Love & Devotion A Record Number Of Couples Celebrate 50 Years Of Marriage Fifty Years

Golden Years - 50

Fifty years ago, many observers worried that the American family was doomed.

The Great Depression and World War II rearranged traditional gender roles. Birthrates were falling … divorce rates rocketed to record highs.

Then, for reasons scholars still struggle to explain, trends shifted dramatically: For the first time in more than a century, couples began marrying younger, having more children and staying together longer.

The number of marriage licenses issued in Spokane and Kootenai counties jumped 54 percent from 1944 to 1946. Fifty years later - from 1994 to ‘96 - the flow of golden wedding anniversary notices submitted to The Spokesman-Review increased almost 70 percent.

Today, four local couples whose marriages survived the past 50 years share the insights and wisdom they gained during their journey together. And what a unique journey it was.

Consider where it began: When these men and women were teenagers, one-third of all U.S. homes were without running water … half didn’t have electric refrigerators.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in 1949 that the lessons of the Depression and WWII were inadequate preparation for an age “in which radio and television and comics and the threat of the atomic bomb are everyday realities.”

Complicating the social equation was a postwar economic boom that sent real wages higher in one decade than they had risen the entire previous half-century.

Young people who had postponed so much were eager to get married and start having families - big families.

Imagine: Had fertility remained at its 1957 peak, the average American woman would give birth to four children, double the current rate.

During this unanticipated “baby boom,” which began just after WWII and lasted more than two decades, most young American men and women didn’t abandon their roles of breadwinners and homemakers, as demographers predicted - instead, they embraced them.

Couples just starting out received unprecedented encouragement, ranging from government-guaranteed mortgages that fueled the flight to the suburbs, to widely publicized advice about the importance of marriage and parenthood from evangelist Billy Graham, pediatrician Benjamin Spock and motivator Norman Vincent Peale.

Popular commentators urged young couples to adopt a “modern attitude” and strike out on their own, away from the scrutiny of their extended families.

Women’s magazines published a steady stream of articles praising homemakers and warning women of the perils of trying to combine marriage and child-rearing with careers outside the home, sociologist Andrew Cherlin recalled in his book “Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage.”

Adlai Stevenson, the great liberal politician of the day, told Smith College’s all-woman Class of 1955 that their place in politics was to “influence man and boy” through the “humble role of housewife.”

And, of course, there was that new member of the family, the television. Each week, shows such as “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” (1952-66), “Father Knows Best” (1954-63) and “Leave It To Beaver” (1957-63) helped define “typical families” for millions of viewers.

But little about these television shows reflected what was really going on in America, as family historian Stephanie Coontz points out in her book “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.”

Coontz, who teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, has discussed postwar families on “Oprah” and other talk shows, and debated the myth-vs.-reality of postwar America with perennial GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

“When people idealize the ‘50s,” Coontz says, “I start by telling them all the things that were wrong, such as the treatment of African Americans and the widespread poverty, even among whites.

“We think of it as a less violent age, but there was daily violence in the cities,” Coontz says. “Much of it didn’t get reported as crime, because it was directed at ‘legitimate’ targets - blacks and Hispanics.”

Incest victims and abused wives had no place to go. And the rate of childbearing among single women tripled between 1940 and 1958.

Tranquilizers, developed in the ‘50s in response to a so-called “female need,” were being devoured at an annual rate of 1.15 million pounds by 1959.

When Coontz presses adults today about what it was like growing up in the ‘50s, “They start off by describing it as a better time, then add, ‘But I sure wouldn’t want to have a marriage like my parents,’ or ‘I wish my father were more involved,’ or ‘I communicate better with my kids than my parents or grandparents did.’

“What they really miss, it seems, is the sense that it was an easier time to raise a family,” Coontz says, “and I think there’s a big element of truth in that. Not because of family forms, but rather because the economic and political climate was so much friendlier to young families.

“In many ways, people were not as well off in the ‘50s as they are today,” she points out. “But all the trends were getting better rather than worse. Poverty was falling, income inequality was falling.” In short, there was a lot more hope about the future than there is today.

But the heyday of the breadwinner-homemaker family concealed shortcomings that led to its rapid demise starting in the mid-‘60s, as divorce became more acceptable and living alone more economically feasible.

In her book “Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era,” social historian Elaine Tyler May makes the interesting case that the free-spirited youth of the ‘60s, who supposedly rejected their postwar parents’ “traditional” values, were unwittingly following the example set by their grandparents.

She writes that those who came of age in the first decades of the 20th century “had challenged the sexual norms of their day, pushed the divorce rate up and the birthrate down, and created a unique youth culture, complete with music, dancing, movies and other new forms of urban amusement.

“They also behaved in similar ways politically,” she writes, “developing a powerful feminist movement, strong grass-roots activism on behalf of social justice and a proliferation of radical movements to challenge the status quo.

“It is the generation in between,” writes Tyler May, “with its strong domestic ideology, pervasive consensus politics and peculiar demographic behavior, that stands out as different.”

Washington State University historian LeRoy Ashby usually warns against comparing generations and eras. “There’s always considerable overlap,” he says.

“But that particular generation - late ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s - was different, and it was so because of a unique combination of circumstances. The sustained economic boom helped a huge number of people. The gap between wealthy and poor people closed. Home ownership became much more of a reality.

“In a sense,” he says, “it was a euphoric time. Things seemed to be getting better, with no end in sight.

“But there was always this undercurrent of tension and doubt and anxiety, too, because of the Cold War - the bomb, the threat of America being undermined (by Communism) from within.

“One of the sad things,” Ashby says, “is that the mythical TV family of the ‘50s has become in many people’s minds an accurate portrait of the real family, and it wasn’t - not a bit.”

Anyone who believes otherwise should try doing housework in high heels, a la June Cleaver.

“Those TV families are real aberrations, and insofar as that image of the TV family continues to have a hold on us, we can’t measure up to it.”

Fretting about the future of the American family is hardly new. Try to guess when the following was written:

“The family, in its old sense, is disappearing from our land, and not only our free institutions are threatened but the very existence of our society is endangered.”

If you guessed late ‘50s, you’re right … late 1850s, as part of an article published in the Boston Quarterly Review.

Sociologist Cherlin notes that whenever the pace of change quickens - particularly when the divorce rate increases rapidly - these sentiments reappear.

They proved wrong in the middle of the last century, and wrong again after World War II.

Perhaps if we consider the advice of those who stay together long enough to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, the doomsayers will be wrong a hundred years from now, as well.

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