The other thing to note is that mostly these generations are defined not in purely demographic terms but in cultural terms – the events and social changes that they lived through in their childhood and teenage years.

Of course people do, but in reality like most things it’s a continuum. Babies are born every day and you can’t say that someone born on 31 December 1964 was a baby boomer but the baby born on 1 January 1965 was Generation X. Part of the reason for the ambiguity is that it’s hard to define a “generation” by arbitrary dates. Most commentators put the end of the baby boom about 1964 in Australia however. 1961 was the introduction of the contraceptive pill, and 1962 saw the first significant decline in birth rates in nearly 30 years. The birth rate reached a peak of 3.55 in 1961.Īll this comes from the ABS publication Historical Population Statistics (3105.0).ĭespite the rise in birth rate before the end of WWII, the first baby boomers are universally considered to be those born in 1946, but different people set the end date of the baby boom at different points. Then it shot up much further as the soldiers came home from the war and the economy began to boom in the following 15 years. This rate rose steadily through the rest of the 1930s, and the 1940s, so contrary to popular belief it was rising throughout World War II in Australia. Notably this is still higher than the level we are currently calling a “mini-boom” which peaked at 1.97 ( more here). The birth rate in Australia was actually at its lowest point of 2.11 (the theoretical number of babies the average woman would have in her lifetime if the fertility rate in that year extended through her life) in 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression. The interesting thing which I didn’t know is that while the UK and US experienced a very large spike in birth rate as soon as the war ended, in Australia it was more of a long sustained build-up. The baby boomers exist in all western countries which were affected by World War II. It’s well known that people tend to have more children in good economic times, and the 1950s were certainly good economic times as the western world recovered from the largest war ever fought.

As a name for a generation it is quite a good one. The “baby boomers” were born in the baby boom which followed World War II. Births, Australia (3301.0) comes out each year and has a fascinating chart which we’ve used a few times, showing an 80 year snapshot of Australia’s birth rate. I recently put together a blog post about the decline in 25-34 year olds, which led me to the ABS website. Overall, this is a unique works because its multidisciplinary approach informs but never preaches on the emotionally charged topic of the American family.I’ve been investigating historic birth rates for a while at. Since Weiss is a historian, she provides analyses of her arguments that are factual rather than emotive, and her use of family interviews further contributes to a strong presentation. 'Weiss has written an enlightening book that examines the dynamics of American families past and present. Weiss’s excellent use of family interviews that span three decades, her imaginative examination of popular culture, and her incisive conclusions make her book an invaluable contribution not only to our understanding of the past but also to our understanding of men’s and women’s roles in today’s family. More than simply changing with the times, the parents of the baby boom contributed to changing times themselves. By the 1980s, they were far more welcoming to the ideas of the women’s movement than has often been assumed. And couples strove for fulfilling marriages as they dealt with the pressures of childrearing in the midst of the sexual and divorce revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Midlife wives and mothers reshaped the labor force and the home by returning to work in the 1960s. Middle-class women encouraged their husbands to become involved fathers. Weiss shows how young couples in the 1950s attempted to combine egalitarian hopes with traditional gender roles. She pairs these firsthand accounts with a deft analysis of movies, television shows, magazines, and advice books from each decade, providing an unprecedented and intimate look at ordinary marriages in a time of sweeping cultural change. Drawing on interviews with American couples from the 1950s to the 1980s, Weiss creates a dynamic portrait of family and social change in the postwar era. Jessica Weiss delves beneath these mythic images and paints a far more complex picture that reveals strong continuities between the baby boomers and their parents. Middle-class family life in the 1950s brings to mind images of either smugly satisfied or miserably repressed nuclear families with breadwinning husbands, children, and housewives, much like the families depicted in Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best.

1950s baby boom