Pre Sexual Revolution Attitudes Toward Adoption, Childlessness, etc.

Factual Questions
1

Mrs. HeyHomie and I recently found out that we have about a 1 in 100% chance of ever having kids. We’re dealing with it.

MammaHomie said that when she was growing up (in the 50’s and 60’s) a childless couple was something of a social pariah, and that adoption was rare because of the stigma. She said this not to be negative, but to illustrate how much times have changed for the better (in this regard, anyway).

MammaHomie admits that her memory may be hazy on this (she was, after all, just a kid), so I’m curious if some SDMB social historians (or those old enough to remember more clearly) can shed some more light on this issue.

To put it bluntly, what were the prevailing social attitudes toward childlessness and adoption prior to the Sexual Revolution? Were “Childless by Choice” couples rare? Were people sympathetic toward couples who couldn’t conceive, or were they viewed as “weird” people to be avoided? And what of adoption? Was there a stigma associated with being adopted? Were adoptive parents instructed NOT to teach their kids that they were adopted?

I appreciate any insight into this.

TIA

2

From what I remember, “childless by choice” didn’t exist and would have marked you as a weirdo. If you didn’t have children, it would be considered by others to be a minor tragedy and would arouse some pity. But that assumed that you wanted children but couldn’t have them; if you said you didn’t want children, it would be mildly scandalous.

Adoption was less of an issue for the parent, and would have been seen as an acceptable way of dealing with childlessness. It also would have been OK if you had a child and adopted another. However, it was something of a stigma for the child, and he might be teased by other children for being adopted.

3

As I recall, adopted children were often assumed to be born “out of wedlock” back then. There was some stigma (to the child) attached to being adopted.
Peace,
mangeorge

4

I’ll add that childless couples, and even couples with only one older child, were somewhat shunned. Not outcast, really, but not invited to parties etc with the same enthusiasm as “normal” couples.
I think this applied to couples in their 30s and beyond.

5

I rather disagree.

In the first place, “the sexual revolution” here seems to indicate the 1960s [and most of what we call the 60s was realy the early 70s)

In fact, the 1920s/30s were roughly on a par with the 60s (but with a different philosophical outlook, and without enabling technologies like the pill and IUD). It’s hard to characterize the 1940’s because of WWII and the post-war chaos, but a DoD study declassified in the 70s indicated that almost 85% of “our boys overseas” had sex overseas. (I regret that I cannot provide a web link for this statistic. I’ve been looking, since I find it a useful stat)

The 1950s weren’t the “classic traditional values”, they were a period of constraint and neopuritanism, both socially and politically (e.g. McCarthyism). Further, the US in the 1950s/60s was not a monolithic culture. Reading many commentaries on that era, one might come to believe that the majority of the US was tract housing suburbs. In fact, such suburbs, despite their ubiquity in the media, didn’t even exist prior to 1947, and ‘tract’ (subdivision) houses built remained a small fraction of American housing until later. [That isn’t to say that suburbs didn’t exist before WWII, but they were more along the periurban Brooklyn Heights model than the Levittown model.]

It was only roughly around WWII ( +/- 5 years. Population shifts during the Depression and the war make it hard to assign an exact date) that the majority of the US population ceased to be rural, yet contemporary writings about the mores of the rural population from 1920-60 stand at stark odds to the writings of those who lived in that time and place. Meanwhile, in urban settings, proximity and lack of privacy bred prudery. New York papers were scandalized that men on Long Island went shirtless in a 1930 heatwave!

Social class and category also played an important role. The attitudes of the American upper middle and upper classes tended to be much more Victorian than the over whelming majority of the country. (Today we read the prudish “guides” and lawsuits of that era, and believe that they reflect the mores of the time, but they were actually attempts to stem the tide. The American Nudist, for example, was carried on most newstands in 1930, without comment, much less the concealment and restrictions used for Playboy in the 1950’s/60s/70s, even as court cases that seem prudish to us were working their way through the Federal courts.

To return to the OP, families with children naturally share interests with other families with children. They tended to live in the same areas and socialize with each other. Today’s adults who were children in the 40s or 50s might have a skewed view of the society as a whole: their experience would naturally be heavily weighted. We also had rosy-tinted views of what live was like even at the time: in 1945, “the years the boys came home”, there were 1,612,992 marriages and 485,000 divorces (1 divorce per 3.3 marriages). after a few years, marriages were up slightly (1,667,231) and divorces down (385,144) for a ratio of 1:4.3 - admittedly the ratios are twice as high today, but the common conception that divorce was rare and scandalous is clearly incorrect. It simply appeared that way to the children or young married childbearing families of the time, due to social segregation. When I was growing up in the 70s, social segregation was a visible process: divorced families often sold their home (no longer able to support both a mortgage and a second household) and each parent moved to less expensive housing.

