Season's Greetings From The Boys From Marketing!

[BlueTrain]

In many places, sixteen was not considered too young to get married and in some, perhaps, maybe just about the right time. In my parents day (both born before WWI), the concept of the teenage years had not yet developed, I believe, although it may have by the time of WWII with the bobbysoxers. At any rate, if a student dropped out of school, he would have been expected to get a job, if he could find one. My father never even went to high school, much less dropped out, and I believe he did farm work. Before he was drafted in 1942 when I think he was 28, he worked in mines, "worked cattle" (cowboy) and drove trucks. His life was rather harder than mine.

 

[tonyb]

In many places, sixteen was not considered too young to get married and in some, perhaps, maybe just about the right time. In my parents day (both born before WWI), the concept of the teenage years had not yet developed, I believe, although it may have by the time of WWII with the bobbysoxers. At any rate, if a student dropped out of school, he would have been expected to get a job, if he could find one. My father never even went to high school, much less dropped out, and I believe he did farm work. Before he was drafted in 1942 when I think he was 28, he worked in mines, "worked cattle" (cowboy) and drove trucks. His life was rather harder than mine.

Another reminder to view the standards of times past in their context. In an age before reliable and accessible contraception, when life expectancy was shorter and making a living from the sweet of one's brow was much more feasible than it is today, when higher education was predominantly the province of the well-to-do, getting hitched at 16 was a common and reasonable thing to do.

 

[sheeplady]

The belief that there wasn't reliable contraception available is mostly a myth. Spermicides were readily available in the 1930s, condoms were available, the rhythm method and extended breastfeeding were well known. Diaphragms were commonly used. If we use today's statistics, the "average use" failure rate for these methods for pregnancies over a year range from 25% (rhythm method) to 12% (diaphragm). Compare that to no use of contraceptives, which results in an 85% chance of pregnancy in a year's time and 91% after 3 years. (Realize that with the combined pill typical use pregnancy rate is 9% after 1 year... so 12% is quite comparable to today.)

Now, that doesn't mean that everyone had access to these; poverty, location, education, immigration status, and religion all played a role.

If you learned about Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in school, realize that she made *significant* progress in the 1920s and 1930s. A lot of modern people (women included) seem to think that birth control started with the pill in the 1960s, it didn't. The reasons for the "sexual revolution" weren't just birth control, and the revolution started long before the 1960s, as much as the boomers like to take credit for it.

 

[BlueTrain]

I also don't agree with some of the images we have a past lives. While it is generally true that people married younger than is generally the case now, getting married at age sixteen, at least for the girls, may or may not have been that common, but one could say that it was natural. The legal age was even lower in many places, though usually both court and parental approval was necessary. Yet many still married later, later than, say, age 30. It would appear all the rules favored males and in some places the legal age for marriage was lower for females than for males. Even today, marriages of younger women to older men is not unheard of. In some cases, it seems like men trade in their wives for newer models but it's expensive and something only the wealthy do.

I also don't generally agree with the idea that people didn't used to live as long. While the average lifespan may have been shorter, the real reason for that was that infant and child mortality was high. Both my grandparents on my father's side and my stepmother (my mother having died at age 48!) lost infant children. But the other children lived to a ripe old age, although the ones who smoked went first.

I also have the idea that more people never married during the period when my grandparents were raising families. One possible reason was that more men lived in communities where there was an unequal distribution of males and females, like mining camps, logging camps and the like. Sometimes there might have been simply a shortage of suitable marriage candidates, such as after the Civil War, when a young lady simply couldn't marry just anyone. My wife's family, for instance, had a number of old maid aunts and old bachelor uncles, except they were all rather later than the war. I've never heard any reason why they never married.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One major factor in young marriages in the Era was the pressure to legitimize babies who would otherwise be born out of wedlock. My great grandmother married at 17 because she was pregnant, and that marriage ended in divorce six years later. This was not an uncommon scenario -- such marriages often ended either in divorce or desertion.

