The History of the Family, 2015

Vol. 20, No. 1, 69–85, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2014.989248

The marriage boom: Spanish and Swedish women making sense of

marriage during the marriage boom
Marı́a Sánchez-Domı́nguez* and Anna Sofia Lundgren

Ageing and Living Conditions Programme, Centre for Population Studies,

Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
(Received 14 July 2014; accepted 14 November 2014)

This article analyzes the marriage boom that took place during the middle decades of
the twentieth century. The increase in nuptiality is analyzed in Spain and Sweden from
a qualitative perspective, and the authors describe how cultural, social, economic
and institutional transformations were understood by women who were in their
reproductive period during the marriage boom. In-depth interviews were conducted in
both places with 51 women born between 1919 and 1951. The authors argue that it is
important that the ways in which the factors previously identified as decisive of the
marriage boom are studied for their motivating power, and the way they were or were
not made important in people’s understandings of their marital practices. The results
show that despite the differences between the national contexts of Spain and Sweden,
three interrelated themes recurred when the interviewed women framed their marital
choices: (1) the normalization of marriage as a life event; (2) religion; (3) and education
and work life. The results also suggest that the women highlighted norm systems within
which their choices and decisions were made, rather than describing individual choices
and decisions as stemming from individual preferences and wishes.
Keywords: marriage boom; social constraints; religion; education; working life;
Spain; Sweden

1. Introduction
In the central decades of the twentieth century there was a significant change in marital
behaviors that led to what demographers have called the ‘marriage boom’ (Campbell,
1974; Carmichael, 1987; Festy, 1979; Glass, 1968; Hajnal, 1947, 1953; McDonald, 1974).
During a short span of time, the developed countries of the world saw a substantial change
in marriage patterns, with an extraordinary increase in the number of couples who were
married, and a decrease in the age at which they did so. A growing number of young
couples increased the length of exposure to conception, not only because they got married
at more fecund ages, but also because the number of years that they were sexually active
increased. This situation, in combination with the limited effectiveness of existing
contraceptives, contributed to a sharp increase in fertility levels (Van Bavel & Reher,
2013, p. 274), usually conceptualized as the ‘baby boom’. Explaining the marriage boom
and understanding why ‘people started to marry at younger ages and why many more
couples married than previously’ have been suggested as important tasks for further
research which could potentially deepen the understanding of the baby boom (Van Bavel
& Reher, 2013, p. 281). Similarly, pleading for emic explanations and trying to understand
the studied phenomenon from the interviewees’ point of view, Fisher (2013) argues that

*Corresponding author. Email: msanchez@geps.es

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

70 M. Sánchez-Domı́nguez and A.S. Lundgren

research needs to focus on ‘the intricate ways in which individuals made sense of the
varied, conflicting and changing debates about marriage that circled around them’ (p. 340),
and Janssens (2007) suggests a ‘radical choice for methodological individualism’ (p. 48).
It is against this background that we, in this article, analyze how women who had their
reproductive period during the marriage boom and subsequent baby boom frame their
marital choices.
A large body of literature has studied, directly or indirectly, the changes in marital
patterns during the baby boom. Although different theoretical approaches have addressed
the changes, there is a wide agreement that cohort effects are important to understand the
social changes that occurred, and that marital and reproductive decisions depend on how
people internalize and materialize the values and ideas of their time (Easterlin, 1987;
Emeka, 2006; Ryder, 1965, 1990). The parents of the baby boomers were raised in
contexts characterized by the economic crisis of the 1930s and, in many countries, by
armed conflict, which is likely to have affected them (Matthijs, 2002; Ryder, 1990). Much
research suggests that economic well-being is imperative for explanations of the marriage
boom, and that people who were brought up during hard times reached adulthood with
modest expectations that were easily satisfied in the 1950s context of economic growth
(Easterlin, 1987; Emeka, 2006; Ryder, 1990), as well as with the attitude that they could
confront any difficult situation (McDonald, 1983).
The parents of the baby boom were also socialized in rather traditional values and
attitudes regarding marriage. More or less outspoken religious and moral beliefs occupied
an important place and, well into the last decades of the twentieth century, marriage was
still the norm for couples who wanted to live together (Fisher, 2013). While it is true that
traditional family and gender systems were weakening, especially in Sweden, they
remained significant during the marriage boom.
It has been proposed that the foregoing, together with the improved economic climate,
created an ideal set of circumstances for marriage (Easterlin, 1987; Ryder, 1990). Another
factor that has been suggested to have contributed to this tendency is that birth control had
become more widely available and accepted. The new contraceptive methods may have
brought about an attitudinal change toward the timing of marriage, and it has been
suggested that, when couples could control their fertility more effectively within marriage,
one important argument for delaying marriage lost credibility (Caldwell & Ruzicka, 1978;
Emeka, 2006).
Most of the specialized literature has two limitations. First, it is based predominately
on quantitative methods. Since individuals’ attitudes, values, ideas and motives are seldom
found in quantitative data such as censuses or marriage data registries, it is our contention
that qualitative interviews can contribute important understandings. Moreover, we are
entering a moment when we must ask the mothers of the baby boom about their
experiences and motives, otherwise we will lose their valuable testimony, given their age.
Second, most previous analyses have been confined to establishing the descriptive reality
of the marriage boom in a given country – mainly the United States (see Byerly & Rubin,
1985). International comparative studies have been scarce, except for valuable recent
exceptions (see Van Bavel & Reher, 2013).
In order to overcome these shortcomings and to gather narratives of marital decisions
made during the marriage boom, we conducted in-depth interviews with Spanish and
Swedish women whose reproductive years coincided with the marriage and baby booms.1
The narratives from each country were then compared in order to detect differences and
similarities in the ways the women created meaning around marriage during the marriage
boom.
 The marriage boom 71

