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Fifty Years of Family Demography: A Record of Social Change
Author(s): Paul C. Glick
Source: Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp. 861-873
Published by: National Council on Family Relations
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PAUL C. GLICK Arizona State University 
Fifty Years of Family Demography: 
A Record of Social Change 
Written in honor of the 50th anniversary of the 
Journal of Marriage and the Family, this essay 
tells how family demography developed in the 
United States and then summarizes findings from 
selected research projects on the subject since 
1940. Early studies examined the family life cycle, 
historicalfamily trends, religious and racial inter- 
marriage, socioeconomic status and family stabili- 
ty, and the marriage squeeze. Later analyses dealt 
with international trends in marriage, health of 
the married and unmarried, cohabitation outside 
marriage, one-parent families, and living alone. 
Still more recent investigations included gender 
preferences in children, marital stability and sex 
of children, no-fault divorce, divorce among 
children of divorce, projections of marital status, 
remarriage, marital homogamy, stepfamilies, and 
some consequences of recent changes in American 
family demographics. 
One of my earliest impressions about the study of 
demography dates back to 1933, five years before 
the National Council on Family Relations was 
formed. It was during my senior year in college 
when Professor Lester Jones shocked me by say- 
ing, as if he meant it, that he could hardly wait to 
see the final reports of the 1930 census, which, in- 
cidentally, included a fat volume entitled 
Families. My reaction was one of disbelief that 
any sociologist could get excited about poring 
Department of Sociology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 
85281. 
over census statistics. A few years later, at a 
graduate seminar on population research, I found 
out that "mere demography" was a misleading 
reference to research that emerges from studying 
population and family trends and differentials 
with respect to ethnic groups, education, occupa- 
tion, and income. 
In 1938, the first year for NCFR, I received my 
doctorate in sociology with a dissertation on fami- 
ly demography concerning an analysis of changes 
in Wisconsin's birth rates during the economic 
depression. In preparing my dissertation, as in my 
later writings, one of the most rewarding parts of 
the analysis was the preparation of interpretive 
comment about the research findings. This exer- 
cise consisted of developing hypotheses about the 
attitudes and motivations of the people and 
families that caused the results to come out the 
way they did. Often, the central purpose of my 
later studies was to design research that would test 
these hypotheses. 
In this article, the contents of each section are 
presented in historical order, starting in the first 
section with developments since 1940 in the 
formulation of demographic concepts and 
research methods relating to household and fami- 
ly life. Succeeding sections summarize highlights 
of research studies on marriage and the family 
from the 1940s until the present time. Many of the 
references cite research, especially during the early 
period, that was produced by me and my col- 
leagues at the Census Bureau. But because of the 
explosive volume of more recent research, as well 
as space limitations, only a sketchy selection of 
studies will be summarized from the more recent 
available literature. 
Journal of Marriage and the Family 50 (November 1988): 861-873 861 
Journal of Marriage and the Family 
SELECTED SOURCES OF FAMILY DEMOGRAPHY 
In 1939, when the National Council on Family 
Relations, as it is now known, was in its second 
year of existence, I was starting my 40-year career 
at the U.S. Bureau of the Census in Washington, 
D.C. As a family analyst, I soon became aware of 
the NCFR and started to subscribe to its official 
journal, then called Marriage and Family Living. 
My attention at the time was concentrated on 
preparing, with colleagues, ten book-size reports 
from the 1940 census that dealt with family com- 
position, age at marriage, fertility, employment of 
women, family income, and housing characteris- 
tics of families. 
Early in my career, I introduced into census 
reports the self-explanatory term "husband-wife 
families" but continued the bureau practice of 
always identifying the husband as the "head," 
regardless of whether he was so reported. This 
situation eventually caused numerous feminists 
after the 1970 census to insist on getting rid of 
such a sexist practice. Therefore, a research proj- 
ect based on a national sample of 1,000 married 
couples was conducted by the bureau, with the 
result that the most popular usage would be to 
consider both the husband and wife as joint heads 
of the household or family. But this solution was 
impractical because efficient operations required 
that only one adult should be the reference person 
in determining the household relationship of each 
household member. Consequently, I proposed 
that the household respondent be asked to list 
first the adult (or one of the adults) in whose 
name the home was owned or rented. The rela- 
tionship of other household members to the first 
person was to be reported. In all published reports 
this first person is called the "householder," 
regardless of whether the wife or the husband in a 
married couple was listed first. This proposal is 
now in use in all Census Bureau reports and in the 
reports of other government agencies. No objec- 
tion to this solution has come to my attention. 
Also, during the 1970s, extensive changes in the 
titles of occupations used by government agencies 
were made in order to eliminate sexist terminol- 
ogy. 
It may be a surprise to some readers that two 
key census variables, education and income, were 
not included in a decennial census questionnaire 
until 1940. In the same census, some of the ques- 
tions, including fertility, were asked for the first 
time on a sample basis. By 1950, all but a few cen- 
sus questions were asked for a 20% sample of in- 
dividuals. The total population was so large-150 
million in 1950 and now 250 million for 
1990-that sampling errors are quite small for 
most classifications. 
The Univac, the first electronic computer, was 
used on an experimental basis to process 1950 cen- 
sus data for four states.From 1960 onward com- 
puters have been used in all decennial census 
tabulations. Another innovation in 1960 was the 
collection of data on sample items for every 
member of each household. Thus, for the first 
time, census data on education, income, and 
other characteristics of any household member 
could be readily compared with the same charac- 
teristics of any other household member. This in- 
novation was a breakthrough that resulted from a 
growing awareness that having census returns 
available for whole households, rather than only 
for individuals quite apart from other family 
members, was of great value to users of census 
data. 
