Population

Demography is the scientific study of population growth and change. Everything in society influences demography and demography conversely influences everything in society. After World War II, the United States began to recover from the long-term negative effects of the war. Families had been separated, relatives died or were injured, and women who had gone to the factories then returned home at war's end. For about 4 years goods and services were rationed and the government had assumed war-time powers which they thought limited the civil rights of the average citizen. It was an era of social and cultural upheaval.

The year 1946 reflected the impact of that upheaval in its very atypical demographic statistics. Starting in 1946 people married younger, had more children per woman, divorced then remarried again, and kept having one child after another. From 1946 to 1956 the birth rate rose and peaked, then began to decline again. By 1964 the national high birth rate was finally back to the level it was at in 1946. All those millions of children born from 1946-1964 were called the Baby Boom Generation (there are about 78 million of them alive today, see Chapter 12). Why was there such a change in family-related rates? The millions of deaths caused by the war, the long-term separation of family members from one another, and the deep shifts toward conservative values all contributed. The Baby Boom had landed. And after the Baby Boom Generation was in place, it conversely affected personal and larger social levels of society in every conceivable way.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 898