{"id":70170,"date":"2017-04-24T09:06:53","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T14:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=70170"},"modified":"2017-04-18T23:03:39","modified_gmt":"2017-04-19T04:03:39","slug":"start-a-family-began-to-mean-have-children-more-recently-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/04\/24\/start-a-family-began-to-mean-have-children-more-recently-than-you-think\/","title":{"rendered":"“Start a family” began to mean “have children” more recently than you think"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

It looks like the phrase \u201cstart a family\u201d started to mean \u201chave children\u201d (after marriage) sometime in the 1930s and didn\u2019t catch on till the 1940s or 1950s, which happens to be the most pro-natal period in U.S. history. Here\u2019s the Google ngrams trend for the phrase as percentage of all three-word phrases in American English:<\/p>\n

\"startfamngram\"<\/p>\n

Searching the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, I found the earliest uses applied to fish (1931) and plants (1936).<\/p>\n

Twitter reader Daniel Parmer relayed<\/a> a use from the\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>\u00a0on 8\/9\/1937, in which actress Merle Oberon said, \u201cI hope to be married within the next two years and start a family. If not, I shall adopt a baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next appearance in the NYT was 11\/22\/1942, in a book review\u00a0in which a man marries a woman and \u201cbrings her home to start a family.\u201d After that it was 1948,\u00a0in this 5\/6\/1948 description of those who would become baby boom families, describing a speech by Ewan Clague, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who is remembered for<\/a>\u00a0introducing statistics on women and families into Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. From NYT<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"claguenyt\"<\/p>\n

That NYT reference is interesting because it came shortly after the first use of \u201cstart a family\u201d in the JSTOR database that unambiguously refers to having children, in a report published by Clague\u2019s BLS:<\/p>\n

Trends of Employment and Labor Turn-Over:\u00a0<\/strong>Monthly Labor Review<\/em>, Vol. 63, No. 2 (AUGUST 1946): \u2026Of the 584,000 decline in the number of full-time Federal employees between June 1, 1945 and June 1, 1946, almost 75 percent has been in the women\u2019s group. On June 1, 1946, there were only 60 percent as many women employed full time as on June 1, 1945. Men now constitute 70 percent of the total number of full-time workers, as compared with 61 percent a year previously. Although voluntary quits among women for personal reasons, such as to join a veteran husband or to start a family<\/strong>, have been numerous, information on the relative importance of these reasons as compared with involuntary lay-offs is not available\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s interesting that, although this appears to be a pro-natal shift, insisting on children before the definition of family is met, it also may have had a work-and-family implication of leaving the labor force. Maybe it reinforced the naturalness of women dropping out of paid work when they had children, something that was soon to emerge as a key battle ground in the gender revolution.<\/p>\n

Philip N. Cohen, PhD is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He writes the blog\u00a0Family Inequality<\/a>\u00a0and is the author of <\/em>The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change<\/a>. You can follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Note:\u00a0Rose Malinowski Weingartner, a student in Cohen’s\u00a0graduate seminar last year, wrote a paper about this concept, which helped him\u00a0think about this.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Family Inequality. It looks like the phrase \u201cstart a family\u201d started to mean \u201chave children\u201d (after marriage) sometime in the 1930s and didn\u2019t catch on till the 1940s or 1950s, which happens to be the most pro-natal period in U.S. history. Here\u2019s the Google ngrams trend for the phrase as percentage of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":70171,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,23384,253,272,85],"class_list":["post-70170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-history","tag-marriagefamily","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/04\/7.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70170"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70174,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70170\/revisions\/70174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}