Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

by Catherine Pakaluk

The shift [in how people viewed their marriages] was part of a broader increase in expressive individualism in American culture—the kind of individualism that involves growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs. Expressive individualism encourages people to look inward to see how they are doing, and it encourages them to want personal growth throughout adulthood. It is not incompatible with lifelong marriage, but it requires a new kind of marriage in which the spouses are free to grow and change and in which each feels personally fulfilled. Such marriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.14