The official baby boom—the period between the 1930s and 1960s when birth rates soared in the West—is so famous that its fame obscures its strangeness. Imagine being a journalist or demographer in 1925. For the previous 100 years, going back to the early 1800s, the fertility rate in the U.S. and practically every other rich country had steadily declined toward the replacement rate of 2.1.1 Nothing in the history of western family life or economics could have predicted what happened next.
In the 1930s and 1940s, fertility in the U.S. surged suddenly by more than 70 percent. It happened in cities and in rural areas; among working women and non-working women; among college graduates and couples who didn’t finish high school; among white and nonwhite couples; in the U.S., Europe, and beyond. In Birth Quake, the Barnard economist Diane J. Macunovich called the baby boom “a totally unexpected, earth-shattering, and ground-breaking event experienced not just in the United States, but in virtually the entire Western industrialized world.”