In order to provide a background, we start by presenting the marriage boom in Spain

and Sweden from demographic, cultural and institutional standpoints. We then describe
the qualitative material and the methodology employed. The third section presents the
results – the main elements detected within the women’s narratives with regard to ‘getting
married’. Finally, we relate the narratives to explanations from previous research about the
marriage boom to shed light on how the narratives can be said to make the explanations
comprehensible.

2. Background: marital and reproductive behavior in Spain and Sweden

Sweden and Spain are societies that, historically, have varied widely in their demographic
behavior, as well as in their cultural and institutional characteristics. With regard to
demographic behavior, the countries exhibit strikingly different trends in the levels
of marriage and fertility during the baby boom. Although these two countries often figure
in quantitative analysis, we have not found any comparisons made with qualitative data.
An understanding of international heterogeneity must take into account the broad
sweep of demographic history in the compared countries (cf. Reher, Requena, Sánchez-
Domı́nguez, & Sanz-Gimeno, 2013; Sandström, 2014; Van Bavel & Reher, 2013). The
intensity of the baby boom appears to be linked to previous levels of fertility. Thus, the
baby boom was stronger in Sweden than in Spain because of the lower level of fertility
when the baby boom started. In other words, where fertility was lowest during the pre-war
years, the increases were stronger and lasted longer (Reher et al., 2013).
Figure 1 provides a condensed portrayal of Sweden’s and Spain’s histories of
nuptiality and fertility. Whereas Swedish fertility rates entered a trend of rapid decrease at
the end of the nineteenth century, fertility in Spain was still fairly high in the 1930s, though
declining fast and reducing drastically during the war years. This transformation of
reproductive behavior from high to low levels of fertility was interrupted by the baby
boom in both societies. It is evident that in each country – and especially Sweden – total
fertility rose during the post-war period and declined throughout the 1970s (Figure 1).
The timing of the peak in fertility varied substantially, however. There was one baby
boom in Spain, whereas in Sweden there were two baby boom peaks. In Spain, the baby
boom took place between the late 1950s and 1978, when the baby boom gave way to an

Figure 1. Crude nuptiality and Total Fertility Rate (TFR), 1938– 1980, Spain and Sweden. Source:
Institud National D’études Démographiques (INED) Developed Countries Database.
72 M. Sánchez-Domı́nguez and A.S. Lundgren

important baby bust. The first peak in Sweden took place in the early 1940s and the second
during the 1960s.
As noted, an essential part of the baby boom was the marriage boom that went with it.
This can be seen quite clearly in Figure 1, where the increase in births was preceded by an
increase in marriages and a lowering of the age at which people got married. As a
consequence, the rising fertility during the Spanish baby boom and the second baby boom
in Sweden were very much spearheaded by women below the age of 30 (Reher et al., 2013;
Sandström, 2014).
Sweden and Spain also differ considerably with regard to the implementation of laws
that promoted equality in family relations. Sweden stands out as a country where traditional
religious attitudes toward family and sexuality have the lowest degree of legitimacy
(Sandström, 2012). Family policy goals can be said to date from the 1930s, coinciding with
the emerging Swedish welfare state, where one important goal was to facilitate increased
fertility (Hatje, 1974; Kälvemark, 1980). During the 1930s and 1940s, a comprehensive set
of welfare policies was introduced, including childbirth benefits for mothers (1937), a
prohibition on firing an employed woman because of marriage or pregnancy (1939), grants
to municipalities for school meals (1946) and child benefits (1947), to name a few.
These new policies made individuals less dependent on the family for social security,
and contributed to a process of weakening family ties and dependence on the family in
the late 1930s and 1940s. The adoption of no-fault divorce as early as 1915 was also
important and reinforces the general picture of Sweden as a forerunner in cultural
changes (Sandström, 2012; see also Melby, Pylkkänen, Rosenbeck, & Wetterberg, 2000).
The advent of compulsory schooling gave impetus to this development. Introduced as a
four-year primary school requirement in the mid nineteenth century, further years were
added, and, in 1936, a seven-year compulsory school term was introduced (Hirdman, 1989).
The legalization of birth control in Sweden took place in 1938 (just before the Swedish
baby boom) after a period when the Contraceptive Act ( preventivlagen) had prohibited all
information on and advocacy of contraceptives.2 Chemical contraceptives such as birth
control pills were on the market from the 1960s.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Sweden also witnessed a change in the norms of having
children while the mother held a professional position. Whereas this had been considered
inappropriate before and during the early stages of the baby boom, specifically for women
holding white-collar jobs, the policy direction for ‘a dual breadwinner model’ (Lewis,
1992) made employment more acceptable for those women giving birth during the 1950s
and 1960s. Thus, educated and gainfully employed women were ‘added’ to the ranks of
mothers (Sandström, 2014). While it is true that women in industry or farming had often
continued to work (Lewis, 1992), the status of wife and mother was privileged from an
ideological point of view, and the 1950s are today known as the era of the housewife
(Axelsson, 1992).
In legal aspects, the Spanish Second Republic (1931 – 1939) placed Spain ‘at the same
level of the most evolved countries concerning equality between the sexes’ (Comenius
Project, 2006– 2007, p. 4). The 1931 constitution represented an important change in the
situation of women: women gained the right to vote; the family was legislated from a
perspective of freedom and equality; and the first divorce law was enacted.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) changed the course of events. Both divorce and civil
marriage were repealed after the war and, during the post-war period, ‘the role of the woman-
wife-mother was a key element of the new ideology’ (Comenius Project, 2006–2007, p. 6).
The conservative Franco regime championed Catholicism, and the Catholic Church became
an important institution in shaping this model of a woman. Female sexuality became strongly
 The marriage boom 73

