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...