ABSTRACT
The mid-twentieth century episode of family renewal, first evident statistically in the 1930s and reaching an apogee in the late 1950s, could still be found in the numbers in 1969. Then it vanished, with remarkable speed. Between 1970 and 2000, the overall US marriage rate tumbled by 35 percent, falling from 76.5 marriages per thousand unmarried women, age eighteen and above, to 50.8. Early marriage all but disappeared. For women, the median age at first marriage rose from 20.8 in 1970 to 25.1 at the turn of the millennium; for men, the increase was from 22.8 to 26.8. Avoiding the altar altogether grew common. The proportion of American women, ages twenty five to twenty nine, who had never married, slightly below 10 percent in 1970, reached 39 percent in 2000. Among men of the same age, the rise in the never-married category was from 18 to 44.4 percent. Replacing marriage in some respects was cohabitation. In 1970, there were only five hundred twenty-three thousand cohabitating couples in the United States; in 2000 nearly 5 million: a ninefold increase.