linked to motherhood, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy discouraged all contraceptive methods
and techniques to limit the number of children. The regime also restricted women from
occupying certain positions. The 1961 Law on Political and Professional Women’s Rights
attempted to avoid gender discrimination, but still specifically prevented women from
becoming magistrate judges and prosecutors, since ‘[w]omen would endanger certain
attributes that they should not give up such as tenderness, delicacy and sensitivity’ (Martı́nez
Salmeán, 2005, p. 8).
The economic development initiated at the end of the 1950s and the subsequent
modernization and opening of the country also meaningfully influenced the lives of Spanish
women. Educational expansion started in the mid 1950s, triggered by a growing level of
industrialization. Illiteracy decreased from 23% in 1940 to 12% in 1970, and the proportion
of women holding university degrees rose (Comenius Project, 2006 –2007, p. 8).
The expansion of higher education, however, only reached the working and middle classes
in the 1970s (López, 2003) – i.e. after the baby boom. Therefore, the expansion of the
education system took place mainly among the baby boomers and not among their parents.
The end of the dictatorship (1975) and the return to a democratic system allowed for
the blossoming of the feminist movement and substantial legal advances that placed
Spanish women on a level similar to Swedish women. The legalization of birth control
took place in 1971 – three decades later than in Sweden – and no-fault divorce was
instituted in 1981 – almost seven decades later than in Sweden.
It has been suggested that these countries arguably represent a traditional (Spain)
versus a modern (Sweden) society (Reher, 1998). Whereas the mothers of the Spanish
baby boom were living under the dictatorship of Franco, the mothers of the Swedish baby
boom were making significant strides on the road to emancipation.

3. Data and methods

We conducted a total of 51 in-depth semi-structured interviews during 2012 and 2014 in
Sweden (28) and Spain (23) with women between 64 and 95 years of age, half of whom
were living in urban areas and half in rural areas. Both in Sweden and in Spain, two
principal criteria were applied to the sample selection: (1) women born before 1950 and (2)
subjects without cognitive problems. We also tried to get women who had completed
primary, secondary or university studies in order to broaden the scope and compare the
information across the different groups. In Sweden, snowball sampling was used, where
suggestions from interviewees led us to other possible participants. This may have led to a
biased selection – for example, with regard to the participant women’s educational level.
Since the first interviewees represented very different backgrounds, both with respect to
the places where they had lived and their educational levels, snowball sampling led to quite
a good distribution. Among the Swedish women, there were both women with no higher
education living in remote rural areas and women with higher education living in cities.
In Spain, the sampling was carried out using mixed strategies. As in Sweden, snowball
sampling was used, although to a lesser extent. However, we were also looking for women
with specific marital conditions and with certain levels of education. The reality of the near
universality of marriage among Spanish women and the low female educational level led
to difficulties in finding women who had never married and who had secondary or higher
education. Some of the Spanish in-depth interviews were conducted in a residence for the
elderly. The directors of nursing homes played an important role in our ability to find
women with the characteristics we were looking for in terms of education and marital
history.
74 M. Sánchez-Domı́nguez and A.S. Lundgren

In both countries, whether the interview was conducted in a private household or in a

residence for the elderly, a first contact with the woman was established that provided her
with a friendly and clear introduction to the research project. There was another reason for
the pre-interview. The script of the interviews contained questions about sexuality.
We expected some problems in talking with the women about these issues, since sexuality
is still thought to be taboo among the pre-war generation of Spanish women, due to the
influence of the Catholic Church. Given the sensitivity of this topic, it was necessary that
the women knew us, and it was also important to create a comfortable and confidential
environment for the interview. After this first meeting, we established when the interview
would take place.
The purpose of the interviews was not to provide statistically generalizable data, but
rather to obtain qualitative information about the underlying attitudes, values and
behavioral patterns among the protagonists of the marriage boom. The interviews were
formed as in-depth life-story interviews, where the women were asked open-ended
questions about their entire lives, but with a focus on a selected set of questions (Atkinson,
1998). For example, and of interest for this article, the women were asked to talk about
their

. childhood fantasies of adult life

. family of origin and living conditions during their lives;
. relationships and engagements, marriage histories, including contraceptive use and
thoughts on family planning;
. childcare and work life;
. thoughts on the social, economic and religious contexts before and during their
reproductive years;
. perceptions of how other women of their cohort and other cohorts behaved with
respect to reproduction and the family;
. relations with their children today and general thoughts on their lives.