Another significant innovation in 1960 was the 
creation of a Public Use Sample of population 
data from the decennial census. The census 
returns for the members of every one-thousandth 
household were placed on computer tapes that 
were made available at cost. These tapes were in 
great demand by social scientists in academia, in 
large business concerns, and in various branches 
of government who could use the tapes to dis- 
cover endless relationships among the variables 
instead of having to be limited to cross-classifica- 
tions of individual and family characteristics that 
were published in census reports. Similar sample 
tapes have been provided from each following 
census. Also, beginning in 1960, computer tapes 
containing Public Use Samples of data collected 
in the Census Bureau's monthly Current Popula- 
tion Survey (CPS) are available at cost. Precau- 
tions have been taken to avoid revealing the iden- 
tity of the households in the sample. 
A milestone in family demography was 
reached in June 1971, when the first of a periodic 
series of "Marital and Fertility History Sup- 
plements" to the CPS was conducted by the Cen- 
sus Bureau with financial assistance from the Na- 
tional Institute of Child Health and Human 
Development. Comparable information has been 
collected in June of 1975, 1980, and 1985 and will 
probably be collected in 1990. The supplements 
862 
Fifty Years of Family Demography 
are obtained from about 50,000 households and 
cover retrospective longitudinal information on 
dates of marriage, divorce, widowhood, and 
remarriage of adults and dates of birth of the first 
four and last children of each woman. All of the 
variables in this supplement can be cross-classified 
with the numerous social and economic variables 
that are covered regularly in the CPS for monitor- 
ing changes in employment. The popularity of 
these supplements can be documented by the fact 
that more purchases of the June 1980 CPS tape 
had been made than any other monthly CPS tape 
up to 1984. Several of my own articles have been 
based on these supplement tapes since 1971. 
Information from marriage and divorce cer- 
tificates was published until the 1940s by the Divi- 
sion of Vital Statistics in the U.S. Bureau of the 
Census. But during the 1940s this function was 
transferred to the agency in the Department of 
Health and Human Services that is now called the 
National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). 
Although the NCHS publishes annual totals of 
marriages and divorces, it receives tabulated data 
to be assembled and published on detailed 
characteristics of persons who marry from only 
the 42 states now in the "marriage registration 
area" and for persons who divorce from only the 
31 states in the "divorce registration area." Other 
states do not have central offices to collect and 
tabulate detailed marriage and divorce statistics. 
The NCHS also conducts periodic National 
Surveys of Family Growth. The last completed 
survey was for 1982, and another will become 
available for 1987. This survey features informa- 
tion on factors related to childbearing of women 
of reproductive age. It also has a lengthy set of 
questions about demographic characteristics of 
women and their husbands, if any. These ques- 
tions have been the source of numerous studies of 
such subjects as homogamy in marriage and 
chances of marriage among women of different 
educational levels. In addition, the NCHS con- 
ducts periodic National Health Interview Surveys 
from which other demographic studies have been 
made, for example, the extent to which young 
children live with their biological parents or step- 
parents under different social and economic con- 
ditions. 
Many other data collection agencies with great 
potential for the furtherance of family demog- 
raphy have emerged or are in the process of 
emerging. In this article, I have chosen to feature 
the contributions made by the Census Bureau and 
the NCHS, the agencies with which I am most 
familiar. Among the other agencies with continu- 
ing periodic demographic surveys are the Detroit 
Area Survey, the University of Michigan's Panel 
Study of Income Dynamics, the Ohio State Uni- 
versity's National Longitudinal Surveys, and the 
University of Wisconsin's new National Survey of 
Households and Families. From these and other 
sources, more and more of the demographic 
analyses appearing in family research journals in- 
clude the testing of hypotheses through the use of 
mathematical models and related statistical 
techniques. 
SOME EARLY STUDIES IN FAMILY DEMOGRAPHY 
The Family Life Cycle 
During World War II I was a member of the 
research group in the U.S. Army that Samuel 
Stouffer and his associates (1949) assembled to 
make studies that were eventually brought to- 
gether in a classic four-volume research report, 
The American Soldier. While on duty in the rear 
eschelon of the Fifth Army in Italy in 1944, my 
colleague, Arnold Rose, and I spent many eve- 
nings making notes about ideas that might be con- 
verted into research projects after the war was 
over. Among the ideas that occurred to me was 
the notion of developing measures of key points 
in the cycle of family life when basic changes 
generally took place. 
Within a year after release from the army, I 
had written a paper entitled "The Family Cycle" 
that was presented at the annual meeting of the 
organization now called the American Sociologi- 
cal Association in December 1946 and that was 
later published in the American Sociological 
Review (Glick, 1947). Evidently I was unaware at 
that time of an earlier article on "Family Life Cy- 
cle Analysis" that had been published in Social 
Forces by Loomis and Hamilton (1936). 
This first of four articles that I authored or 
coauthored on the subject showed comparisons 
between 1890 and later dates with respect to 
median age of the wife at marriage, at the birth of 
the first and last children, at the marriage of the 
last child, and at the death of the husband and 
wife. The article also included tables and graphs 
for 1940 on changes in family composition and 
economic characteristics of the family by age of 
863 
Journal of Marriage and the Family 
the husband. Thus, the article documented the 
dynamics of the family life cycle pattern over time 
and also during the typical life of a family. 
One of the most significant discoveries re- 
vealed by this study was that back in 1890 one of 
the parents was likely to die before the last child 
married, whereas by 1940 the chances were 50-50 
that the couple would still have 11 years to live 
together in their "empty next" after their last 
child married. Later articles included measures of 
the dispersion around each of the family's pivotal 
points and projections of those points forward for 
a decade beyond the date of the available infor- 
mation in printed reports (Glick, 1955: Glick and 
Parke, 1965; Glick, 1977). 
