In the post-war's period, forces happened that brought about significant changes in the family. We've been seeing all along that the shift from rural life to urban life is changing the family. Families are living on wages rather than as business people running their farms together. This is changing gender roles and the patriarchal system tended to keep white women home while men went away and earned a living, and had financial control. So, after the Second World War, the men came home and took back the factory jobs and women who had been introduced to work outside the home were now expected to return home. Women of color had always been expected to work outside the home, but white women were forced to return home. Babies had been delayed during the Great Depression and during the Second World War few babies were born. So after the war, families reconstructed, women went home and we saw a huge expansion in the birth rate. The group that we call the Baby Boomers, which I am one. Babies born between 1946 and 1962, causes a huge expansion of young people the need to build more schools, the need to build more colleges, eventually the movement of this population into the labor force. Now we'll come back to talking about baby boomers when we're talking about social security in course number four. The GI Bill created housing and moved white families out of the cities in the suburbs, leaving the buildings empty and allowing people of color and poor people to move into the public housing. There was a family wage. It was expected that one wage would support the family. So, we go into the 1960s with this view, and then in the 1960s things really change. The first two around fertility. Birth control which had been illegal from the eugenics movement to force people to have more babies became legalized. Margaret Sanger one of the formers of the Planned Parenthood made her way importing illegal condoms into the American cities. So, with the development of legalization of birth control, the development of the pill of the IUD, of spermicides and sponges really the possibility to control fertility became possible. Then with the development of antibiotics, syphilis could be treated, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis had been a very serious disease. It was spread from one partner to another. It caused deaths. It caused blindness. It caused mental illness. It could be spread to children, and the fear of syphilis meant that there was a limit on sexual involvement. So, with the development of birth control and the development of antibiotics, we really enter a society of free love. Until the reemergence of HIV in the late 1970s, for a period of time in the 60s and 70s, sex did not have the normal consequences of pregnancy and disease, and so we changed our sexual behavior as a nation. Over a 100 years, there had been a great increase in the amount of divorce. So, divorce as we moved into the cities, we saw that marriages became less stable. In a rural setting, people simply had to live together to make the family work. Families were basically economic models, but as we moved into the cities, wage labor allowed a great deal more freedom and so divorce rose and then had a quite dramatic peak during the Second World War. But then during the Baby Boomer age, it fell again, and then it began to rise in the 1960s to the point that by the 1980s, more than 50 percentages of marriages were ending in divorce. Now, this trend seems to be declining, but the reason it's declining is because fewer and fewer people are actually even ever getting married. So we've seen this huge shift in divorce rates. In the 1960s, we had liberalized divorce laws. The changing role of men and women in marriage, the world in which many more single parents are raising children and people are living longer. So, marriages that used to last a few years now lasted 50 years because people are not living to be 40, but they're living to be 70 because of better conditions for women in childbirth, because of the control of infectious diseases, because of safer workplaces. So, in the 1870s and 80s the average marriage lasted six and a half years. By the 1960s and 70s where it's routine for marriages to last 40 and 50 years. So, marriages have to meet a level of satisfaction that they previously didn't. So, this shifting in family structure really becomes a central issue in US social policy, and we'll return to this again and again in our conversations.