The women all chose to talk differently about these questions, and often shared with us
intimate memories and details of their lives. Contrary to some of our initial expectations,
we experienced almost no (obvious) problems during the interviews, not even with the
questions related to sexuality. In many cases, among the Spanish as well as the Swedish
informants, the women admitted that we were the first people with whom they had talked
about these issues.
The interviews lasted, on average, between one and a half and three hours. They were
all recorded and transcribed in the original language. The transcriptions were then
processed and coded for how the women framed their marital decisions and made
themselves understood: How did they talk about their reasons to marry? What kinds of
narratives were evoked when they talked about marriage? What circumstances, events,
positions and so on were described as important within these narratives? We soon
started to see patterns. A number of themes recurred and, of these, three stood out as
specifically significant: (1) marriage as a natural life event; (2) religion; and (3) education
and work life.
Our material consisted of narratives about a limited time period, but we do not set out
to describe the narrative traits as specific to this era. Rather, we point out ways of narrating
that were central to the interviewees’ ways of remembering and narrating. Some of the
themes may very well have been relevant both before and after the marriage boom, but it is
their presence during the marriage boom that is analyzed.
 The marriage boom 75

3.1. Methodological discussion

There are obvious methodological problems connected to the interview method.
First, interviews are always affected by what goes on in the interview situation, where the
narratives are conditioned not only by the research project and its preconditions, but also
by the chemistry between the interviewer and interviewee (Lundgren, 2013). Second, in
order to obtain the information we needed, we urged the women to tell us about events that
took place many years ago. It is important to conclude that our intention has never been to
uncover some unaffected ‘truth’, but rather to focus on the ways in which the women
understood their lives and in which things were made sense of within the context of their
narratives.
Of interest for this article are the ways in which the interviews offered an
understanding of individual motivations and reflections about marriage. We argue that
even though there is no way of getting to any absolute truth about the things we are
studying, we still believe that, taken together, the differences found in the material from
different national contexts will give important insights into the context of the marriage
boom and help provide a critical understanding of the marital decisions studied.

3.2. The comparative approach

Working with a smaller sample makes generalizations difficult. Although the main reason
for engaging in comparative research often centers on ‘the pinpointing of decisive factors in
the provision of a causal explanation of empirical phenomena’ (Glynos & Howarth, 2007,
p. 206), our reasons, grounded on a constructivist perspective, are rather to allow the
contrasts to help us see new things in the material, thereby rendering the studied phenomena
more intelligible. For example, the interviewed women’s explanations for their
reproductive choices sometimes seemed similar in the two countries and their different
settings, but with different social meanings and seemingly fulfilling different social
functions (cf. Watson, 1998). At other times, the contextual as well as narrative differences
were so significant that we tended toward interpretations where we instead exaggerated the
differences between the women’s feelings and the logic behind their choices. Here we had
to be sensitive not to contribute to excessive national stereotyping. At other times still,
differences within one country seemed to be equally important as the differences between
national contexts. Thus, we have not targeted primarily the differences between the
countries when it comes to conditions for marriage and reproductive decisions. Neither
have we tried to focus only on the similarities. Rather, we have focused on the various
reasons given for marriage and starting a family, and the ways the women describe how they
negotiated perceived demands.
Initially, we were somewhat surprised that approximately the same themes recurred in
so many interviews, regardless of the national context. Importantly though, neither the
presence of the themes nor our comparative approach suggests that the content of these
themes – the women’s narratives and experiences – was the same.

4. Results
The analysis of the narratives led us to detect three main themes: (1) getting married was
initially described as a natural life event; (2) narratives about marriage were often related
to religion; and (3) questions of education and work life permeated the narratives of
marriage and married life. In this section, we will describe briefly the women’s ways of
talking about marriage in relation to the detected themes. Thereafter, in the following and
76 M. Sánchez-Domı́nguez and A.S. Lundgren

concluding discussion, we relate the narratives to previous explanations given for the
marriage boom in order to shed light on how the narratives can be said to make the
explanations comprehensible.

4.1. Marriage as a natural life event

What were the reasons for women deciding to get married during the baby boom? In
general, ‘married life’ was regarded as a natural life stage that primarily legitimized
reproduction. Both for the Spanish and the Swedish women, getting married before having
children was described as a very strong norm: ‘We . . . absolutely thought we were going
to get married first [before having children]’ (Sweden, woman born in 1929).
Many of the Spanish women even meant that children were the primary reason why
they got married:
A marriage without children is inconceivable. [Otherwise] it doesn’t make sense to get
married, right?! (Spain, woman born in 1920)
Giving birth to children is the reason why marriage makes sense. A marriage without children
is like a plant without flowers. (Spain, woman born in 1932)
While ‘romantic love’ is often said to have surfaced as an ideal in the nineteenth century
(for a discussion, see Fisher, 2013), this aspect of marriage was clearly downplayed by the
Swedish as well as the Spanish women. There were some exceptions, where the women
told about love as a dream and how they had gone through hardships to get the man
they wanted, despite ambient criticism. Some spoke about parents who had been very
much in love, and how they had themselves dreamed that a man would some day love
them that way. Most of the narratives were, however, marked by what may be called a
discourse on ‘contentment’, and love was described in these narratives as a feeling of
respect and trust that is achieved over time, and not as ‘love at first sight’. This does, of
course, not say much about the feelings that were experienced at the time of meeting their
partners, but it is indicative of a way of narrating.
Marriage was generally described as a ‘natural’ step once a woman had met a partner
who she wanted to live with, and it was also something that the women often claimed not
to have discussed in any detail with anyone – either their friends or their partner. Swedish
women often got married without much fuss, and several women stated that pregnancy
was one important reason for their decision to marry: ‘Well, if I hadn’t got pregnant,
I don’t think we would have married as quickly. In those days you had to marry’ (Sweden,
woman born in 1935). In fact, some even said that they may not have married the same
person if they had not become pregnant.
Unlike the Swedish women, the Spanish women perceived their wedding as one of
their most important life events. Sex outside marriage was surrounded by strong social
sanctions in Spanish society due to the cultural and religious norms of that time, and
premarital pregnancy was less important as a reason for marriage in the Spanish context.
The institution of marriage was not questioned and was considered a vital expectation.
In the Spanish women’s narratives, marriage becomes the fulcrum on which adolescence
turns. Daughters were brought up and educated to be good wives and good mothers by
family members (mainly women), school and the Church. Once they got married – usually
to their first boyfriend – their lives revolved around their husband and children. In the
narratives, marriage was described as the pivotal event that defined their transition from a
girl to a woman and, once they were married, it would be for life:
Was separation (divorce) frowned upon?
 The marriage boom 77