In the meantime, Duvall published the first 
edition of Family Development in 1957; in it she 
considerably expanded the number of family life 
cycle stages that were identified. Her sixth edition, 
Marriage and Family Development, was pub- 
lished in 1985. Hill and Rodgers (1964) perceived 
that the changing roles of adults were determined 
to a greater extent-both inside and outside fam- 
ilies-byevents during the life cycle of the family 
than by age alone. Some problems with the 
methodology involved in establishing the basic 
measures of family stages are discussed at length 
by Hohn (1987) in the methodological book by 
Bongaarts, Burch, and Wachter (1987) entitled 
Family Demography: Methods and their Applica- 
tion. Among these problems are the sequencing of 
family events at the present time because so many 
marriages are followed by divorce and remarriage 
(Norton, 1980). Incidentally, the term family life 
course has been used increasingly with a meaning 
similar to family life cycle but with the implication 
that family events occur in the context of previous 
family experiences (Clausen, 1972; Elder, 1974; 
Mattessich and Hill, 1987). 
American Families 
After the 1950 census, the Social Science Research 
Council, in cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of 
the Census, arranged with John Wiley and Sons 
to publish a series of 1950 census monographs, 
one of which was entitled American Families 
(Glick, 1957). This book traced changes since 
1790 in household composition but primarily con- 
centrated on changes during the family life cycle, 
including the extent and correlates of separation, 
divorce, widowhood, and remarriage. 
One of the most striking discoveries based on 
data presented in this book was the nonlinear rela- 
tion between divorce rates and education. Divorce 
rates standardized for age were found to be 
highest for white women with an incomplete col- 
lege education. Further research based on the 
1960 census confirmed this pattern. It also 
demonstrated that women with an incomplete 
high school education had higher divorce rates 
than high school graduates and that women with 
four years of college training had the lowest 
divorce rates of all. This situation was analyzed at 
length by Bernard (1966), drawing on some of my 
earlier writings. The pattern was interpreted as an 
indication that married persons with the social 
background and perseverance that helped them to 
succeed in reaching their goal of high school or 
college graduation are also most likely to be per- 
sons who would succeed in maintaining a perma- 
nent marriage. In a discussion of this phenome- 
non, Bernard referred to it as the "Glick effect." 
The same relationship has been found in later cen- 
suses and surveys. 
Religious Intermarriage 
A question on religious preference has never been 
asked in a decennial census and has been asked 
only once, in 1957, in the Current Population 
Survey. Some of the results on this social 
characteristic, which historically has been suppor- 
tive of stable family life, were analyzed by Glick 
(1960). One of the topics featured was intermar- 
riage among major religious groups. The study 
concluded that one-fourth to one-fifth as many 
married couples at the time of the survey included 
one Protestant and one Catholic partner as would 
have been expected if the persons had married at 
random with regard to religion. But the cor- 
responding proportion for couples involving one 
Jewish partner and one partner of Protestant or 
Catholic preference was only one-fourteenth. 
Research conducted by Glenn and Supanic 
(1984) provides some of the most recent informa- 
tion on the consequences of religious intermar- 
riage for marital disruption. They showed that 
divorce is much more likely to occur among Prot- 
estants of different denominations than among 
the ethnically more homogamous Catholics and 
considerably more likely than among Jewish 
couples. The authors attribute much of the varia- 
tion in level of divorce to differences in the degree 
864 
Fifty Years of Family Demography 
of value consensus among the several religious 
groups. The amount of religious homogamy is 
found to be understandably greater if it is 
measured sometime after the marriage than if it is 
measured in terms of the religious preference in 
which the marital partners were raised. 
Interracial Marriage 
Information on interracial marriage from the 1970 
census was used by Heer (1974) to investigate the 
proportion of first marriages contracted during 
the 1950s that were still intact at the time of the 
1970 census. The results showed that 90%o of the 
white/white marriages had endured, as compared 
with 78% of the black/black marriages, 63% of 
the black husband/white wife marriages, and 
47% of the white husband/black wife marriages. 
Corresponding results from the 1980 census 
regarding first marriages contracted during the 
1960s that were still intact in 1980 followed the 
same pattern, but because of the intervening in- 
crease in divorce the proportions with stable mar- 
riages were much lower-79%, 68%, 58%, and 
44%, respectively (Glick, 1988). 
The one million interracial couples reported in 
the 1980 census were three times the number in 
1970 and six times the number in 1960. Mixed 
marriages are increasingly being considered ac- 
ceptable, especially by persons with average or 
above-average education. Although interracial 
couples with a black husband or wife in 1980 were 
only 4% of all couples involving a black person, 
one-fourth of the couples involving a Filipino 
were racially mixed, as were also nearly one-half 
of the couples involving a Native American and 
four-tenths of the couples involving a Japanese 
wife. 
Socioeconomic Status and Marital Stability 
During the 1950s an investigation of the relation 
between socioeconomic status (SES) and marital 
stability was conducted by Goode (1956). He 
found that, contrary to popular belief at the time, 
the level of divorce was lower among high-status 
occupation groups than among the lower groups. 
A little later, information from the 1960 census 
suggested that there was a tendency toward con- 
vergence of divorce levels among men in upper 
and lower SES groups, regardless of the way it 
was measured. 
With the increase in the employment of 
women, the earnings of the wife more often com- 
plicate the relations between income and divorce. 
