People are often surprised to hear this, assuming that women had no agency at all until the late 1960s, with the blooming of the women’s movement. But in The Way We Never Were, the historian Stephanie Coontz shows that women worked outside the home steadily, and in increasing numbers, throughout the twentieth century. The 1950s, putatively the golden age of the family, were the real anomaly: the median age of women at first marriage fell to twenty (in 1940, it was twenty-three); birth rates increased (the number of women with three or more children doubled over twenty years); and women started
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