Yes, then, yes! In my time, yes. The elderly, the mothers, the grandmothers, the aunts were
always saying to you [when you got married] that, yes, [marriage] was for life. (Spain, woman
born in 1926)
Although it is true that most of the women, both Spanish and Swedish, talked about
marriage as natural, there were a few exceptions among the (Swedish) women, whose
experiences did not live up to the dominant norms of marriage, and who cohabited and had
children without being married. All of these women eventually married, but they all stated
that it was their husband who had been reluctant, thereby delaying the marriage. This
reluctance was strongly individualized in the narratives. One woman talked about her
husband as having ‘commitment issues’. Another explained her husband’s unwillingness
to marry as an individual interpretation of ‘academic culture’. Others concluded that their
husband was just ‘not the marrying kind’. All of the women with a reluctant husband
positioned themselves as supportive of their husband’s choices. Simultaneously, they all
admitted to being the ones who eventually (and successfully) demanded to be married.
This pattern is supported by studies of Swedish population politics of the 1930s, in which
pro-family policies were primarily directed toward men, who were on average viewed as
being more reluctant to commit to marriage and fatherhood (Hirdman, 1989).
From an international perspective, Sweden is described as a forerunner in the transition
to men and women living together without getting married (Kiernan, 2002). Cohabitation
before marriage rose from approximately 30% of women born in the late 1930s to 90% of
women born at the end of the 1940s (Bracher & Santow, 1998; Henz & Jonsson, 2003,
p. 240; Hoem & Rennermalm, 1985). The interviews gave an interesting insight into this
process from the perspective of women in the older cohorts, showing that cohabitation was
perceived primarily as problematic and as a threat to their security as (future) mothers, and
also to their societal position as women. The Swedish women highlighted how important it
was for them to become respectable in the eyes of others, and that marriage was central to
the achievement of this status. One woman, who worked full-time as a teacher and had no
children, and thus was not economically dependent on her partner, with whom she was
cohabiting, issued an ultimatum to her partner when he did not want to marry her:
‘In that case I’ll go back to Västerås . . . Eh, and then you can do as you like with this
[relationship]. I will not answer the phone in the mornings when the kids [pupils from school]
call to say they’re sick – saying that my name is Bergström and not Nyman!’ That was the
issue, I think. ‘Is that so hard to understand?’ Well, that’s about how we argued.... And then
we got married. (Sweden, woman born in 1928)
It was in relation to the external society – here represented by the pupils – that she wanted
to be Mrs Nyman and not use her maiden name of Bergström. It seemed to be less a
question of embarrassment in relation to the moral status of cohabitation (as some of the
other women touched on) and more a question of attaining the position of a respectable
wife and having the relationship legitimized in the eyes of others. Although the position of
being unmarried while in a relationship had become increasingly possible, it was still
stigmatized for the Swedish women (cf. Kling, 2007).
This example reveals an important force which was present in all the narratives from
both countries and seemed to be a key element in the marital decision-making process:
‘people’s opinions’. When the women were asked if they could remember any policy
incentives to get married and have large families, their answers were clearly negative. The
women had very few memories of such stimuli and seemed to have been more concerned
about what people around them would think. Other people’s opinions also seemed to have
played an important role in the marriage and reproductive decisions of the Spanish women.
The literature, however, has largely ignored the influence of such underlying processes of
78 M. Sánchez-Domı́nguez and A.S. Lundgren

‘neighborhood gossip’ or the demands that were raised explicitly or implicitly by parents
and parents-in-law on the marriage and reproductive decisions made during the marriage
boom period, and very possibly at other times (see, however, Watkins & Danzi, 1995).
The women talked about how family members found the situation of being married and
childless socially undesirable, and they testified to clear expectations that cohabitation
would lead to marriage, just as marriage was expected to lead to children. One Spanish
woman expressed it as follows: ‘If a woman did not have many children, people talked
about her. They said: “notice that she does not have children; how rare that she doesn’t
have any more children”’ (Spain, woman born in 1951). Although some of the interviewed
women never came across these expectations, they were all well aware of them.

