In 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion nationwide. That newfound right gave women veto power over pregnancies and with it the ability to delay marriage and motherhood until they felt ready. The relationship between the feminist movement and these legal and scientific advances (abortion rights, the Pill) was a mutually reinforcing one. It was feminists who pushed for the invention and then accessibility of the Pill; it was feminists who pushed for abortion rights. Reliable contraception and safe, legal abortion in turn enabled women to be increasingly independent and feminist-minded. Yes, women were already heading to college in larger numbers than in previous decades, but it’s hard to imagine that quite so many would have been able to stay in school and in the workforce without this degree of control over their reproductive lives.
These shifts were revolutionary, but sexual freedom didn’t mean that Boomers forewent marriage. They just married a little later than their parents. By 1975, the average newlyweds were 23 and a half (men) and 21 (women) on their wedding day; through the early 1980s, when the tail end of the boom babies were marrying in significant numbers, the average groom was 25 and the average bride was 23.
But they were also divorcing.
When young marriage was practically required for social acceptance, a lot of young people settled into mediocre or even bad marriages. Maybe you were in a just-okay marriage with someone you didn’t like all that much and to whom you weren’t particularly attracted, but the relationship was a vehicle to an acceptable middle-class life; maybe you were married to someone who was intolerable, cruel, or even abusive. As the expectation of marriage as a social requirement waned, divorce rates initially skyrocketed. By the time Millennials entered adulthood, marriage was no longer a required stepping-stone to an acceptable adult life. We may marry less frequently, but so far, our marriages are more stable because of it.
Boomers can’t say the same. If anything really sets Boomer marriages apart, it’s divorce—they do a lot of it. Older Boomers brought the nation a glut of divorce in the 1970s and a national divorce rate that peaked in 1980. While younger generations of Americans divorce less often, Boomers just keep splitting up into middle and even old age. While dissolving these marriages might be for the best, divorce is financially hard on Boomer women in particular. The National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University found that while divorced men over fifty have slightly better than a coin’s toss chance of remarrying, only about a quarter of divorced women over fifty tie the knot again (perhaps by choice).