Ross and Sawhill (1975) reported that the wife's 
income added to that of her husband may increase 
the financial and marital stability of some 
families, while at the same time, increasing the 
economic independence of the wife may cause the 
wife in other families to abandon an unsatisfac- 
tory marriage. But by now the proportion of men 
with stable marriages is positively correlated with 
their income level, whereas the pattern is reversed 
for women (Glick, 1984). Moreover, Cherlin 
(1979) found that the chances for marital stability 
are greater if the ratio of the wife's income to that 
of her husband is relatively small. 
In this context, it is informative that 18% of 
the wives with earnings in 1983 had more earnings 
than their husbands, and an additional 8% had 
earnings within one-fifth of the level of the earn- 
ings of their husbands (Henson and Cleveland, 
1986). Thus, one of every four wives with earnings 
had more earnings or not very perceptively small- 
er earnings than those of their husbands; among 
wives with five or more years of college education, 
the corresponding proportion was nearly two of 
every five. 
The Marriage Squeeze 
In 1959, three of us colleagues at the Census 
Bureau gave a paper at the annual meeting of the 
American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, in which the term "marriage squeeze" 
was used for the first time (Glick, Heer, and 
Beresford, 1963). This expression referred to a 
situation created by the baby boom. Girls born 
during the rapid increase in the birth rate even- 
tually faced a shortage of men in the usual age 
range for them to marry. Those men were born 
two or three years earlier than they were, when the 
birth rates were lower. This shortage of eligible 
men placed the women in a marriage squeeze. I 
speculated that some of the excess women would 
never marry, while others would marry men who 
were younger or older than men they would have 
married if there had been no baby boom. Twodecades later, Schoen (1983) estimated that 
changes in the age-sex distribution of the young 
population between 1951 and 1978 had the effect 
of implying a decrease of one-half year in the age 
of men at marriage and a one-half year increase in 
865 
Journal of Marriage and the Family 
the age of women at marriage, besides an increase 
in the dispersion of age at marriage, especially for 
women. 
The marriage squeeze may have indirectly con- 
tributed to the growth of the women's movement 
during the 1970s. Presumably as the excess un- 
married women acquired more education and 
employment, many of them found discrimination 
against women in the labor market and conse- 
quently turned to the women's movement for 
alleviation. Also, presumably many of the scarce 
young married men with unsatisfactory marriages 
sought divorces with the assurance that they had a 
good chance of finding a partner willing to marry 
or with whom to cohabit (Heer and Grossbard- 
Schectman, 1981). After 1980, the situation 
changed, so that young adults for the rest of the 
20th century will be in a reversal of the marriage 
squeeze. With the maturing of those born after 
the baby boom, there are already more men than 
women in the usual age for first marriage. Ac- 
cording to Guttentag and Secord (1983), during 
such periods throughout much of history, mar- 
riage rates tend to be relatively high and divorce 
rates relatively low, other things being equal. 
SOME LATER STUDIES 
Marriage and Divorce 
More than a dozen 1960 census monographs were 
sponsored by the American Public Health Asso- 
ciation. One of them was entitled Marriage and 
Divorce: A Social and Economic Study and was 
prepared by Carter and Glick (1970; updated 
1976). Among the subjects covered were interna- 
tional trends in marriage and divorce; family com- 
position by type of family; variations in marital 
status by occupation; and health conditions 
among the married and the unmarried. A few ex- 
amples of the research findings deserve mention. 
The United States was found to have (and still 
has) one of the highest marriage rates among the 
developed countries, partly because it also had 
(and still has) one of the highest divorce rates; 
remarriages after divorce contribute to the overall 
marriage rate. Family composition was shown to 
vary widely by numerous demographic variables, 
in particular the marital status and ethnic 
characteristics of the householder. Tables showed 
that men were more likely, as a rule, to be di- 
vorced if they were employed in occupations with 
a preponderance of women employees, and vice 
versa for women. Married persons had much 
lower age-standardized death rates than unmar- 
ried persons in general and especially from heart 
disorders. Unmarried persons had death rates well 
above the average from cirrhosis of the liver, 
pneumonia, motor vehicle accidents, suicide (es- 
pecially among white men), and homicide (espe- 
cially among black men). Older persons who 
never married had very high rates of hospitaliza- 
tion for mental disorders, with the rate being 
twice as high for men as for women and with the 
rate for care in private mental hospitals being rela- 
tively high for adults in middle age with above- 
average education. 
The 1976 update of the book confirmed sub- 
stantial changes after the familistic era of the 
1950s and early 1960s, particularly the upturn in 
divorce and cohabitation. Five years later the clas- 
sic book, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, by 
Cherlin (1981) was in a real sense a needed further 
update of the book by Carter and Glick. It fea- 
tured marriage and divorce trends, their explana- 
tion, and their consequences, with a final section 
on black-white differences. 
Unmarried Cohabitation 
Signs of an upcoming wave of cohabitation 
among unmarried couples in Northern Europe 
and the United States appeared during the 1960s. 
This was a period when established norms of 
various kinds, including those relating to mar- 
riage, were being questioned. The statistics on un- 
married couples of opposite sex collected by the 
Census Bureau referred to two unrelated adults. 