4.2. Marriage and religious explanations

A second theme that recurs throughout the narratives is the presence of religion.
The Church and the priest or minister were present in many interviews, especially in the
narratives of the Spanish women, for whom religion seemed central, irrespective of
whether they had lived in urban or rural areas.
The Spanish women often talked about having a lot of children in terms of ‘God’s will’
and ‘a blessing’, in a way that rhetorically transferred the responsibility for their number of
children to God. In 1930, the encyclical Casti Connubii was promulgated by the Catholic
Church, banning any contraceptive method or technique that was not regarded to be ‘natural’
(sexual continence and prolonged lactation) (Guereña, 2004). The ecclesiastical hierarchy
discouraged all methods and, in the 1960s, launched a campaign against the pill, using the
argument that the pill was linked with cancer, acute myocardial infarction and fetal
malformation (Martı́nez, 2005). The Franco regime and the Catholic Church considered that
the true mission of women was to give children to Spain, and, of course, to do so within the
endogamous and indissoluble institution of marriage (Enders & Radcliff, 1999).
The Spanish women for whom religion was a central element of their biographies
generally sympathized with the traditional gender roles advocated by the Church and the
regime, and a common feature of their narratives was the importance they attached to
marriage and the family as fundamental elements in the domestic sphere which women
had traditionally taken care of. In general, the Spanish women claimed that women were
the ones who were particularly subordinated by the conservative values regarding family
life, while men were raised more freely: ‘The women in my family have been socialized in
Catholic values – most conservative traditions. That is not the case with men, where
education was more flexible and open’ (Spain, woman born in 1928).
The Church’s teachings were used to explain why birth control was a particularly
problematic issue. It was evident from the Spanish narratives that the constraints worked
against birth control, especially among the older women. Limiting the number of children
became a problematic issue, both because it meant going against God (and the Church) and
because it affected a woman’s status as a successful – ‘blessed’ – mother.
Despite the importance of this aspect in the women’s reproductive life, some of the
Spanish women provided us with valuable testimonies of the way in which they faced the
Church’s teachings. One woman explained that, during a confession with a priest, she told
him she did not want any more children than the six she already had. The priest then said:
‘If you control the number of children, I will excommunicate you and your children from
the Church’. At that time, excommunication was a serious punishment, but in the
interview she proudly remembered how she replied: ‘That’s fine; do not absolve me. I will
not have any more children’ (Spain, woman born in 1921). The woman was later
 The marriage boom 79

excommunicated. As Tentler (2004) has pointed out, the strict stance taken by the Catholic
Church often forced people to solve their birth-control problems on their own. Although
this statement has been largely tested, it does not provide a full explanation when the
Spanish context is considered. While it is true that there were few Spanish women who
confronted the Church, they did so when they had reached a very high fertility level,
suggesting that the Church’s teachings were important to them during most of their
reproductive life.
Although references to religion (Protestantism) recurred and seemed also to be
important for the Swedish women, specifically for those who had grown up in rural
areas, it did not seem to carry a decisive meaning for their reproductive choices and
understandings. The Swedish women talked much less about religion, and it would be easy
to dismiss its impact. However, both religion and the Church were still present in their
narratives. Similarly to the Spanish women, the Swedish women would say things like
‘children are a blessing’ or use the expression ‘blessed with children’, but for many of the
women these expressions seemed to be more a way of speaking than an actual belief. In the
Swedish interviews, religion was narrated primarily as a source of strength in difficult
situations, rather than a repressive determinant of marital and fertility choices. Only in a
few cases did the women talk explicitly about making choices on the basis of religious
beliefs or being reprimanded by a minister. In those cases, it had to do either with
not wanting faithful parents to know about them dating men who were not available for
marriage or with having children while unmarried:
Yes, we were reprimanded [by the minister] for being unmarried and having children . . . Sure.
That’s how it was. And then I thought, well, ‘No, you don’t have to wed us!’ But we did it after
all in time [for the birth of their third child] . . . No. Ugh. No. I said directly [to my partner]:
‘Apply for banns!’ [The minister] didn’t have to keep on like that, but he was like that. It was
different then. (Sweden, woman born in 1930)
Just as in the case with the excommunicated Spanish woman mentioned above, these
women also positioned themselves in opposition to ministers, emphasizing how they
asserted their right to live the way they wanted. Still, being reprimanded was always
described as shameful and embarrassing, and it was mentioned as one of the circumstances
that had impacted on their eventual decision to marry.
As indicated above, religion was connected to gender regimes, and it has been
suggested that religion influences decision-making within families through imposing
religiously based gender models. For example, Janssens (2007) argues that while the
Catholic gender model supports the husband’s rights to marital sexuality, the Protestant
model has been described to rely more on ‘the husband’s ability to exercise sexual self-
restraint’ (p. 47). Although what Janssens is referring to are the economic costs of having
many children, what was clear from the interviews was that, while this was sometimes true
in the Spanish interviews, where women reported that their husband only wanted as many
children as they could afford education for, the Swedish women quite often referred to
their husband’s anxiety and unwillingness to put his wife through the pain and risks
involved in pregnancy and childbirth. One woman, who had lost her first child during a
complicated delivery, recounted her husband’s reluctance to have more children once they
had a child who survived:
My husband didn’t want any more children . . . It was because it was so terrible the first
time. He thought it was so terrible, so now that we had a child, he didn’t . . . But I said no,
I don’t want just one, because the best thing you can give a child is a brother or sister, and
also, if anything happened to this only child, where would we go? (Sweden, woman born in
1930)
80 M. Sánchez-Domı́nguez and A.S. Lundgren

In none of the cases where a husband’s reluctance was mentioned in the narratives did this
reluctance form the basis for the decision not to have any more children. Rather, such
narratives always ended with the women’s wishes for another child being fulfilled.
The gender model where a husband’s masculinity is connected to self-restraint and
considerateness in relation to his wife has been connected not only to Protestantism
(Janssens, 2007), but also to secularization (Kling, 2010). The latter explanation points to
how it was seen to be possible to plan having children when the notion that they came from
God weakened. Even though the interviewed Swedish women related to this caring
masculinity, they still seldom talked explicitly about choices in relation to having children.

