Most Americans believe our country's culture and way of life have “largely changed for the worse” since the 1950s, according to the Public Religion Research Institute's 2025 American Values Survey. That includes 55% of whites, 53% of blacks and 57% of Latinos.
For many, the problem lies in the collapse of the marriage system of that decade, when the majority of women married before turning 21, only 6% of men and women reached the age of 35 without having married, and divorce rates fell to a postwar low of 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women. The solution, according to the Heritage Foundation's “Project 2025” family policy plan, is to encourage early marriage and childbearing (only for heterosexual couples) and abolish no-fault divorce.
I have spent much of my career as a historian. criticizing any idealization of the marriages of the fifties. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among housewives was so widespread that, by the end of the decade, doctors called it “housewife syndrome.”
It's no surprise, then, that after California passed a “unilateral” divorce bill in 1969, allowing people to leave an unhappy marriage even if their partner objected, states that followed suit saw women's suicide rates decline by 20% over the next five years. Reports of domestic violence fell by a quarter to a half.
But now I think I have been too dismissive of that nostalgia. The underlying feeling of loss is not “all in people's heads.” Instead, I've come to see it as an example of what doctors call “referred pain,” as when a problem in one part of the body is experienced as pain elsewhere.
I also believe that much of the pain we feel in our social and family relationships originates in a deeper part of the economy and the body politic.
The fact is that we are doing “family” better than before. Domestic violence rates have continued to fall since the 1970s. Husbands do much more housework and hands-on childcare than before, and both parents spend more time interacting with their children.
Few modern women have to conform to the low expectations expressed by a Bay Area mother of five, married in the late 1950s, who told an interviewer that “any woman who has a man who rarely gets violent and who doesn't drink much doesn't have much to complain about.”
Today's married couples have much higher expectations of mutual support, sympathy, loving companionship, honesty, and equal participation than in the past. And people who get married have been getting better at meeting these new expectations. After peaking at 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married women in the late 1970s, the the divorce rate had fallen to 4.2 per 1,000 in 2024, a figure lower than that of the 1950s.
But one of the reasons divorce rates have dropped so much is that people who have not yet achieved the financial security and personal stability they believe marriage requires are much less likely to “give marriage a chance” than in the past. And they have good reason to be cautious. A successful marriage requires more effort, commitment, and maintenance skills than ever before, just as many people have lost the financial security, predictability, and social support systems that give them the confidence to make such an important commitment. While couples may not be aware of the sociological research on how financial challenges, work stress, and time pressures increase negativity in marriages, they have seen the effects in practice. And they have far less reason to be optimistic about their future stability than people had in the postwar era.
Between 1949 and 1969, in each economic expansion, at least two-thirds of the income growth reached the poorest 90% of the population. If those postwar wage trends had continued, two Rand economists recently estimated, by 2018 the bottom 90% of the population would have earned 67% more than they actually did. Instead, between 1975 and 2018, it was the top 10% that made big gains, earning $47 trillion more than they would have received if postwar wage trends had continued.
From 2025, the top 1% of the population owned 31.9% of the wealth. We now live in what three Citibank financial analysts have called a “plutonomy“, in which the richest 20% of the population accounts for about half of all consumer spending. It is not surprising that more and more companies have begun to compete for the vast purchasing power of those consumers. And that is not achieved by lowering prices, as is done with mass-produced televisions and ready-made clothing, but by multiplying premium experiences and luxury goods.
A good example of how this results in referred pain can be seen in housing. What underlies much of today's nostalgia for 1950s families is not so much what happened in the family home but how people got such a home. In 1955, economist John Schmitt reports, a median-priced home cost 2.5 times the median annual income of men working full time. For women who worked full time, that same house cost almost five times more than their median annual income. Those figures help explain why most men could afford to marry young at the time and why so many women couldn't. No marry.
In 2024, by contrast, the median-priced home cost 5.9 times the median income of a full-time worker and more than seven times the median income of a full-time employee.
The costs of a family's most important sources of security—home, college education, and health care—have risen faster than average wages. The same applies to the kinds of “treats” that people associate with a satisfying family life (for example, a family outing to the ballpark or amusement park). In 1962, on opening day of the new Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium in Chavez Ravine, the cheapest ticket was $2.50. If the price had increased at the actual inflation rate, that would be just over $27 in today's dollars. But on Inauguration Day 2026, the cheapest seat was $155, nearly six times more expensive in constant dollars.
Or consider what happened at the most iconic family vacation destination. If the price of admission to Disneyland had increased at the average rate of inflation, the 1962 adult ticket of $3.75 would now be $41. However, starting in 2026, admission costs $104 for adults, or up to $225 on high-demand days.
Meanwhile, the staggering growth of inequality has reorganized everyday life to benefit the rich in ways that impose increasingly stressful inconveniences on the rest of us. High-value customers call dedicated phone lines that are quickly answered by a human while the rest of us wait through seemingly endless loops of recorded music or struggle to get an AI assistant to understand a question. Sports stadiums and amusement parks are increasingly charging fees for special experiences or services that were previously available to everyone or not available at all.
These “bonuses” are not just the small advantages that have always come with wealth: luxuries that we might envy, but that take nothing away from our own experiences. They come at a cost to the rest of us. It doesn't hurt my family's enjoyment of Disneyland if we can only afford one visit a year and other families can go as many times as they want. But when other families can pay between $300 and $499 for Lightning Lane Premier passes that allow them to skip the lines any time they want, that lengthens everyone else's wait time.
Contrary to contemporary nostalgic intermediaries, the main threat to family life and social solidarity today is not the fact that couples who do not get along can obtain a no-fault divorce. It is not about women and girls having access to contraception and abortion when necessary. Nor is it that same-sex couples can now formalize their commitments in the same way that different-sex couples do and can access alternative ways of having children.
We need to address the underlying sources of pain and resentment: the reversal of the economic equalization of the 1950s and 1960s, the destruction of the social and medical safety net, the attack on hard-won protections for workers and consumers, and the extent to which middle- and low-income families have had to bear so many of the stressful inconveniences that are the flip side of the privileges granted to the wealthy.
Stephanie Coontzprofessor emeritus of history at Evergreen State College in Washington, is the author, most recently, of “For better and for worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.”
