www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News 2010 Statistics from Annuario Pontificio

The dynamism of the Melkite Church is interesting. It suggests that the Melkites probably have a lot to contribute to Eastern Catholicism in America

The U.S. TFR is just about 2.0 today. With immigration, we are slightly above replacement. This is pretty much the first time TFR has fallen below 2.1 in the United States.

But you are wrong about the age at which women in this country used to give birth. In fact, throughout our history, most women married for the first time at 22-24, while most men married for the first time at ages 24-26. From 1945 until the middle 1960s, women married at 18-20, while men married at 20-22, significantly lower than the historical norm.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, men usually did not marry until they could support a family, which meant they had to have time to get a job and build up savings. As men typically want to marry women a couple of years younger than them, this explains the ages at which men and women married for most of U.S. history, from the colonial period through the Second World War.

What happened between 1945 and 1965? Coming out of World War II with the only intact industrial economy, the U.S. enjoyed unprecedented prosperity that featured a plethora of semi-skilled and high paying jobs that could be filled by men right out of high school. Most of them were also unionized, so they had stability and job security. By the time they were 22, they had enough money in the bank to buy a car and a house, and support a wife--a wife a couple of years younger than them.

After 1965, things began to return to normal, as the rest of the world's economies recovered and the U.S. had to become economically competitive again. The semi-skilled, high-paying jobs disappeared, the high paying jobs required more training (hence time to learn), and the average age at which men married moved back towards its historical average of 26--where it stands today.

The main difference between now and the past is the age at which women marry for the first time, which is now also around 26. Women had always participated in the workplace (except for the 1950s), but now women are filling jobs which require as much training and education as those filled by men. When women finally get around to marrying, they are having trouble finding men in the desirable demographic who want to marry them--men are still looking for women in their early 20s.

Women haven't done themselves any favors by buying into the feminist theory of sexual liberation (a phenomenon that began before the Pill, as I have written for First Things, but which the Pill accelerated). By frittering away their time in casual dalliances, women reduce their perceived value as stable life partners by the men who drift in and out of their lives--and they never learned about living in a long-term relationship, which explains why they ditch at the first opportunity when the going gets rough.

Men, for their part, simply act like pigs. Or, to mix metaphors, why buy the cow when the milk is free? If women make themselves available sexually outside of marriage, men will take advantage of them. And time is much kinder to men in that regard than it is to women: men get older, but they also can become more attractive to younger women. Older women seldom become more attractive to younger men, and men their own age are busy chasing after available younger women.