I am actually reading the book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, rather than just opining about it. It's really quite good -- a lot of compelling facts presented in a very well written and argued fashion. I am probably going to do a couple of more posts about it. But I wanted to share one set of facts that corresponds with something I asserted the other day about my age cohort sort of being in the on the ground floor of this evolving family structure, particularly as it relates to the role of women:
Of the women born in 1950 and entering college in the late '60s, half were married by the age of 23. For those born 7 years later, in 1957, and entering college in the mid to late 1970s, fewer than 30% were married by 23, a year after the normal age of college graduation. With the decline in birthrates [attributable to the widespread availability of the birth control pill] a new cadre of women not only secured university degrees but entered the professions. Between 1950 and 1970, the percentage of women in professional schools stayed flat with no more than 1% in medicine (.1%), law (0.04%), dentistry (0.01%) and business administration (0.03%). By 1980, the numbers had jumped to 30% in medicine, 36% in law, 19% in dentistry, and 28% in business.
Those are pretty amazing numbers -- from less than 1% of students at schools of law and medicine in 1970 to about a third of them by 1980 -- (and of course now more than half of them.) Those numbers represent a quiet revolution, one which, I will argue later has helped foster a culture of masculine panic (Amanda has written quite a bit about this) among the right wing commentariat.
By the time I entered law school in 1982, most major law schools were pretty close to a fifty-fifty split, with men only marginally outnumbering women.
