From Countercultural Trend to Strategy for the Financially Insecure: Premarital Cohabitation and Premarital Cohabitors, 1956-2015

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Arielle Kuperberg, Associate Professor (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Arielle Kuperberg, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies, UNC Greensboro.In the early 1960s, fewer than 3 percent of women who married for the first time had lived with their husband before the wedding. As late as 1968, news of a college student living with her boyfriend touched off a national scandal. As you can see in Figure 1 (below), even by the end of the 1970s, fewer than one-third of first marriages began after premarital cohabitation. Since the mid-1990s, however, cohabiting before marriage has become the norm. Between 2011 and 2015, around 70 percent of women marrying for the first time had lived with their husband before marriage, and a 2015 national poll of U.S. adults found that only 17% believed living together outside of marriage was not an acceptable way of life.

Additional Information

Publication
Language: English
Date: 2018
Keywords
financial insecurity, marriage and family, premarital cohabitation

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