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This. All those servicemen returning from the war. Also, a surge in confidence about the economy and life in general, after the war was won, or stopped, at least. I don't think anyone really "won", in view of the horrific losses. But even couples who were married before or during the war and weren't involved in military service waited until after the war to start having kids. Not all of course, but many.
..the Diaphragm was available to women in the 50's.
And they were used before then starting more widely in the mid-1930's. Women in my family (a big city family) used them in the early 1940's. Nonetheless, this statistic surprised me:
"...the diaphragm became one of the most widely used contraceptives in the United States. In 1940, one-third of all U.S. married couples used a diaphragm for contraception."
Letter from a Canadian navy sailor. to his wife in Alberta.........
Paint the ceiling in the bedroom......because that's all you are going to be seeing for the first six months after I get home.
The pent up demand for "consumer items ' such as cars, homes, and furniture, helped to fuel the post war recovery. In Canada, during the 10 years after the end of the war, we built over one million new homes, and the oil discovery at Leduc Alberta created thousands of new, good paying jobs.
Many of the returning servicemen took advantage of the FREE University tuition that was offered by the Canadian Government, so we gained an entire generation of new Doctors, Engineers, Lawyers and other professionally trained men. They went on to be the leaders in the next 3 decades in our country.
There was no effective and nonintrusive birth control in the 1950s. The first birth control pills came on the market in the '60s, and the IUD was starting to be popular by the early '70s. Once people could have sex without babies, they did. Except for Catholics and Mormons, the 6 child family virtually disappeared.
NJGoat wants to dismiss all the migrative, demographic, cultural
and medical reasons I proposed, replacing them with war and depression.
What he hasn't considered is that the baby boom wouldn't have occurred if the
"return to normalcy" politically and economically happened just a decade later.
The reasons for that, I would argue, were spelled out in my prior posts.
The people changed.
Look at the chart of US birth rates. It must be acknowledged that a massive
change in American society took place in the 1960s.
NJGoat's placing sole cause d'etre upon the wars and depression also completely fails
to address the decline of the 1920s, a time of economic and political strength.
What I said, however, does address it, because it was the coming-of-age
of the children of the immigrant wave from the 1910-20 spike that produced
the families of the baby boom, due to their cultural mindset of large families,
and this characteristic was immune to their economic struggles.
Last edited by Snowball7; 07-28-2016 at 08:03 AM..
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