Volume 41, Number 3 · February 3, 1994
Mysteries of the Middle Class
By Nicholas Lemann
Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream
by Katherine S. Newman
Basic Books, 257 pp., $23.00
Silent Depression: The Fate of the American Dream
by Wallace G. Peterson
Norton, 320 pp., $23.00
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
by Stephanie Coontz
Basic Books, 391 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Good Society
by Robert Bellah, by Richard Madsen, by William M. Sullivan, by Ann Swidler, by Steven M. Tipton
Vintage, 347 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Rising in the West: The True Story of an 'Okie' Family from the Great Depression Through the Reagan Years
by Dan Morgan
Knopf, 532 pp., $25.00
For a long time after World War II the middle-class American family, consisting of a working husband, a housewife, and their children, seemed to be moving on a steady, upward economic course. But in the early 1970s, at about the time of the OPEC embargo, family income leveled off. Partly to maintain their standard of living while inflation was high and earnings were stagnant, millions of married women went to work. In 1970, in 40 percent of families both husband and wife worked. By 1990, the percentage had increased to 60. Women began to marry later: 62.5 percent of women in their early twenties were already married in 1975, but only 38.5 percent in 1990. Birth rates fell. There were more divorces: for every 1,000 who were married in 1970 there were only 47 who were divorced, while in 1990 there were 152. Seventy percent of households in 1970 included a married couple; twenty years later the percentage had dropped to 56.
Review, 6905 words
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