Quite a number of "confirmed bachelors" and "spinsters" in the Era were, in fact, gay. But even for those who weren't, being single wasn't necessarily a ticket to ostracization. Marjorie Hillis's 1937 best-seller "Live Alone And Like It" celebrated the life of the unmarried "business girl," and encouraged women to stay single as long as they wanted -- and to enjoy every minute of their freedom.

As Sheeplady points out concerning birth control, it was considered a very up-to-date thing to know about in the Era. You could order spermicides -- euphemized as "feminine hygiene products" -- right out of the Sears catalog thruout the 1930s and 1940s, along with books describing exactly how such products should be used. The Ladies' Home Journal, that most bourgeois of women's magazines, editorially endorsed "family planning", and published quite a few articles about it during those years. Planned Parenthood was established in 1942 as a capstone to this era, as a descendant of the original "Birth Control League" which dated back to the early 1920s.

Abortion was also not uncommon thru this period, and it wasn't always bloody back-alley butchers who performed them. Many respectable general practitioners would perform abortions, especially on underage girls, while putting them down in the records as some other sort of abdominal surgery -- a scenario depicted accurately in the book and movie "Peyton Place." My mother recalls a schoolmate who got pregnant in the early 1950s, and when asked what happened, replies, in a very matter-of-fact way, "she got rid of it." This happened far, far more often than people today want to admit.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Lizzie's post is very consistent with what my father and grandmother told me about the GE. People like sex, have sex and have the consequences of sex (and try to prevent those consequences) pretty much anywhere you have...people. The same with drug and alcohol abuse / addiction - they all existed then as well.

My grandmother could tell you who in our reasonably small town had affairs, who had "gone away" to give up a baby, whose very young "sister" was really a daughter, etc. It all went on. And my grandmother should know as I found out after she died that she had had a multi-decade affair with a married man.

 

[BlueTrain]

Life has probably always seemed unfair to women, doesn't it? Women couldn't "play the field," but men could. A man might visit a prostitute or, if he could afford it, maintain a mistress, though I doubt that was at all common. In fact, I suspect that in some circles, it may have even been expected if a man were to be considered virile or something like that. But "barrenness" was considered grounds for divorce. I'm sure all of this was less common after WWI, however.

There were several reform movements beginning sometime in the 19th century, I think most of which were of benefit to women, though they were usually long in becoming fulfilled. Dress reform, voting rights, property rights, marriageable age and prohibition of alcohol were some of those movements. And some are pushing back against them still. It says a lot when black men got the right to vote decades before white women.

The business of women going away to give birth to an out-of-wedlock baby reminds me of the joke that every time a child is born, someone leaves town.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep, the more you look at the Era, the more you see what's underneath the coat of whitewash slapped onto it in the 1970s and 1980s.

Women in the 1930s were very much aware of the "double standard" -- and it wasn't accepted with quiet equanimity. As far back as the 1910s it was strongly condemned by both secular and religious progressives: the Methodist Social Creed, as seen in the church's 1916 Book of Discipline, specifically calls for the elimination of the "double standard." By the thirties, articles in women's magazines described the harm caused to society by the "double standard," and Marjorie Hillis, in "Live Alone and Like It" went so far as to remind single women that they had every right to do exactly as they pleased in their own personal relationships -- that their "affairs" were no one's business but their own.

 

[BlueTrain]

It seems more like any whitewash was applied in the 1940s and 1950s and was starting to peel off by the late 1960s and on into the 1970s. But even then double standards still existed. Some may be coming back, too, starting in a couple of hours.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was referring to the use of an idealized "wholesome" recent past as a club with which to beat the 1960s and 1970s -- a very common tactic in certain quarters during the '70s and '80s, and even into the '90s. That whitewash was applied thick and heavy.

People in the 1930s and 1940s tended to be refreshingly blunt and honest about the world they lived in, certainly more so than they would become from the 1950s onward.

 

[BlueTrain]

Okay, I understand and agree completely. I believe many people today do not realize the resistance to all the social changes that began in the late 1960s and resented them bitterly. Moreover, I think the resentment has been building over the decades since then, too. The odd thing to me is that few of those changes made much difference in anyone's personal lives. But when have other people's lives been other people's business?

