decade, people married slightly later in life and had
fewer children.
Earlier differences between working-class and
middle-class family structures persisted. In 1920
about a quarter of the American women who were
working were married, but less than 10 percent of
all married women were working. Middle-class mar-
ried women who worked were nearly all either
childless or highly paid professionals who were able
to employ servants. Most male skilled workers now
earned enough to support a family in modest com-
fort so long as they could work steadily, but an
unskilled laborer still could not. Wives in most such
families helped out, usually by taking in laundry or
doing piecework sewing for jobbers.
By the 1920s the idea of intrafamily democracy
had emerged. In such families, husbands and wives
would deal with each other as equals; given existing
conditions, this meant sharing housework and child-
care, downplaying male authority, and stressing
mutual satisfaction in sexual and other matters. On
the one hand, they should be friends and lovers, not
merely housekeepers, earners of money, and produc-
ers of children. On the other hand, advocates of
these companionate relationships believed that there
was nothing particularly sacred about marriage;
divorce should be made easier for couples that did
not get along, provided they did not have children.
InThe Companionate Marriage(1927), Benjamin
B. Lindsey, a juvenile court judge, suggested a kind of
trial marriage, a period during
which a young couple could get
used to each other before under-
taking to raise a family. By practic-
ing contraception such couples
could separate without doing seri-
ous damage to anyone if they
decided to end the relationship. If
the relationship remained firm
and loving, it would become a tra-
ditional marriage and their chil-
dren would grow up in a loving
environment that would help
them to become warm, well-
adjusted adults.
Much attention was given to
“scientific” child-rearing. Childcare
experts (a new breed) agreed that
routine medical examinations and
good nutrition were of central
importance, but they were divided
about how the socialization and
psychological development of the
young should be handled. One
school stressed rigid training.
Children could be “spoiled” byIn Howard Thain’s 1925 painting of New York’s Times Square, the people are inconsequential
gray blurs beneath the luminous wonders of consumption and pleasure.
New Urban Social Patterns 641places. These figures are somewhat misleading when
applied to the study of social attitudes because the
census classified anyone in a community of 2,500 or
more as urban. Of the 54 million “urban” residents
in 1920, over 16 million lived in villages and towns
of fewer than 25,000 persons and the evidence sug-
gests strongly that a large majority of them held
ideas and values more like those of rural citizens
than like those of city dwellers. But the truly urban
Americans, the one person in four who lived in a city
of 100,000 or more—and particularly the nearly
16.4 million who lived in metropolises of at least
half a million—were increasing steadily in number
and influence. More than 19 million persons moved
from farms to cities in the 1920s, and the population
living in centers of 100,000 or more increased by
about a third.
The urban environment transformed family
structure, educational opportunities, and dozens of
other aspects of human existence. Indeed, since
most of the changes in the relations of husbands,
wives, and children that had occurred in the nine-
teenth century were related to the fact that people
were leaving farms to work in towns and cities,
these trends continued and were intensified in the
early twentieth century as more and more people
settled in urban centers. In addition, couples con-
tinued to marry more because of love and physical
attraction than because of social position, economic
advantage, or the wishes of their parents. In each