To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social ChangeUniversity of Chicago Press, 2000 M04 15 - 299 pages Middle-class family life in the 1950s brings to mind images of either smugly satisfied or miserably repressed nuclear families with breadwinning husbands, children, and housewives, much like the families depicted in Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. Jessica Weiss delves beneath these mythic images and paints a far more complex picture that reveals strong continuities between the baby boomers and their parents. Drawing on interviews with American couples from the 1950s to the 1980s, Weiss creates a dynamic portrait of family and social change in the postwar era. She pairs these firsthand accounts with a deft analysis of movies, television shows, magazines, and advice books from each decade, providing an unprecedented and intimate look at ordinary marriages in a time of sweeping cultural change. Weiss shows how young couples in the 1950s attempted to combine egalitarian hopes with traditional gender roles. Middle-class women encouraged their husbands to become involved fathers. Midlife wives and mothers reshaped the labor force and the home by returning to work in the 1960s. And couples strove for fulfilling marriages as they dealt with the pressures of childrearing in the midst of the sexual and divorce revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, they were far more welcoming to the ideas of the women's movement than has often been assumed. More than simply changing with the times, the parents of the baby boom contributed to changing times themselves. Weiss's excellent use of family interviews that span three decades, her imaginative examination of popular culture, and her incisive conclusions make her book an invaluable contribution not only to our understanding of the past but also to our understanding of men's and women's roles in today's family. "Weiss has written an enlightening book that examines the dynamics of American families past and present. . . . Since Weiss is a historian, she provides analyses of her arguments that are factual rather than emotive, and her use of family interviews further contributes to a strong presentation. Overall, this is a unique works because its multidisciplinary approach informs but never preaches on the emotionally charged topic of the American family.—Sheila Devaney, Library Journal |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Youthful Marriage and Gender Roles in the 1950s | 15 |
The Impact and Meaning of Employment for the Mothers of the Baby Boom | 49 |
Fatherhood and Family Life | 83 |
Companionship Childrearing and Marriage | 115 |
Prescription and Reality in the MiddleClass Bedroom | 141 |
Divorce and the Generation That Gave Birth to the Baby Boom | 177 |
Other editions - View all
To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change Jessica Weiss No preview available - 2000 |
To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change Jessica Weiss No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
activity advice American family American women attitudes baby boom baby boomers behavior Berkeley Betty Betty Friedan breadwinner career child childrearing Clausen cohort companionship Connie contraceptive couples cultural daughters Dean Lawrence decades division of labor divorce rates early earning economic emotional employment empty nest equality Erma Bombeck experience family cycle fatherhood fathers feel felt female Feminine Mystique feminism feminist fifties Friedan full-time Gail Henderson gender roles Hank Jones historian Home Journal homemaking household husbands and wives IHD Archives interviews Janice Rogers Judy Kent Ken Harris kids Kinsey Leonard Stone lives male marital marriage married women McCall's men's ment middle-class midlife motherhood mothers Nina Harris Oakland parenthood Parents Magazine participation patterns percent Perkins postwar problems responsibility riage satisfaction sexual revolution shared social sociologists Spock spouses suburban things tion University Press vorce wife woman World York young youthful marriage