 

[HudsonHawk]

I also don't generally agree with the idea that people didn't used to live as long. While the average lifespan may have been shorter, the real reason for that was that infant and child mortality was high. Both my grandparents on my father's side and my stepmother (my mother having died at age 48!) lost infant children. But the other children lived to a ripe old age, although the ones who smoked went first.

People often conflate "life expectancy" and "life span", but they are two different concepts. As you say, we often hear that people "live longer" today, but that's a statistical change in "life expectancy" due to changes in infant mortality rates, wars, disease, etc. It doesn't really speak to the idea of *when* the average person can expect to die or an increase in human life span. The idea that our ancestors routinely died young has no real scientific basis.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Okay, I understand and agree completely. I believe many people today do not realize the resistance to all the social changes that began in the late 1960s and resented them bitterly. Moreover, I think the resentment has been building over the decades since then, too. The odd thing to me is that few of those changes made much difference in anyone's personal lives. But when have other people's lives been other people's business?

I think a big part of the whitewashing in the '70s had to do with the popularity of "The Waltons," which, while a well-written entertaining show, offered a highly selective image of what it was like to live thru the Depression. The Waltons, by early 1930s standards, were not poor. Not in any way whatsoever. They owned land, and a large home, and a working family business that paid enough for them to live on, they had electricity -- which the overwhelming majority of rural families did not have until the REA got going -- and they always had enough to eat. The result was a distorted image of the Depression for people who didn't know much about it -- if what they saw on TV was "the Depression," well, it -- and the system that produced that depression in the first place -- couldn't have been that bad after all.

I watched "The Waltons" regularly all thru its run, and enjoyed it for what it was, but I knew that it was nothing like the real Depression. I've always thought there ought to be an updated version for HBO or something, with a bit more authenticity. Call it "The Wyckoffs," and have it tell the story of a desperate family crammed into an Old Law tenement on the lower East Side. Pa is a laid-off fur cutter who jumps a freight train to go to Washington to join the Bonus Army, and comes home with a lung full of gas for his trouble. Ma does piecework in a sweatshop and is scared to join the ILGWU for fear she'll be beaten and fired. The youngest son dropped out of school to hustle on the streets, and is a pickpocket known as "Jimmy the Dip." The middle son plays piano in a bordello, and hopes if he works hard enough he might get a job at Poily Adler's. John Boy, the oldest, is an idealistic street-corner Communist who leads hunger marches and wants to write plays like Clifford Odets, but all he can get is a copyreading job on the WPA. Two of the daughters quit school to hire out as maids for wealthy German families on Vanderbilt Avenue, while the other changed her name to "Brenda LaRue," lied about her age, and got a job as a chorus girl at Minsky's. Grandma and Grandpa rarely talk, because they're still traumatized from fleeing the Cossacks back in the old country. And Ike Godsey runs the ex-speakeasy where Pa goes to drown his sorrows each night.

 

[Fading Fast]

...People in the 1930s and 1940s tended to be refreshingly blunt and honest about the world they lived in, certainly more so than they would become from the 1950s onward.

One good window into this are the pre-code movies ('33 and before) where you will see it all:

- women in almost all types of jobs
- women not wanting to be denied those jobs
- women as bosses (in one, running a major car company and using her VPs for casual sex - I kid you not)
- women using sex to get better jobs
- women as the smart one in the relationship - at work and at home
- women as prostitutes to support their families (husband sick or he abandoned them, etc.)
- women as single moms trying to earn a living and raise their child
plus
- sex out of wedlock with all its consequences
--- out of wedlock births
--- abortions, etc.
- divorce / affairs (both men women cheating)
- threesomes
all discussed and handled in all the different ways they are always handled
plus
- alcoholism
- drug addiction
- white collar crime
- violent crime / crooked cops / crooked DAs, etc.
- speakeasies
- and on and on

Those pre-code movies emphasize Lizzie's point: there was a "refreshing bluntness" and unvarnished understanding of life in those times by the people who lived in them. The '34 and on enforcement of the code is part of the whitewashing as - and this happened innocently to me for awhile growing up - I first saw the '30s and '40s through those code-enforced movies and thought they were a more wholesome time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"If at any time you are a bit foggy as to what constitutes honor, purity and goodness or where sophistication stops and sin starts, I'll tell you."
-- Joseph Ignatius Breen, 1934.

