Childless in the Golden Era

K.D. Lightner said:

I was almost tempted to move back to Iowa, deliberately have a baby out-of- wedlock and apply for car insurance. Then, when turned down, I would have taken that puppy all the way to the supreme court!

karol

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You giving birth to puppies??????? Can I have one???[huh]

That's all I need, a litter of puppies. Or kids.

Heck, you can have them all.

I just wanted to win the court case for my friend, who would not pursue it because she did not want the publicity of being an unwed mother.

Except, if I'd had a kid, my poor dear parents probably would have raised it.

karol

K.D. Lightner said:

A nastier comment was being called an "un-natural woman..."

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Said the carefully coiffed, begirdled Jello-eaters.

"Unnatural" seems like such an odd epithet from a generation that preferred anything man-made.

Regardless of what may be "imagined" as the attitude of having no children in the 1930s, that period of 1930 to 1940 has the lowest birthrate ever in the US. For some years of the thirties, it was not even sustainable (i.e. replacement children were less than the death rate resulting effectively in population decrease). I was born in the 30s, 1932 to be exact, but at my age during the time, wouldn't have been particularly aware of attitudes of those without children. But clearly from statistical data, not having children in the 30's was something of a way of life, so I suspect it wasn't much of a "thing", other than that of a bunch of old busy bodies, who, as my Mother would always say, needed to be slapped good and hard, especially hard. And she was known to do that on festive occasions. Or thoroughly cussed out - my Mother knew cuss words I think the world never heard of and still hasn't.

During the 1930's, the average family size was less than one child per family (something like .54, as I recall.

Bill Taylor

I know of a number of married couples who postponed their child-bearing and rearing in the 30's because of the depression.

A lot of my friends who were born in the 40's were "war babies" and then "boomers." Their parents were almost a decade older than mine and had been married for over a decade before they had children.

karol

Bill Taylor said:

I was born in the 30s, 1932 to be exact, but at my age during the time, wouldn't have been particularly aware of attitudes of those without children. But clearly from statistical data, not having children in the 30's was something of a way of life, so I suspect it wasn't much of a "thing", other than that of a bunch of old busy bodies, who, as my Mother would always say, needed to be slapped good and hard, especially hard. And she was known to do that on festive occasions. Or thoroughly cussed out - my Mother knew cuss words I think the world never heard of and still hasn't.

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My dad, born in northern Iowa in 1935, recalls quite a different attitude in small-town agrarian society. That way of life, so communal and calvinist, gave the busybodies a LOT of power. No one ever slapped or cussed them, anyway - they were the moral backbone of the community in a way they probably weren't in big cities like Des Moines.

As a side effect of that social structure, people tended to get married and have children at the appropriate time or not at all, and the ones who didn't ended up in very set categories: the old maid teacher, the itinerant worker, the fey male musician or artist, the aunt or uncle who Wasn't Quite Right.

I often think that the safe, civilized, and peaceful life of those little communities was very fragile and easily upset by difference. It probably came at quite a price for some people.

I absolutely concur with Fletch. There were unspoken and spoken rules in smaller towns.
As near as the early 1970s and way before that there was for sure one woman that would mark the date of the weddings on their calendar and keep tight records on when the first babe was born.
Reputations were everything and followed you till death I guess.
Some small towns I know it is still the norm to have 4 children.

No one ever slapped or cussed them, anyway - they were the moral backbone of the community in a way they probably weren't in big cities like Des Moines.

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You would be railroaded out with tar and feathers to be sure or at the very least shunned for the rest of your born day and so would your future heirs.

Some of that still goes on. My 90-year-old mother, who has lived her entire life in South Des Moines, is ruled by "what the neighbors think."

She is fearful people on the block will talk about us or condemn us and gets very upset with my eccentric ways, certain we will be shunned because of my actions, all of which are innocuous.

It does not matter that most of the people in our neighborhood, whose opinions meant everything to her, are dead. And the younger people who live across the street and beside us could give a hoot.

She lives in terror -- and shudders everytime I don a fedora.

A nerdy ballcap would be fine, but no fedoras or cowboy hats. This is, after all, Iowa.

And, yes, we do have some people on the block, around my age, who are busy bodies and love to gossip amongst themselves.

