Title:	Renewing the Family: A History of the Baby Boomers
Authors:	Catherine Bonvalet • Céline Clément • Jim Ogg Éric Brian
Keywords:	Renewing
Issue Date:	2015
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The post-war baby boom phenomenon is still a source of enigma today, even for demographers. Do baby boomers really represent a homogeneous and specific generation? To what extent have they contributed to the drastic family transformations of the last five decades? Do they bear some responsibility for the current social problems regularly raised by politicians and the media, such as youth delinquency and violence, negative impacts of divorce, weakening of social links, decline of authority and respect, loss of references, etc.? Baby boomers arouse questions and ambivalence. On the one hand, the fertility recovery which occurred suddenly after the Second World War in most industrialized countries was received as a wonderful promise for hope in the future and even in some countries, like France, as a miracle after a long period of low fertility and strong pro-birth movements and policies; but on the other hand, this baby boom was progressively understood as a source of small revolutions and new claims in the sphere of private life, contributing to dismantling the previous social order and centrally the male breadwinner gender contract. Ambivalence between innovation and promises of gender equality, on the one side, and individualism and fear of egoism, on the other. Nowadays, baby boomers are looked through the lens of a new collective “problem”: the papy boom. Catherine Bonvalet, Céline Clément and Jim Ogg’s book is the perfect tool to understand this process of change in private life. When following the succession of generations, that is to say, historical and sociological generations (people born at the same period, who have witnessed the same events at the same age), but also generations as we consider them in kinship (people situated between ascendants and descendants), one can understand concretely what these changes mean as an experience for the actors. The authors propose from the outset a distinction in this large generation between a first wave, born between 1946 and 1954 and a second one, born between 1955 and 1973. The famous year 1968 represents a turning point for this distinction as it is certainly different to experience this historical event at 13 or 14 years old or between 18 and 22. But the main argument refers to the gap in terms of socialization and living conditions: the first wave experienced the postwar frugality, scarcity, rationing and resourcefulness, whilst the second grew up in a context of economic growth and prosperity and enjoyed greater social mobility and a much better quality of life during the “Thirty golden years”. Among its numerous qualities, this book gives us a complete state of the art of academic discussion concerning the baby boom, its understanding from a demographic but also sociological point of view. It presents the main relevant results of large national and international databases, underlines the crucial role of the gender variable to understand social changes, so much it is true that women were frequently the main actors of the process of transformation during these decades. It also provides a very useful comparative counterpoint when looking at the differences between France and the United Kingdom. However, the book does not offer a systematic comparison between these two countries, but more a qualitative and in-depth study of the cultural differences, since many very close economic and sociological indicators could let us expect more similarities
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53735
ISBN:	978-3-319-08545-6
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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