934, at the age of twenty-five, she got engaged again, after a five-year period when “dates were a lot harder to come by than before the crash.” But before she and her fiancé, Paul Archer, had saved enough to marry, Cora got pregnant. Her family doctor directed her to an abortionist.

Shortly after the abortion, Cora and Paul did get married. The following year she got pregnant again and had another abortion because Paul had been laid off from his job at a sawmill and “we couldn’t afford another mouth to feed.” In those days, Cora told me, “you just asked your doctor if he could do something. Doctors understood how hard things were. When my daughter got in trouble in the mid-1950s, I couldn’t believe it when she said her doctor wouldn’t help.”

Cora’s daughter was born in 1938. By then Cora and her husband had moved in with her brother on his dairy farm in eastern Washington. “Those were tough years,” she told me, filled with family tensions. Her sister-in-law looked down on Cora’s husband for not having a found a new job, and Cora worried constantly that he would get so discouraged with his inability to find work that like her earlier fiancé, he would run off.

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