4.3. Marriage, education and work life

The third important theme in the interviews is related to education and work life.
In the Spanish material, the women’s educational trajectories had often been interrupted
by the Spanish Civil War and post-war period. Most of the Spanish informants had
dropped out of elementary school (Catholic schools – typically convent schools or schools
for girls). The women remembered being educated primarily to become good housewives:
‘Women were educated to marry. The women were taught to sew and embroider’
(Spain, woman born in 1951).
The employment history of the interviewed women in both countries can be divided
into two types: paid and unpaid labor. In regard to the latter, many of the women spent
their working lives in the family or family business, usually in farming and livestock
activity. These women did not receive a salary for their work because it was considered
to be their duty. Instead of a salary, they received food generated from the crops and
livestock – mainly milk, beef and pork products. The women who worked in the family
business did not consider it a job in itself and, when asked if they had worked at some point
in their life, the answer was often ‘no’.
During the dictatorship in Spain, there was a reaction against women occupying
certain positions. This was not, however, the reason the interviewed women gave for not
seeking employment. Most of them lacked the education to get such positions and, instead,
they explained their choice as having too much to do at home, where they were responsible
for the housekeeping and looking after their children.
Most of the Spanish women who had had a paid job stopped working when they got
married or had their first child. One woman declared that she had to leave her job as a
stenographer at the Ministry of Labor (a high-status post at that time for a woman) because
she did not have time to prepare lunch for her husband while carrying on in her position.
The Swedish women experienced working as young girls in other people’s households
for minimal wages or for food and shelter, or working on the family farm (if living in rural
areas). These occupations were often viewed as temporary. However, in the Swedish
interviews, there was a greater proportion of women who had higher education, and it was
obvious that education was important to these women. They described getting an
education and being encouraged to do so by their parents, especially their mothers. Several
of the women told of mothers who had given up their aspirations to study or had not used
their education professionally after having children.3 From this perspective, it is safe to say
that the women were affected and influenced by their mothers’ life stories:
I don’t think she had any thoughts of continuing, but she thought, I know she thought . . . She
was, like, eager to study and, well. I don’t think it was good for her not to be a teacher . . . So
she urged me, but I was so convinced that I would work anyway. (Sweden, woman born
in 1926)
 The marriage boom 81

They explicitly referred to these stories as a way of making their choices comprehensible
(cf. Åström, 1986). A similar stimulus for further education and work in order to achieve
social promotion and independence seems to have originated in the mothers of the Spanish
baby boom, and reached its maximum impact in their granddaughters, the daughters of the
mothers of the baby bust.
The Swedish women recalled their negotiations between, on the one hand, finishing
school before getting married and not giving up their career to stay at home with the children
and, on the other hand, starting a family and living up to the norms of womanhood and
motherhood. The women who were gainfully employed often reported having struggled to
work full-time while simultaneously caring for the household and children. One woman
remembered being jealous of a friend who gave up work when having her child, while she
herself continued to struggle with working as a teacher while caring for three small children.
The first reason she gave for her decision was that they needed the money. However, she
then said: ‘But I guess it had also something to do with me not wanting to let go of it! I guess
that had also something to do with it’ (Sweden, woman born in 1926).
These negotiations show that although it had become easier to work while having a
family due to legal reforms,4 this was still an object of concern for the women on an
individual level, partly because the safety net of childcare was not yet sufficient, thus
causing a heavy workload, and partly because of the strong norm of the mother as
housewife. Working full-time was sometimes perceived as indicating either that the
woman was not a good mother or that her husband was unable to provide for the family.
Still, for the Swedish women, staying in employment was legitimized with references not
only to a pressing economic situation, but also to how they enjoyed work. What is more,
although some of the women who had studied to become nurses told about the norm (and
the breaking of the norm) of not dating men during their education, this norm never
seemed to be valid once they had completed their studies.

5. Concluding discussion
We set out to collect data which would allow us to approach an understanding of the ways
the women of the marriage boom might have understood their marital practices, and which
could help to deepen the understanding of existing quantitative findings and demographic
theories. The analysis of how the women talked about and remembered their own reasons
for getting married gives an indication of some of the elements involved in shaping the
marital decisions of women during the marriage boom, and how these elements were
understood and handled.
Many previous explanations for the marriage boom emphasize the importance of the
economic growth that affected many countries in the aftermath of the war (Easterlin, 1987;
Emeka, 2006; Ryder, 1990, p. 447). The economic prosperity of Spain and Sweden in the
1950s and 1960s was certainly commented on by the women who had experienced hardship
during their childhood. A novel finding of this study is, however, that although the improved
economic situation may have been important, it was not explicitly articulated with the
women’s choices regarding marriage. Although the economy may very well have been a
critical precondition, it did not figure as a reason, and none of the women argued that the
economy affected their choice to marry or the timing of the marriage. A few of the Swedish
women said that they had deliberately tried to postpone their first pregnancy due to their
personal economic situation, but such narratives were rare, and most of the interviewed
women had their first child within two years of their marriage. When asked about the use of
contraceptives, very few of the Swedish women and even fewer of the Spanish women
82 M. Sánchez-Domı́nguez and A.S. Lundgren

