Well I'm sure the world was different in the 50's, but how much of what you say is statistical and how much is antidotal. For example 50% of house wives were committing adultery in the 50's, statistically teen pregnancy rates were higher in the 1950's then today so I honestly don't believe the 'american pie, atomic family, happy days' 1950's facade.
Sorry, I should not have said "teen pregnancy" since that includes 18 and even 19-year-olds, as the chart in your citation clearly states. Unlike today, very few kids went on to college, so when high school was over they moved out and became "emancipated minors," in fact if not in law. When I went off to college in 1960 it was not remarkable for 18-year-olds to have sex and rather common for 19-year-olds, so I'm sure the stats were the same or even higher for the demographic that didn't go to college. But for the 17-year-olds who were seniors in high school and living with their parents, the numbers were far lower, low enough that pregnancies in that age group were indeed remarkable. And virtually zero in the lower grades.
The demarcation was: Do you live with your parents? Kids who did, for the most part, did not have sex. We didn't have the freedom kids have today. Nowhere to go and no cars to get there. Working mothers were not the norm and neither was divorce, so most kids had one parent at home at all times.
so an eighteen or nineteen yr old getting pregnant wasn't considered a teen pregnancy?
It is in the stats he provided at the URL he gave. Sorry, I was talking about high school-age. Even in the 1950s adolescence was sort of finished at 18, unless you went to a weird all-boys university for geeks like I did, where growing up was not part of the curriculum.
I was going to say that. It's like when you're a kid you have sleepovers because it's fun and exciting and you get to see your friends longer and play with them when you wake up. When you're older, it's more crashing because one or several of you are drunk. I think after a certain age, if they are able to, people prefer to wake up in their own place instead of someone else's.
In "the sixties," that misnamed twelve-year period from the first Beatles record to the dawn of Disco, there were a lot of people who really didn't have "their own place." They generally didn't have jobs either, or at best were struggling musicians, so they survived by sponging off of the rest of us. Life was cheap and easy back then so those of us who had jobs and places to live were pretty generous to our friends. For one thing, the hippies
always brought dope.
