Lisa of Sociological Images says

In the U.S., when people refer to the “traditional family,” they usually mean a family that they associate with the 1950s.  But the 1950s was a really unusual time in American history.  Elsewhere I’ve written about how the husband breadwinner/wife homemaker model is an American anomaly.  The data below, put together by the New York Times, shows that the 1950s was an unusual time in terms of age of marriage also:

Though the data is rough (five points across 107 years), you can see a distinct dip in the age of marriage that includes the ’50s. 

Read the quote in context here.

There’s actually a little more bounce and jitter over the centuries but whatever else one might want to say about it, it seems extravagantly peculiar to pick a historical low point in age of marriage (and a correspondingly high point in overall percentage of marriage) and label that “traditional.” It would be as dumb as, say, a conservative Fed Chairman picking the narrow point where interest rates their historically lowest point to recommend that everyone go out and refinance with adjustable-rate mortgages. (Oh wait!)

I have to say, by the way, that there were some interesting correspondences between the early age of marriage in the 1950s and the popularity of the ARM-driven housing boom of the 2000’s (the “aught naughts” as a 90’s wag predicted we’d call them and I suspect we may still.)

Both points were driven by a huge increase in material prosperity (a worker-productivity-driven one in the 50’s, an open-ended debt-driven one in the 00’s) that amounted to… well.. whatever you’d call a happy emergency — a situation where under the circumstances it makes sense to at least temporarily have a social breakdown because otherwise people aren’t going to just feel left out of but be left out of the response.

In the 1950s the breakdown was a massive and really, highly, conscious, and intentional exit of women from the workforce in order to process and organize a largely unprecedented influx of domestic infrastructure made possible (in folk-Keyensian terms anyway) by redirection of “war surplus” industrial infrastructure and spending to civilian use accompanied by the economic demand to rebuild much of the so-called 1st-World after it had been rubbled during the war. And at least in the 1950s this wasn’t a minor deal — as Stephanie Coontz points out in Marriage, a History, the prosperity of the 1950s wasn’t build on a foundation of pretty-much-normal. Instead it came a the end of at least 20 years of really, really awful — sometimes ordinary-Americans-starved-in-the-streets awful! And in those circumstances what happened made a lot of sense. (The bizarro-world version of the 00’s — the oh-oh’s? — started from a largely excellent standard of living and tried to build… literally build in this case… on that. But in that case what you got left out of if you didn’t reorganize everything to do it was… rolling bankruptcies and foreclosure on too-large houses in places nobody wants to live after evaporating years worth of home equity in what would have been more sustainable standards of living. But let’s get back to my glowing-if-temporary enthusiasm for the 1950s…)

See what’s going on here though? The 1950s were a happy emergency (I’m still wondering what to call that.) They exactly weren’t a status quo to rest an entire “tradition,” of marriage or anything else on! (No more than getting a “pineapple express” warm spell one winter makes it a “tradition” to buy sandals instead of boots for the next.

So yeah! Great! The 50s were a point in history where various trends converged to make it an intelligent, rational decision for women and men to marry (even non-straight ones who experienced not only social but economic pressure to at least play the part!) and start a household very early, and for women to stay home and be (sometimes literally!) homemakers rather than enter the workforce at all.

But also, yeah, great, it would have been a moronic mistake to say that that brief — maybe only 8-10 year! — moment in time, a “happy emergency” ought to be the baseline against which all else is measured. And you’d have to be an idiot to believe that just because it was like that at the dawn of the television and Kodak era it was always like that. And you’d have to be an extraordinarily dour, sour, short-sighted, and unimaginative wet blanket to say that it’s all been downhill ever since. (Oh wait!)

See? Even if you’re progressive and feminist you can look back at that moment in time and say wow, that was something else. Which of course it was! Something else! Unique. Unprecedented. And also fleeting!

Something, in particular, that was already beginning not to unravel but to return to normal_ by the beginning of the Kennedy era. At which point the homes were prepared, the giant boom of children were out of the nurseries and in school much of the day. And either quietly or loudly there began to be “wait a minute” moments as well. People who’d participated in working in the boom but not reaping it’s rewards — women, “minorities,” the impoverished rurals, the young, and those who, um, couldn’t marry… or at least couldn’t marry the people they wanted — entered the conversation.

Which, again, when you look at the 1950s as a windfall, a happy emergency, isn’t even a threat to that new prosperity! After all, adding mazillions of previously dispossessed or otherwise othered people to the middle class expanded the middle class! And triggered a frankly amazing expansion of culture — yes, Frank Sinatra and Frank Lloyd Wright were amazing but, y’know what? Without taking anything at all away from them so were Prince and Maya Lin and millions of others who 60 years ago would have been decidedly excluded from the original 50’s boom.

Anyway, all that’s a big way of saying that even the crankiest, fringiest “traditionalist” could be right about the 1950s… while still being almost 100% dead wrong to imagine that’s the way it always was or that such a singular event ought to be the standard against which all else should be measured.