Didn't Dante, in his Inferno, put gossips in the second ring of hell?

karol

K.D. Lightner said:

Didn't Dante, in his Inferno, put gossips in the second ring of hell?

karol

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Where they belong---however most people nowadays think that Dante is a video game.

Didn't Socrates say, more or less, that not everyone's opinion is worthy of respect?

Paisley said:

Didn't Socrates say, more or less, that not everyone's opinion is worthy of respect?

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I think that was in The Wrongness of Lying.

One of my favourite writers is Virginia Woolf, and although she was married for 29 years she never had children. Granted, she was part of a highly tolerant circle of artists and intellectuals.

Has anyone else here read her To the Lighthouse? It takes place between 1909 and 1919, and I have a special interest in the Lily Briscoe character. At the beginning of the book she's an unmarried woman in her 30s who is fiercely dedicated to her painting, which is quite avant-garde for the time, and does not feel any strong desire to get married. She's not conventionally pretty or especially charming like other women, but it's suggested that to some people this would make her quite attractive indeed.

An older matriarch figure, Mrs. Ramsay, considers her a fool for not marrying and insinuates to her that "an unmarried woman has missed the best of life." Mrs. Ramsay takes it upon herself to try to get Lily to marry an old widowed scientist friend of theirs, Mr Bankes. The plan doesn't come to anything although Bankes and Lily remain very close friends. It seems this result is at least partially because Lily is both fascinated by the idea of love and also rather horrified by how cruel it can make people (especially a young couple who marry in the first half of the book and fall out of love swiftly) and she doesn't want any part of that.

So we have in Virginia Woolf's book a very interesting and rounded characterization of an early 20th century English woman who doesn't marry and faces a certain amount of pressure for her choice. Still, it's worth noting that the Lily character lives in London, not some of the more close-knit communities that have been mentioned earlier in this topic.

One can also study some of the Hollywood films of the 40's and 50's in which the "career woman" has to decide between having a good job or marrying and having children.

It was thought, in these films, that if she gave up her career to marry, she would live happily; ever after; if she choose her career over marriage, she was doomed to a sad, lonely, loveless life.

Look at what the future held for George Bailey's wife in It's a Wonderful Life if she had not met and married Bailey. We saw her as a shy, introverted, frightened, and rather homely (hard to make Donna Reed homely) librarian.

Yes, the "unfulfilled woman" -- with no husband and no children. A tragedy, indeed. And, I have read, a perhaps unsubtle way to persuade those "Rosie the Riveters" to get out of the factories and back into the kitchens, where, of course, they belonged.

karol

jamespowers said:

I think that was in The Wrongness of Lying.

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Yes, I remember now--that's where he said the busybodies needed to go to Walden Pond and take a long walk on a short pier because it would be for the greatest good.

K.D. Lightner said:

Yes, the "unfulfilled woman" -- with no husband and no children. A tragedy, indeed. And, I have read, a perhaps unsubtle way to persuade those "Rosie the Riveters" to get out of the factories and back into the kitchens, where, of course, they belonged.

karol

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You forgot bare foot and pregnant.

Barefoot and pregnant -- Yes, that too.

I didn't want to say it outloud.

karol

Bill Taylor said:

Regardless of what may be "imagined" as the attitude of having no children in the 1930s, that period of 1930 to 1940 has the lowest birthrate ever in the US. For some years of the thirties, it was not even sustainable (i.e. replacement children were less than the death rate resulting effectively in population decrease). I was born in the 30s, 1932 to be exact, but at my age during the time, wouldn't have been particularly aware of attitudes of those without children. But clearly from statistical data, not having children in the 30's was something of a way of life, so I suspect it wasn't much of a "thing", other than that of a bunch of old busy bodies, who, as my Mother would always say, needed to be slapped good and hard, especially hard. And she was known to do that on festive occasions. Or thoroughly cussed out - my Mother knew cuss words I think the world never heard of and still hasn't.

During the 1930's, the average family size was less than one child per family (something like .54, as I recall.

Bill Taylor

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Of those women born between 1901 and 1910, approximately 1/5 went their entire lives without having any children. While many people attribute this to the Great Depression, the birthrate actually started dropping before the Great Depression and was very low by the end of the 1920s (probably due to a number of factors, including but not limited to: feminism and the resulting increase of women in the workplace, increased access to and knowledge of more reliable forms of birth control, a shift from agrarian to industrialized ways of living, and the phasing out of Victorian ideals in favor of more modern ones).