If you look at the US Census statistics, you’ll see that a large percentage of couples were childless. They were so common in the daily experience of most people that the media was full of them, and no one ever thought twice. Keep in mind that in 1930-1980, hysterectomy was second only to tonsillectomy as the commonest surgery, and a very sizeable fraction of couples aren’t fertile (individually or with each other) to begin with. Beyond that, many couples who didn’t have children by choice, were not very sexually active, or were infertile secondary to delays in treating “VD” (as we called STDs back then)

6

Let me about what I remember of the era. I grew up during the Baby Boom (1946 to 1964) in rural and small-town Ohio. I was born in 1952, so being a child during this time, I can only indirectly speak to how adults perceived the era.

Adoption happened occasionally. One kid in my class was adopted. His family was more or less our nearest neighbors. (I lived on a farm, so that’s harder to define than you might think.) Everybody in the class knew that he was adopted and nobody made a big deal of it. When anyone asked about his real parents, he said (probably correctly) that he didn’t know anything about them. Perhaps the adults knew or guessed that his real parents probably weren’t married, but they didn’t discuss that fact with us. One important thing to remember is that some things didn’t get discussed, especially with children.

I don’t remember childlessness being considered a social stigma. There didn’t seem to be many childless couples, but perhaps that’s only my perception because the adults I knew were mostly the parents of the children I knew. I don’t remember any adults being looked down on because they had no children, but if any adults had that view, they wouldn’t have discussed it with children. Again, some things didn’t get discussed.

The families weren’t that all-fired large compared with the generations before that. There were a lot from one to four kids. My family was weird because we had eight kids. That was definitely unusual. (We’re Protestants and this was an overwhelmingly Protestant area, incidentally.) I don’t recall anybody making a big deal about how large our family was, though.

Divorce happened occasionally. It was definitely a little shameful, but that doesn’t mean that people to whom it had happened were shunned. A good friend of my parents’ was married just before leaving for the military during World War II. His wife left him while he was overseas. After the war he married another woman and had four kids. This didn’t stop him from being well accepted in the community and, in particular, in the church. His having been divorced wasn’t discussed much, but it wasn’t held against him. I suspect that multiple divorces would have been held against someone. I think the real shame would have been if you were perceived as being the one who casually got married and divorced. Marriage was important, and you didn’t want to be seen as taking it lightly.

7

I’ve cast my mind back as well as I could, and I surely do remember things being as I related above. People weren’t, of course, tarred and feathered or driven to the town limits, but they were treated as “different”.
In fact, I remember something about the (catholic) church counselling childless couples. I was just a kid then, so much of my recollection is from reflection with elders once I reached adulthood (1965 and beyond). I was born in 1945.
It was a different time. Odd things I remember;
Adults in my circle didn’t use the word “pregnant” around us kids. They said “carrying”. As in “When I was carrying Charles”. I don’t recall hearing the word “sex” either. A womans, or girls, breasts were her “front”. I swear. Even a grown woman. :smiley:
Girls who got “in trouble” did often disappear for a while. Or sometimes the boy was forced to marry her.
Anyone who believes that the occurance of sexual activity didn’t explode upon the invention (introduction, actually) of the pill wasn’t paying attention.

8

I wonder if my perceptions of what it was like back then differs from other people posting here because I grew up in a working-class environment. What sort of an environment did you grow up in, mangeorge and RealityChuck? What sort of an environment did MammaHomie grow up in?

9

She grew up in a solidly working-class neighborhood in a medium-sized Midwestern city (Springfield, IL). Not poor by any means, but not rich by any stretch either.

10

I grew up in a small town, on the poor side of low income. My dad worked as a deliveryman for a dept. store. I had four younger brothers and one sister by the time I was nine or so. Most of our neighbors were minorities or okies. All were larger families and quite conservative. My dad died when I was eleven, so I wasn’t exposed to that general “loosening up” that many sons experience from their dads as they enter their teenage years.

11

Only slightly off-topic…

HeyHomie, should you and MammaHomie decide that adoption is right for you, please check out CCAI. NoCoolSpouseName says if she had known how easy adoption is she never would have had any the “regular” way.

When we told a friend’s sister (who is from Denmark) that we were adopting, she said “Oh, I’m so sorry you can’t have any of your own.” To which our reply was “Oh, we have 4!” She almost fainted. So, while times have changed a bit, they haven’t changed that much. A friend at work is adopted and when people find out they often say “I’m sorry”–like it was a problem??

Yes, I am: NoCoolUserName, father to 1 bio-kid, 3 step-kids and 2 adopted (from China) kids.

As long as I’m bragging, here are the web sites for my 2 youngest:
Scarlett and Jett. Sorry to rave about the little ones, I’m just giddy about them and I can’t help it.

12

Hey, I didn’t mean to kill the thread! I promise I won’t rave about my daughters again.

I’d still like to hear about any studies of attitudes about childlessness/adoption that compare the 50’s with recent history (or other periods, for that matter).