There were 50,000 in 1950, 400,000 in 1960, 
500,000 in 1970, nearly a million in 1977, and 2.2 
million in 1986. An article in the 7 January 1980 
issue of Newsweek called these couples 
"POSSLQs" (partners of opposite sex sharing liv- 
ing quarters). By 1986, over 6?% of all unmarried 
adults in the United States were cohabiting, but 
the level was far higher, 16%1o, among divorced 
persons in their late twenties. Four percent of all 
couples (married plus unmarried) living together 
were not married to each other. This proportion is 
only one-fourth as high as the level in Sweden in 
1979 (Trost, 1980). These levels refer to the situa- 
tion at one point in time and would be at least 
twice that high if they were to refer to lifetime ex- 
perience. Many adults had previously cohabited 
866 
Fifty Years of Family Demography 
but later had become married, by the census or 
survey date, while others who had never yet 
cohabited would later on do so. Moreover, some 
students of the subject consider the Census 
Bureau's figures conservative (Glick and Norton, 
1977). 
The number of households consisting of two 
unmarried (and unrelated) adults of the same sex 
25 years old and over have likewise been 
monitored by the Census Bureau since 1950. 
These households have been rather consistently 
about one-half as numerous as unmarried couples 
of opposite sex. Currently they constitute about 
4%o of all unmarried adults over 25 years of age, 
according to the Current Population Survey. 
Lone Parenting 
The changing lifestyles during the 1960s and 1970s 
caused rapid growth in the numbers not only of 
cohabiting couples but also of families being 
maintained by a single parent and adults living en- 
tirely alone. Of all these alternatives to "marriage 
and settling down," the one that elicited the most 
social concern was the increase in one-parent 
families, primarily because of the negative effect 
this living arrangement was having on many, but 
not all, of the developing children in terms of their 
neglected socialization and the fact that over one- 
half live in poverty (Bumpass and Rindfuss, 1979; 
Hernandez, 1986; Thornton, 1977). 
Ever since 1940, the number of one-parent 
families has been reported periodically by the 
Census Bureau. Relatively little attention was 
given to the information until the proportion of 
all families with children under 18 that were main- 
tained by only one parent began to rise substan- 
tially. From 1940 until 1960, the proportion 
hovered between 12% in 1940 and 14% in 1960, 
but it jumped to 22% in 1986, with little of the 
change occurring after 1980. During the earlier 
period, one-parent families were generally a 
widow and her children, but later they were 
generally a divorced parent and children. 
The rate of change has been even larger when 
measured in terms of the children under 18 in one- 
parent families. In 1960, only 9% of the children 
were living with a lone parent, but by 1986 24% 
were doing so. Among black children under 18, 
the corresponding rate of increase was similar, but 
the level was far higher, rising from 22% in 1960 
to 53% in 1986. 
Factors associated with the rapid increase in 
the number of one-parent families were (a) the up- 
surge in divorce while the remarriage rate was fall- 
ing; (b) the large amount of financial Aid to 
Families with Dependent Children; and (c) the 
tremendous growth in the number and proportion 
of births that occurred to unmarried mothers, 
from 5% in 1960 to 22% of all births in 1985-the 
increase among black births being from 22% in 
1960 to 60% in 1985. Incidentally, about 5% of 
all children in one-parent families were actually 
living with a biological parent and a cohabiting 
unrelated quasi-stepparent. 
Living Alone 
Among other changes in lifestyles since 1960, the 
practice of living entirelyalone became a much 
more frequent occurrence that was generally con- 
sidered acceptable, especially if it turned out to be 
temporary. Actually, there is still a great 
preponderance of elderly females among lone 
householders, but the rate of increase in lone liv- 
ing has been far and away the greatest among 
adults in their twenties and thirties. More young 
adults have been occupying "bachelor" quarters 
before marriage or between marriages-or 
because they have decided never to marry (or to 
remarry). Many of the adults who live alone 
undergo various kinds of hardships, while others 
consider it a welcome relief from an unhappy life 
with parents or former spouses. 
The statistics show that only 7% of all house- 
holds in 1940 consisted of one person living entire- 
ly apart from relatives or nonrelatives. In this 
earlier period, the family was almost always the 
source of economic and nurturant support for 
young adults before marriage and for the elderly 
after their period of self-support. But by 1960 the 
proportion living alone had nearly doubled to 
13% of all households and kept on rising until it 
reached 23% in 1980, after which it leveled off to 
24% in 1986. One consequence of this change in 
living arrangements has been the more abrupt in- 
crease in the proportion of one-person households 
maintained by men than by women. Thus, in 1960 
lone females outnumbered lone males by 70% (4.4 
million versus 2.6 million) but by only 55% in 
1986 (12.9 million versus 8.3 million). 
867 
Journal of Marriage and the Family 
SOME RECENT STUDIES 
Use of Birth Control Methods 
The decline in the birth rate during the 1960s was 
facilitated by a growing use of revolutionary 
methods of birth control-the Pill and the IUD 
(intrauterine device)-quite apart from sexual in- 
tercourse. The peak use of the Pill occurred in 
1973, the year when it became legal to perform 
abortions in the United States. In turn, the 
number of abortions reached a peak in the early 
1980s. By that time sterilization of the husband or 
wife became the technique used by the most adults 
for avoiding unwanted births. In 1982, 610/o of 
contracepting couples wanting no more children 
had chosen as their birth control method the 
sterilization of the wife (38%o) or of the husband 
(23%), according to Pratt, Mosher, Bachrach, 
and Horn (1984). The use of birth control is, of 
course, only a means to the end of implementing 
motivation toward wanting a family of the desired 
size or of the desired timing of births. 
Sexual Preference in Children 
Some students of human fertility have been in- 
trigued by the idea that parents should be able to 
control the sex as well as the number of their 
children. Among other benefits, this would pre- 
vent the birth of unwanted children in the hope of 
getting at least one child of the preferred sex. 