 

[BlueTrain]

The movies were wholesome; the times weren't. Some people are even nostalgic for the war--first the Civil War, then WWII, ignoring all the others. The army was still fighting Indians when my grandparents were born.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I think a big part of the whitewashing in the '70s had to do with the popularity of "The Waltons," which, while a well-written entertaining show, offered a highly selective image of what it was like to live thru the Depression. The Waltons, by early 1930s standards, were not poor. Not in any way whatsoever. They owned land, and a large home, and a working family business that paid enough for them to live on, they had electricity -- which the overwhelming majority of rural families did not have until the REA got going -- and they always had enough to eat. The result was a distorted image of the Depression for people who didn't know much about it -- if what they saw on TV was "the Depression," well, it -- and the system that produced that depression in the first place -- couldn't have been that bad after all.

I watched "The Waltons" regularly all thru its run, and enjoyed it for what it was, but I knew that it was nothing like the real Depression. I've always thought there ought to be an updated version for HBO or something, with a bit more authenticity. Call it "The Wyckoffs," and have it tell the story of a desperate family crammed into an Old Law tenement on the lower East Side. Pa is a laid-off fur cutter who jumps a freight train to go to Washington to join the Bonus Army, and comes home with a lung full of gas for his trouble. Ma does piecework in a sweatshop and is scared to join the ILGWU for fear she'll be beaten and fired. The youngest son dropped out of school to hustle on the streets, and is a pickpocket known as "Jimmy the Dip." The middle son plays piano in a bordello, and hopes if he works hard enough he might get a job at Poily Adler's. John Boy, the oldest, is an idealistic street-corner Communist who leads hunger marches and wants to write plays like Clifford Odets, but all he can get is a copyreading job on the WPA. Two of the daughters quit school to hire out as maids for wealthy German families on Vanderbilt Avenue, while the other changed her name to "Brenda LaRue," lied about her age, and got a job as a chorus girl at Minsky's. Grandma and Grandpa rarely talk, because they're still traumatized from fleeing the Cossacks back in the old country. And Ike Godsey runs the ex-speakeasy where Pa goes to drown his sorrows each night.

I read something online a while back called "Bleaker Endings", where people made up alternate storylines to movie endings. This would have fit in nicely. I offered up:

Field of Dreams: "Eddie Ciccote beans Moonlight Graham right in the temple for winking. Graham is left to die at home plate, blood pouring from his ears, as no one notices Karin choking on the hot dog. The movie ends not with a line of cars, but with two hearses picking up dead bodies."

 

[scotrace]

Interesting current statistic that flies in the face of common belief about The Era: Abortions are at the lowest rate since 1973 and Roe V Wade. 14 per 1000 women of child bearing age (15-44) versus 30 per 1000 in 1980 (the highest). I suspect the rate is lower now than in 1940, but there's no way to know.
Current rate is attributed to fewer unexpected pregnancies due to more widely available birth control and better education.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It would be interesting to know what the "appendectomy" rate was for women between the ages of 13 and 50 in 1940.

 

[tonyb]

People often conflate "life expectancy" and "life span", but they are two different concepts. As you say, we often hear that people "live longer" today, but that's a statistical change in "life expectancy" due to changes in infant mortality rates, wars, disease, etc. It doesn't really speak to the idea of *when* the average person can expect to die or an increase in human life span. The idea that our ancestors routinely died young has no real scientific basis.

The more telling stats are those filed under "life expectancy by age," meaning how much more life might the average person expect if he or she survives to age 10, and 20, and 30, and so on. Those numbers have indeed been going up -- pretty much across the board -- for more than the century and a half that more or less reliable data are available.

Attributing that increase to any one factor would be folly, of course. But many millions of people live into their 80s and beyond these days who not so long ago would have croaked in their 50s and 60s if not for the medical advances of recent years.