Civil Rights / Cold War
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Read about the Baby Boom.
After the war ended, both men and women wanted to get married and start a family.
During the war, they had postponed marriage because it was difficult to meet someone and plan a life together with the men serving in the armed forces. After the war, a lot of people got married and started having children
As the economy started becoming more prosperous, people could afford to have more children. In the U.S. 76 million babies were born between 1946 and 1964, an 18-year span, compared to 24 million in the ten years of the 1930s.
In 1951, Sylvia Porter, a writer for a New York newspaper, called the birth of 3.5 million babies in 1950 “the biggest…boom ever known in history.” This became the term for the era, and people born during this time were called baby boomers.
Notice on the chart on this page how the births rose dramatically in 1946 and started declining in the early 1960s. The rise in births in the 1980s and 1990s resulted from the baby boomers having babies.
Civil Rights / Cold War >> Everyday Life >> How They Lived >> Women's Lives
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