Research by Pebley and Westoff (1982) led them 
to expect that the effective development of this 
ability would result in more first births being sons, 
but that the second child would more often be op- 
posite the sex of the first. More recent research by 
Muhsam (1987) has led him to conclude that sex 
selection of children (by timing fertilization, 
presexing the embryo and aborting it, or selection 
of sperm and artificial insemination) is not yet 
possible with acceptable results but that it will be 
before long. 
Marital Stability and Sex of Children 
For the first time, the Current Population Survey 
in 1980 provided separate data on family 
characteristics of children under 18 years of age 
by sex. In 1986, the CPS showed that there were 
6%o more boys than girls in married-couple 
families but equal numbers of boys and girls in the 
homes of unmarried mothers. A more refined 
study of 1975 data from the CPS by Spanier and 
Glick (1981) showed that parents were significant- 
ly more likely to be in their first marriage at the 
survey date if they were the parents of sons than if 
they had girls but not sons. More specifically, 
mothers were 18 %o more likely to be in an intact 
first marriage if they had two sons and no 
daughters than if they had two daughters and no 
sons; but mothers of two children had equal 
numbers of boys and girls if they were known to 
have been separated or divorced after their first 
marriage. These findings arouse speculation 
about the reasons behind the differences. One 
such speculation is that mothers of sons are more 
likely to remain married so that the father can 
serve as a role model and disciplinarian for their 
sons. 
Majority of Marriages Ending in Divorce 
As long as the death rate was falling and the 
divorce rate was rising, the overall marital dissolu- 
tion rate remained essentially unchanged (Davis, 
1972). But by 1974, for the first time more mar- 
riages ended in divorce than death (Glick, 1980). 
And by 1984 and 1985, only 78% as many of the 
marital dissolutions were caused by death as by 
divorce, according to the most recent data 
available. In 1960, before the changeover, one- 
third more children were living with a widowed 
parent than with a divorced parent, but by 1986 
one-half more children were living with a divorced 
parent than with a widowed parent. Incidentally, 
many couples who apply for a divorce or who 
separate for a while become reconciled. Research 
by Kitson (1985) found that 19% were doing so in 
Cuyahoga County, Ohio. 
No-Fault Divorce 
In 1970, the first no-fault divorce law was enacted 
in California. This legislation was intended to 
reduce the acrimony and frequent deceit in 
divorce proceedings, but it also made divorce 
much easier to obtain and probably helped to ac- 
celerate the upsurge in divorce. However, the root 
cause was social change that tended to reduce the 
perceived value associated with maintaining a 
marriage intact. Weitzman (1985) conducted ex- 
tensive research from court records and hundreds 
of interviews with judges, attorneys, and divorced 
persons in the preparation of the classic book en- 
868 
Fifty Years of Family Demography 
titled The Divorce Revolution. She documented 
weaknesses in the no-fault principle, especially as 
it applied to divorced women in middle age with 
little work experience and to young divorced 
mothers. Weitzman discussed a number of recom- 
mendations for making the standard of living 
more nearly equal for the divorced man and 
woman. 
Divorce among Children of Divorce 
In 1978, one of the early nationwide studies of this 
subject was conducted with a random sample of 
the members of the National Council on Family 
Relations. The results showed that members were 
one-half again as likely to be separated or di- 
vorced if their parents had been divorced (Glick, 
1980). Members of NCFR are generally profes- 
sionals with five or more years of college educa- 
tion, and the proportion of the members who 
were separated or divorced (14%) was practically 
the same as that for persons in the U.S. popula- 
tion in professional occupations with graduate 
school training. Other results reported by Glenn 
and Kramer (1987), based on data from the Na- 
tional Opinion Research Center, indicated that 
the proportion of white adults who were 
separated or divorced was 59% higher for those 
who were children of divorce than for those who 
lived with both parents when they were 16 years 
old. The authors recognized that the proportion 
would have been still higher if it had been based 
on lifetime experience rather than on a cross sec- 
tion of adults. 
Projections of Marriage, Divorce, and 
Remarriage 
Among the first attempts to determine the risk of 
eventual divorce among married persons was a 
study based on Current Population Survey data 
for 1971. The resulting projection for married 
women 25 to 34 years of age was that 290%o would 
eventually end their first marriage in divorce 
(Glick and Norton, 1973). A comparable projec- 
tion based on 1980 data raised the estimate to 
49% (Glick, 1984). Still more recently, Norton 
and Moorman(1987) applied the same technique 
to 1985 CPS data and concluded that a peak level 
of 56% of women 35 to 39 years old would end 
their first marriage in divorce. This level was 
higher than that for older or younger cohorts. 
Projections of chances of first marriage, 
remarriage after divorce, and redivorce were also 
developed with the employment of parallel 
methods (Glick, 1984). Among the results were 
prospects that about three times as large a propor- 
tion of young adults in 1980 as persons in their 
parents' same-age cohort in the 1950s may never 
marry; that the proportion eventually remarrying 
after divorce may decline from 80% for persons 
about 70 years old in 1980 to not over 75% for 
those under 40 years old at that time; and that 
61 % of divorced men and 54% of divorced 
women may end their second marriage in 
redivorce. The research by Norton and Moorman 
concluded that this likelihood of redivorce among 
women 35 to 39 years old is about the same as that 
for divorce after the first marriage. Unpublished 
first marriage prospects for women college 
graduates prepared by Moorman at the Census 
Bureau are much more optimistic than com- 
parable unpublished prospects prepared by Neil 
Bennett and Patricia Craig of Yale and David E. 
Bloom of Harvard. 
