The New Woman of the 1930s and 1940s was “soaring free,” Friedan writes, but by the late 1940s she “hesitates in midflight, shivers in all that blue sunlight and rushes back to the cozy walls of home.” Friedan was onto something: Americans married younger in the 1950s than in the 1930s, with the result that Silents married younger than any other generation born in the 20th century.
