OK Boomer, Let's Talk by Jill Filipovic

Author:Jill Filipovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

FAMILY

The idealized image of the American family that flourished when Boomers were being raised was a nuclear family in a stand-alone house, Dad working full-time, Mom at home raising babies. Today, we think of this as traditional; in reality, the 1950s Leave It to Beaver model was something of a historical blip. Rosie the Riveter’s wartime tiptoe toward feminism, with women entering the workforce in large numbers, built on decades of movement toward female independence. Birth rates had been going steadily down for nearly 150 years. Couples were marrying later. Women had been securing more rights and asserting greater economic independence.

In the aftermath of World War II and at the beginning of the Cold War, that was all quickly walked back. Rosie was out, replaced by über-homemaker June Cleaver. Birth rates went up for the first time in more than a century. In 1890, the average man was twenty-six when he got married, and the average woman was twenty-two. By the 1950s, men were on average between twenty-two and twenty-three, and women just twenty, when they tied the knot. The teen birth rate hit its highest point since data on teen births was collected; American teenagers had more babies in the 1950s than at any other time in modern history (no, not even in the teen mom freak-out of the 1990s). But unlike in the 1990s, the teen moms of the 1950s typically got married before they became mothers—and those who didn’t saw their babies whisked away.

Boomers reversed course from their parents, marrying later, having fewer babies, and essentially bringing the American family back on the course charted by their grandparents. Millennials have simply followed their lead.

That’s not quite as exciting a story as the claim that Millennials are ruining marriage and engineering a baby bust, but it’s a true one.

Millennials are staying single longer. But like so much else in our lives, sex, marriage, and child-rearing remain rife with inequality.

Both Boomers and Millennials reshaped dating, sex, marriage, and child-rearing in significant ways. To see the whole picture, though, we first have to shatter 1950s nostalgia and consider that when it comes to our sexual, romantic, and reproductive lives, Millennials are doing the best with what’s been handed to us—and that the choices we’re making suggest a clear way forward to something better.

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