Young Adults Living with Parents 
Delayed marriage, adjustment after divorce or 
unwed parenthood, and high unemployment rates 
have been among the factors causing more young 
adults to be living with their parents now than in 
1960. This phenomenon decreased from a high 
level in 1940 to a low level in 1960 then rose again 
but not to the 1940 level (Glick and Lin, 1986; 
Goldscheider and DeVanzo, 1985; Heer and 
Grossbard-Shechtman, 1985). Data from the Cen- 
sus Bureau indicate that most of the change since 
1960 occurred after 1980 and that the age group 
affected most has been persons 18 to 24 years of 
age. Meantime, there has been a decline in the 
proportion of young adults, especially males, who 
maintain their own homes as householders or 
spouses of householders. 
Remarriage after Divorce 
A summary of what was known about 
demographic aspects of remarriage by the late 
1970s was published in a much-quoted article by 
Furstenberg (1979). Among the established facts 
he reported were that men are more likely than 
women to remarry and that remarriage rates are 
higher than first-marriage rates at each age level. 
869 
Journal of Marriage and the Family 
Moreover, white persons are more likely to 
remarry than black persons and to remain remar- 
ried longer (Bianchi and Spain, 1986). Various 
researchers, including Grady (1980), confirmed 
that remarriage is more likely to be delayed or 
foregone by better-educated than less well- 
educated women. Presumably highly educated 
women have more career interests and are less 
likely to need financial assistance from a husband. 
Remarriage rates are positively correlated with in- 
come for men but negatively correlated for 
women. Bane (1976) speculated that women of 
higher status may seem threatening to potential 
husbands, but recent statistics from the Census 
Bureau suggest that this barrier is on the decline. 
Research by Duncan and Hoffman (1985) showed 
the extent to which high-status men have im- 
proved the living standard of women through 
remarriage and have been the earliest to be 
selected for remarriage. 
Research from the National Survey of Family 
Growth, Cycle III, provided 1982 data on the 
number and timing of children born to women 
before and after remarriage. The results show 
that, on the average, two-thirds of the children 
are born before remarriage and one-third after the 
remarriage (Glick and Lin, 1987). Also, the most 
typical combination is two children born before 
the remarriage and none after remarriage. 
Women were found to be twice as likely to remain 
childless during their second marriage as during 
their first marriage. One-tenth of the women who 
remarried never had any children at all. Divorced 
mothers in 1980 were marrying more quickly than 
in 1975, and divorced childless women were stay- 
ing divorced longer. 
Remarriages have increased more rapidly than 
first marriages during the last two decades, hence 
there has been a sharp change in the distribution 
of brides and grooms by previous marital status. 
Reports from the National Center for Health 
Statistics show that the proportion of marriages 
that involved a remarriage for the bride, the 
groom, or both went up from 31 o in 1970 to 45 o 
in 1981, representing an increase of almost one- 
half. The proportion has changed very little since 
1981. 
Homogamy and Mobility in Second Marriage 
A decade ago, Dean and Gurak (1978) 
demonstrated from the 1970 National Fertility 
Survey that husbands and wives who were still in 
their first marriage were more homogamous with 
respect to age at marriage, educational attain- 
ment, and religion than couples with one or both 
spouses remarried after divorce. In addition, the 
degree of homogamy in these respects was greater 
for remarried persons when they first married 
than when they remarried. For remarried women, 
a heterogamous first marriage was likely to be 
followed by an even more heterogamous second 
marriage. 
At about the same time, Mueller and Pope 
(1980) also used 1970 National Fertility Survey 
data to conclude that, on the average, women 
who remarried were likely to be upwardly mobile 
in the sense that their second husband had a 
higher occupational position than their first hus- 
band. However, Jacobs and Furstenberg (1986) 
found that according to 1977 and 1978 data from 
National Longitudinal Surveys of women between 
14 and 34 years of age, a proper appraisal of the 
situation should call for an adjustment for the 
usual career advancement of men during the 
period that elapsed between the time of the first 
marriage and the survey date several years later 
(after the remarriage). Such an adjustment could 
account for the preponderance of the observed 
difference between the two occupational levels. 
Lin (1987) made use of 1982 data from Cycle 
III of the National Survey of Family Growth to 
analyze the increase in education for remarried 
women 30 to 44 years old between the time of 
their first marriage and the time of the NSFG 
survey. He found that this increase tended to be 
larger than the difference between the husband's 
education at the time of their first marriage and 
that of their second husband at the time of the 
survey. This finding is consistent with the much 
larger increase since 1965 in school enrollment for 
women than men 25 to 34 years old. It also implies 
that, in terms of educational attainment, men 
tended to be more upwardly mobile than women 
through remarriage. 
Remarried Families and Stepfamilies 
A "remarried family" involves a married couple 
with the husband, the wife, or both in a second or 
subsequent marriage. Statistics on stepfamilies 
usually consider a remarried family as a stepfami- 
ly if it includes children under 18 in the home who 
were born before the remarriage occurred. In 
870 
Fifty Years of Family Demography 
1987, the approximately 11 million remarried 
families in the United States were 17% of all 
families but 21% of married-couple families, 
because one-fifth of all families were not main- 
tained by a married couple (Glick, 1987). Also in 
1987, the estimated 4.3 million stepfamilies were 
6.7% of all families, 8.3% of married-couple 
families, and 17.4% of married couples with 
children under 18 in the home. These estimates 
are consistent with those reported by Norton 
(1987). 
The approximately 6 million stepchildren in 
1987 constituted 9.4% of all children under 18 in 
families, 12.7% of children under 18 in married- 
couple families, and 60% of children under 18 in 
remarried families (Glick, 1987). These results 
reflect the fact that about one-fourth of all 
children under 18 do not live with two parents; 
that only about one-fifthof the children under 18 
living with two parents are in remarried families; 
and that an estimated two-thirds of the children in 
remarried families are born before the remarriage. 
