The context of illegitimacy from the 1920s to the 1960s

Abstract

The mid twentieth century was what some have described — whether nostalgically or ironically — as a golden age of marriage and the family. In the first decades of the century only around one-quarter of women had married by their twenty-fifth birthday, and around 15 per cent could expect to remain single all their lives.² By contrast, from the 1930s to the late 1960s the overall proportion of women who were married rose, and the number who married at a young age rose dramatically.³ Yet the proportion of births outside marriage was rising even as marriage was seemingly becoming more popular. Indeed, it was in the 1960s, as the age of marriage fell and overall marriage rates rose, that the illegitimacy ratio increased most significantly, from 6.9 per cent in the first half of the decade to an unprecedented 8.3 per cent in the second half.