reported having used contraceptives regularly, and none of them spoke about the new
methods of birth control as an enabler to marry young. This was particularly true for the
Spanish women, for whom birth control had been more or less prohibited.
Overall, our results support the stance taken by researchers who argue in favor of
ideational and cultural explanations (Blake & Gupta, 1975; Lesthaeghe & Surkyn, 1988;
Sandström, 2014). Without denying other explanations, our analyses suggest that in order
to understand the motives and drives of the women of the marriage boom, we need to not
only turn our gaze to the enabling circumstances, such as the economy, policy and
contraceptives, which are important, but also include reflections on how norm systems
worked to make the possibilities offered by these enabling factors desirable to so many
women.
In the analysis of the collected narratives, three themes recurred when the interviewed
women framed their experiences of marriage and starting a family. The themes concerned
marriage as a natural life event, religious beliefs and morals, and education and work life.
The first theme framed marriage as a natural life event, where marriage was
unreflectively seen as the natural step after meeting a partner. In both contexts, other
people’s opinions were framed as specifically important, steering the women’s choices in
certain directions. From this first result, we conclude that, on an individual level, the
women comprehended the entirety of economic, policy and other changes that allowed
more people to get married and at a younger age in terms of general norms cherishing
women’s roles as wife and mother, rather than as concrete possibilities. Few of the women
could recollect any direct memories that the economy or policy had affected their choices.
Although the national contexts differed in this respect, they all described being ‘pushed’
into the decision to marry by comments from priests and ministers, parents and mothers-
in-law, as well as by their own wishes to do what ‘was expected’ and thus become a
respectable woman.
The second theme comprised religious explanations and recurred throughout the
material, although it was more pronounced in the Spanish women’s narratives. This
second result points to the meaning ascribed to the Church in promoting a traditional
gender system and gender roles. Within the women’s narratives, religious beliefs and
Church representatives were constructed as important guardians and explanations for the
norm to marry and have children, as well as for the women’s own decisions to follow the
norms because of fear of shame and embarrassment. There was, however, a tendency in
the narratives that stories about priests or ministers were also used to narrate marital
and reproductive agency that went against these norms. A few women talked proudly
about antagonisms, in which they had explicitly or implicitly opposed a representative of
the Church. These stories are interesting because they suggest that the institution of the
Church was used creatively to frame the women’s decisions.
The third theme concerned education and work life as factors that had impacted on the
women’s lives in general. Whether education had been a precluded possibility, had
focused on the roles as wife and mother or had prepared the women for professional skilled
careers, it surfaced as a decisive factor in the narratives. The oral testimonies presented in
this article indicate that even when working full-time while caring for the household
and several small children was perceived as hard, and sometimes even impossible, the
possibility for higher education and/or employment was never described as competing
with having a family. The question was never whether or not to have a family, but whether
or not to carry on working.
The three themes highlighted by the interviewed women when talking about marriage
can hardly explain the marriage boom itself. They do, however, make visible the ways in
 The marriage boom 83

which the women framed their marital practices, not by describing individual choices and
decisions as the result of their conscious plans for their lives, but by highlighting the norm
systems within which such choices and decisions were made. Although acknowledging
enabling circumstances, such as the improving economy and the increased availability of
contraceptives, when asked to talk about marriage, the women in both countries dwelled
most on what they perceived as strongly coveted incentives and exhorting demands to
marry and have children.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the women who generously shared their memories and reflections with us.
We also wish to thank Esther Abad Baptista and Angelika Sjöstedt Landén, who helped us to carry
out the interviews.

Funding
For Marı́a Sánchez-Domı́nguez, this research was made possible by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from
the Ageing and Living Conditions program at the Centre for Population Studies, Umeå University,
Sweden, and by the Ministerio de Economı́a y Competitividad of Spain [CS02011-24625]. For Anna
Sofia Lundgren, this research was funded by the Ageing and Living Conditions program at the
Centre for Population Studies, Umeå University, Sweden.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1. The need to acknowledge women’s role as decision-makers has been emphasized by
MacKinnon (1995). The decision to interview only women is partly based on Emeka’s (2006)
research, who, referring to Bumpass (1973), suggests that fertility decisions are primarily taken
by women (see also Janssens, 2007). However, the role of men and masculinity remains an
important area of research (Janssens, 2007), and men’s family-size desires have been noted to
have equal effects on birth rates (Thomson, McDonald, & Bumpass, 1990).
2. The introduction of the Contraceptive Act has been interpreted as a case in point that birth
control was, in fact, beginning to be widely discussed as early as 1910 (Lennerhed, 1994,
pp. 29 – 38).
3. Research has pointed to a substantial reduction of what has been called ‘the female educational
penalty on fertility’ during the Swedish baby boom (Sandström, 2014, p. 137).
4. In 1939, dismissing women due to pregnancy, childbirth or marriage was prohibited in Sweden.

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