A study based on the 1981 National Health 
Interview Survey showed that 82% of the step- 
parents were stepfathers and 18% were step- 
mothers (Bianchi and Selzer, 1986). Nine-tenths 
of the remarried parents had been previously 
divorced and one-tenth previously widowed, ac- 
cording to the 1980 census. The vast majority of 
remarried parents (87%) were white, 9% were 
black, and 4% were of other races; 6% were of 
Hispanic origin (of any race). Bumpass (1984) 
found that two of every three children entering a 
remarriage situation had a stepsibling or acquired 
a half sibling, but that only one of every six had 
both, according to the June 1980 Current Popula- 
tion Survey. 
The number of people involved in step situa- 
tions is much larger than the number living 
together. Ahrons (1987) has given the name 
"binuclear family" to the entire group of persons 
who lived together before divorce but who are 
currently occupying two households. The number 
of people touched by remarriage and step situa- 
tions would be much larger still if the concepts 
were expanded to include stepchildren over 18 as 
well as under 18 regardless of whether they were 
living with their parents and regardless of how old 
the parents were when they remarried. 
CONCLUDING STATEMENT 
Demographic studies of family behavior make 
their contribution by adding to the knowledge and 
understanding of trends and variations in the 
structure of family life. These studies throw light 
on the increasing complexities of household and 
family patterns that have tended to reduce the ex- 
ercise of social control that is consistent with long- 
established family norms. It is more difficult now 
for parents to say that members of their families 
always do thus and so, but family members now 
have more options to pursue lifestyles that reflect 
their individual differences and preferences. 
There are limits to the extent of future changes in 
lifestyles, but there will always be variation to 
some extent in demographic characteristics among 
families with members of differing ethnic compo- 
sition, personal ability, and socioeconomic status. 
When social changes come rather suddenly, as 
they have come during successive periods since the 
National Council on Family Relations was 
organized, the problem of adjustment is especially 
great and leads to increasing signs of personal and 
family stress. The costs and benefits from changes 
in family behavior-more divorce, remarriage, 
cohabitation, lone living, and lone parenting-are 
not distributed equally among those who are af- 
fected. Many of those involved are more resilient 
than others during changes; some can take fragile 
marital relationships in stride more easily than 
others; and some can withstand pressures to 
marry (or divorce) more effectively than others. 
In this context, more concern is generally ex- 
pressed about the impact of these emerging condi- 
tions on young children than on the adults who 
are involved. It may be small consolation that 
these children are no longer members of a unique 
minority, as such children once were. More of the 
children today than a few decades ago have never 
known the benefits of lifelong dependable ties be- 
tween themselves and their parents (Aldous, 
1987). 
It is hard to predict with very much confidence 
the changes in family demographics during the 
next few decades, but I believe they will be more 
moderate than those of the last few decades. One 
caviat that should be kept in mind is that the 
possible rapid spread of AIDS would be likely to 
cause more early and permanent first marriages. 
Most of the students of the family see little pros- 
pect of a substantial reversal of trends in family 
871 
Journal of Marriage and the Family 
patterns (Thornton and Freedman, 1983; West- 
off, 1978). Instead, concerned groups are taking 
such steps as helping to move remarriage and step- 
families away from the category "incomplete in- 
stitutions" (Cherlin, 1978). To paraphrase 
Spanier and Furstenberg (1987), as more mar- 
riages become voluntary and tentative, so also will 
divorce and remarriage become behavior that is 
taken for granted when it occurs. But the pre- 
ferred goal of most young adults will likely con- 
tinue to be a permanent first marriage. 
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Perspectives 10: 79-83. 
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	Issue Table of Contents
	Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp. 857-1096
	Volume Information [pp. 1083 - 1095]
	Front Matter [pp. 857 - 1048]
	Editorial Comment [p. 859]
	Anniversary Essay
	Fifty Years of Family Demography: A Record of Social Change [pp. 861 - 873]
	Research Reviews
	Current Theorizing on the Family: An Appraisal [pp. 875 - 890]
	Measurement Issues in Marital Research: A Review and Critique of Contemporary Survey Instruments [pp. 891 - 915]
	Family Research Methods: A Mini-Symposium
	Causal Modeling in Family Research [pp. 917 - 927]
	Logistic Regression: Description, Examples, and Comparisons [pp. 929 - 936]
	Linear Structural Relationships (LISREL) in Family Research [pp. 937 - 948]
	Panel Analysis in Family Studies [pp. 949 - 955]
	Well-Being of Children
	The Family and Hierarchy [pp. 957 - 966]
	Effects of Parental Separation and Reentry into Union on the Emotional Well-Being of Children[pp. 967 - 981]
	Fertility Patterns: Their Relationship to Child Physical Abuse and Child Neglect [pp. 983 - 993]
	Place of Child Care and Medicated Respiratory Illness among Young American Children [pp. 995 - 1005]
	Longitudinal Aspects of Childhood Poverty [pp. 1007 - 1021]
	Does Wanting to Become Pregnant with a First Child Affect Subsequent Maternal Behaviors and Infant Birth Weight? [pp. 1023 - 1036]
	Parent-Child Relations
	Explaining Intergenerational Conflict When Adult Children and Elderly Parents Live Together [pp. 1037 - 1047]
	Just the Two of Us: Parent-Child Relationships in Single-Parent Homes [pp. 1049 - 1062]
	Parental Self-Esteem and Its Relationship to Childrearing Practices, Parent-Adolescent Interaction, and Adolescent Behavior [pp. 1063 - 1072]
	Book Reviews
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	Back Matter [pp. 1079 - 1096]