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The authors identify basic features of womens changing lives from greater personal control over life outcomes to their greater independence relative to family claims and sum up the general picture with a concept of the woman as a primary individual. This story focuses on the women who married and gave birth to children in the baby boom of postwar America the women of the baby-boom generation itself and their daughters who are encountering a period of higher levels of womens paid employment marital instability and economic pressure. Across the generations the primary individual among women feels more personal efficacy and less constraint from family and time family events later in their lives in response to career needs and personal desires. Within a broader time span this new life course can actually be seen to have more in common with the lives of women around 1900 than with the lives of mothers of the baby boom. The latter now appear among all the generations of the 20th century to be the unique group given their pattern of early marriage and parenthood. The authors achieve a valuable beginning in charting the life patterns of American women across historical time and to a lesser extent across the lifetime of individual women and cohorts. The task of linking actual social changes (such as recessions and wars) to womens lives is left untouched. A 2nd task involves analyzing connections across a womans life. Lastly more research is needed on the relation between early and later events in the life course. Whatever the nature of social change this volume underscores the importance of a broad historical timeline in studies of successive generations or cohorts.
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