How Did The Great Depression Affect Women In The 50's

WW2 was finally over and the horrors of the Great Depression were gone. People started spending again and started to relax! Men were coming home to their wives and starting new families and it was finally a happy period in the United States. Consumer goods were being produced and we felt like that we finally had power again. However, not all of society was feeling happy as to what was shown on television. American society in the 50s was very gilded because of the consumer goods being produced, lot’s of dating and babies, but also the depression women had faced in this era.

Many good consumer goods started getting produced during the 50s which was a very positive thing because Americans didn’t have to worry about losing their money again. Car registrations soared along with birth rate: from 26 million in 1945 to 40 million in 1950 to 60 million by the end of the decade. Americans can finally enjoy the
Every 7 seconds, the Birth Light blinked off a new baby. Wow! Parents were being more sexually active because they weren’t together for a couple of years because of the war effort. Women weren’t working anymore and all parents ever wanted were families, so they had babies. Just like parents, teens were similar. A study in one Pennsylvania school district in 1961 found that 40% of the 5th graders were already dating. 40%! That’s a lot for those 12 year olds. Teens were also falling in love and tried to have sex, just like their parents. That’s a wow. Since babies were being produced, so were diapers! Diapers went from a $32-million industry in 1947 to $50 million in 1957. Many workers who actually made money off of diapers must have been real happy. You can’t have diapers without someone to wear them, so this shows that babies kept coming into this world. In this era, many parents just wanted to relax together and start families, thus having an increase in the production of