There were certain alarmists who were worried by the lowering birthrate, especially racists who were afraid that white women were committing "race suicide" by not outbreeding minorities. As early as the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt himself made numerous statements decrying white women who had no or few children. However, despite the protests of politicians and others in high places, the birth rate continued to drop throughout the 1910s and 1920s, and the amount of women foregoing reproducing altogether went up. It wasn't until the post-WWII Baby Boom that the pendulum made its full swing in the other direction and the birthrate became extremely high and the childlessness rate extremely low. It appears that along with the Baby Boom came an increase in societal pressure to have children, and this pressure didn't start to significantly let up until around the 1970s. (Of course, that is not to say that these attitudes or shifts thereof were consistent; attitudes can differ widely from area to area and community to community.)

According to an interesting paper from 1968 (a page of which is shown below), in college towns in the late 1920s (and presumably at least the early part of the 1930s), there was pressure not to have children too soon or have too many of them. Also, while the overall amount of women who became adults around the 1920s that went their entire lives without having children was around 1/5, it was as high as 24% for women who had graduated high school, and 1/3 for those who had graduated college (in comparison, those last two numbers dropped to about 8% and 12%, respectively, by the 1950s).

Good information, and thanks for posting it as yet more proof that American society prior to 1946 was very, very different from American society after 1946, regardless of the hats and clothes.

Prewar attitudes about contraceptive options, for example, were in many ways more open than those of the 1946-60 era. I've often mentioned, and it bears mentioning again, that all thru the thirties you could order contraceptive jellies and similar products right out of the Sears catalog -- when you read about a feminine hygiene product's "germicidal power," it was a euphemism for *spermicidal* power, and the women of the thirties knew and understood this. However the "race suicide" people might have howled, and whatever local laws might have attempted to interfere, women all over the US could order their Koromex or their Ortho-Gynol thru the mail and have it delivered right to their doorstep. Among the popular magazines of the time, the ultra-respectable Ladies Home Journal campaigned openly for wider access to birth control information, and Consumer's Union Reports even published -- in 1937 -- a detailed booklet rating available contraceptive products for their effectiveness.

Abortion was also a far more common option than latter-day commentators want to admit, and it wasn't always the stereotypical stinking-of-liquor back-alley abortionist who performed the act. Many reputable family doctors would perform abortions on the QT and report them as "miscarriages" or "appendicitis," especially for school-age young women who would disappear without explanation from school for a couple of months, and return just as mysteriously.

LizzieMaine said:

Good information, and thanks for posting it as yet more proof that American society prior to 1946 was very, very different from American society after 1946, regardless of the hats and clothes.

Prewar attitudes about contraceptive options, for example, were in many ways more open than those of the 1946-60 era. I've often mentioned, and it bears mentioning again, that all thru the thirties you could order contraceptive jellies and similar products right out of the Sears catalog -- when you read about a feminine hygiene product's "germicidal power," it was a euphemism for *spermicidal* power, and the women of the thirties knew and understood this. However the "race suicide" people might have howled, and whatever local laws might have attempted to interfere, women all over the US could order their Koromex or their Ortho-Gynol thru the mail and have it delivered right to their doorstep. Among the popular magazines of the time, the ultra-respectable Ladies Home Journal campaigned openly for wider access to birth control information, and Consumer's Union Reports even published -- in 1937 -- a detailed booklet rating available contraceptive products for their effectiveness.

Abortion was also a far more common option than latter-day commentators want to admit, and it wasn't always the stereotypical stinking-of-liquor back-alley abortionist who performed the act. Many reputable family doctors would perform abortions on the QT and report them as "miscarriages" or "appendicitis," especially for school-age young women who would disappear without explanation from school for a couple of months, and return just as mysteriously.

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An "appendectomy" was the cover story for the trial saving discovery of an abortion in "Peyton Place." Written in the '50s, set in the '40s - the climax of the movie pivoted on this fact and how society denied on the surface what it knew was going on beneath it.

Exactly so. My mother vividly remembers a girl in her high school class who got pregnant -- and when you ask her what the girl did, her matter-of-fact reply is "She got rid of it." And my mother wasn't any kind of urban sophisticate with advanced views on reproductive freedom -- she was a small-town working class kid, and that was the way small-town working-class people looked at these things.