Younger Marriages.

During the 1950s Americans were marrying at a younger age than they had in generations. As Brett Harvey reported in The Fifties: A Woman's Oral History, "the median marriage age dropped from 24.3 to 22.6 for men [during the decade], and from 21.5 to 20.4 for women." Women were more likely to marry in their teens than were men: by 1959, 47 percent of all brides were younger than nineteen. This trend was a continuation of the marriage boom of the late 1940s, which was originally thought to be a temporary response by young Americans to the end of the war. By the 1950s, however, the trend seemed to be longer-lived, and it had the endorsement of many of the nation's experts. As Dr. David R. Mace, professor of human relations at Drew University, wrote in Woman's Home Companion in 1949, "When two people are ready for sexual intercourse at the fully human level they are ready for marriage—and they...