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Title: Transition to Marriage in the United States, 1850-2000

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2005

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Abstract: Age at first marriage in the United States has increased dramatically between 1970 and 2000. This demographic phenomenon has captured the attention of academic researchers, policy makers and the media. To understand these recent changes in marriage, however, it is important to place them in a broader chronological context. This dissertation is a demographic analysis of marriage and marriage timing in the United States using census microdata from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The first half of this dissertation presents a broad overview of the demographic trends in marriage formation over the period 1850 to 2000. These chapters investigate significant racial and ethnic variations in marriage formation and compare marriage formation to other life course transitions. In the second half of the dissertation, I assess the dominant demographic theories of marriage formation, focusing particularly on the role of economic opportunity. This research highlights two key issues: the relevance of changes in women's economic opportunities in explaining changes in marriage age and the important racial and ethnic variations in marriage behavior. Demographers in recent years have dismissed the role of women's economic opportunity and have turned their attention to declines in men's economic opportunity as an explanation for the rapid increase in marriage age since 1970. I argue, however, that both male and female economic opportunity are important to understanding the dramatic fluctuations in marriage age since 1940. Social scientists have documented and analyzed the substantial differences in black and white marriage patterns in recent decades. The economic hardships of black men, in particular, are often cited to explain the differences. Scholars have spent considerably less effort, however, on other racial and ethnic variations in marriage timing and on a longer historical view of these current trends. In this dissertation I present the patterns in marriage age for whites and blacks in the twentieth century, revealing that prior to 1950, black men and women married at younger age than their white counterparts. These results, and the differences between racial and ethnic groups in recent decades, raise questions about the association between socio-economic circumstances and marriage.

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Authors: Fitch, Catherine A.

Institution: University of Minnesota

Department: History

Advisor: Sara M. Evans and Steven Ruggles

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Minneapolis, MN

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Aging and Retirement, Family and Marriage

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