(09-14-2019, 02:46 AM)Ldr Wrote: You're rationalizing the reasons for the events.
You're obviously correct that marriage as an institution was socially stronger in the 1930's, but then again, it is so today compared to for example the 1980's. But why don't millennials divorce as much as boomers? I'm sure you have explanations for this too, but I'm claiming it's because millennials have higher oxytocin levels. Read the chapter 4.5 on the generational hormone theory's webpage, the address is in my signature. You will see that it's not so much what decade it is, it's the generations. Generations keep together or keep divorcing/separating as time goes by.
...and in the early 1940's. The constraints on spending on personal indulgence (rationing) prevented much of the activity associated with dating whether single or in a one-night stand. If one lived in Detroit, Indianapolis or St. Louis, then a romantic journey to Chicago was out of the question because it would more than devour gas rations for a month. Besides, many young men were overseas or at least in training camps far from lonely women in places that men felt fully comfortable.
It is easy to see that the strictures against divorce as well as economic realities kept some otherwise-shaky marriages together. Maybe a marriage stayed together 'because of the children' or because such would bring about the failure of a small business that had to be kept together no matter what. Divorce may have happened in Hollywood but not Holyoke. The peak time for divorce was the 1960's, when people felt economically secure enough to 'find themselves'... and they might 'find themselves' with an unsatisfying spouse who might have been frigid, in the closet, abuseive, or increasingly obnoxious. Figure that the genteel pornography of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine allowed men to look at nubile young women without feelings of guilt, and.. well, at some ages women (other than the grotesquely obese) are more attractive without clothes as with them no matter how old a man is (unless he is gay, but that is a rare qualification). As women age that no longer holds true. But the divorce epidemic of the 1960's involved all generations of the time except perhaps the Lost. OK, so the older middle-aged people of the time (largely early-wave GI's) no longer had children who could have trauma from a family break-up... but younger adults did. Add to this that the old factory jobs that once supported families whose main bread-winner didn't need much education disappeared, and the economic incentive to stay married often vanished in some poor communities.
OK, every era has effects on all generations, and the generations in place react differently depending on how they were brought up and what social roles they have at the time. Well, that is the theory, isn't it? Could it be that during the last completed Crisis Era that the adult generations of the time (Missionary, Lost, and GI) had different hormones based upon the times in which they were children? In the last Awakening Era, would not the adult generations in place (GI, Silent, and Boom) have had different hormones based upon the realities of the times in which they were children? Or could it be that events (that include opportunities) manifest themselves in hormones? Attitudes can change abruptly in something so subtle as the perception that bottle-feeding is somehow more 'scientific' than breast-feeding.
Quote:What you also see to fail is that not only married couples stayed together during the 1930's and 2008 economic crashes, but also the unmarried couples stayed together, with or without children. This fact negates the institution of marriage and it's social value.
It could also be that marriage has become less convenient. Husbands and wives must both work, and if she is in the publishing industry in New York City and he is a construction contractor who suddenly finds that the opportunity is in 'Vegas', then such creates marital instability. Economics is everything in our plutocratic society.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.