In the past decade or so, sociologists and other social scientists have borrowed from demographers the concepts and techniques of cohort analysis for studying the process of social change. To state it simply: Social change has been viewed as the succession of cohorts through various stages of the life cycle. This cohort-analytic perspective highlights three important components of social change: (1) change associated with the aging process; (2) change associated with changes in the "external" environment; and (3) change associated with the replacement of one group of people (usually the succession of age groups) by the next.
Consider, first, the aging process: An individual's life is patterned by a variety of role sequences, probably the most important of which is the family life cycle, but also including sequences of student, career, and community roles. The combination and juxtaposition of various role sequences provide texture to an individual life cycle. Certain roles are traditionally associated with certain ages: student roles with the young; parental roles with the middle years; life alone (whether as a result of divorce, widowhood, or lifelong singleness) with the middle aged and elderly.
Second, the historical times during which an individual matures also affect expectations and behavior: the 1930s Depression, World War ll and the Vietnam War-all have an impact on patterns of marriage, fertility, and employment.
Finally, each birth cohort has a unique pattern of experiences as it progresses through the life cycle, experiences that may be seen as the interaction of the aging process and the period during which it occurs. The cohort that grew up and reached maturity during the 1930s bears the mark of the Depression. The baby-boom cohort faces (and will continue to face) sharp competition for education, for jobs, and for a variety of social services-the consequences of belonging to a group that is larger than both the group it follows and the one that will follow it.
The combination of the notion of the life cycle (and sub-cycles within it) and the notion of cohort succession provides a powerful tool for characterizing and understanding some of the recent changes in the roles and status of American women. Some of these changes have resulted from changes in the perception of appropriate role sequences for women; some are the result of the interaction of social, political, and economic events of the 1960s and 1970s; and some of the changes (and certainly the speed of the changes) may be attributed to the fact that the cohort that reached maturity in the past few years is not an ordinary cohort but rather the baby-boom generation.
Let us examine, briefly, some of these changes. It was noted at the outset that the family life cycle constitutes perhaps the most important sub-current of an individual's life cycle. It is certainly the most important sub-cycle if that individual happens to be a woman. In fact, the tendency until recently has been to equate the family life cycle with the female life cycle. After all, most women marry at some point in their life, and most married women have children. In 1974, for instance, 95 per cent of all women 35 and older had been married at least once, and all but about 10 per cent of them had had at least one child (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1974d, 1975a). Most women's lives have been regulated by the family life cycle, their "career" choices to one extent or another circumscribed by the responsibilities attending their family roles-the bearing and rearing of children.
From this presumed identity of female and family life cycles, there developed well-defined notions of what activities and roles are appropriate for women of different ages, corresponding to different stages of the family life cycle. These expectations were, to some extent, suspended for women who did not fit the mold: the 5 per cent or 10 per cent who never married, and the ever-increasing number of divorced, separated, and widowed women. Thus there developed the notion that there are two categories of women: those who are married and those with careers.
In fact, of course, such a dichotomy never existed. In 1950, one quarter of all married women who were living with their husbands were in the labor force, and more than one quarter of all women in intact marriages who had school-age children were employed: more than 10 per cent of married women with husband present and preschool children were in the labor force. And the number of women who combine career and family roles has risen steadily since then. Nevertheless, it has only been in the last decade or so that notions about what activities and roles are appropriate for women at each stage of the family/female life cycle have become somewhat less rigid. Slowly, social definitions of women's roles are catching up with reality.
Many have seen this trend as the increasing overlap and similarity of men's and women's life cycles. An alternative is to view this trend as the decreasing salience of marriage and the family in the life choices of women. In a recent article, Presser (1973) examined some of the consequences for women and for the family of perfect fertility control. Many of the changes she envisioned are becoming evident in the trends to be highlighted in this article: continuing education for women, an orientation toward lifelong careers, smaller families, and child-free marriages. This is not to suggest that all of these changes may be directly attributed to greater contraceptive efficiency. But what it does suggest is that the distinction (in terms of roles and expectations) between child-free women and those with children (whether by choice or through contraceptive failure) is gradually disappearing. Or, to phrase it differently, the family life cycle is becoming but one of a number of sub-currents in the lives of American women.
In documenting some of the facets of this general trend, it is important not only to examine changes in several key aspects of women's (and men's) lives-education, marriage and the establishment of a separate household, childbearing, and labor force participation-but also to examine these changes with a view to the variable effects on different age groups at different stages in the life cycle.
Conclusion
At the outset it was suggested that one way of summarizing these various trends was in terms of the declining importance of the family life cycle in the woman's total life cycle-the diminishing social importance of the distinction between married women and those who are unmarried (never married, no longer married and not yet married). In examining this general proposition, recent changes in a number of areas which have a direct impact on a woman's life choices were highlighted: education, marriage, childbearing, and employment.
The essential message has been: The traditional family life cycle for women has been slowly disappearing for the past quarter century; the rapid-paced changes of the past decade have released the secret, and another sacred myth is being dispelled. With the death of the myth, little doubt now exists that during the last decades of the century these trends will exert a profound effect on family, economy, social values- and, of course, the changing bases of self-identification and of sex roles.
