Firstborn Boomers

Tom Poppendieck, a 1946 firstborn, with his parents.

In 1945, there were over 12 million men in the US military; about 2 million were in Europe and another half million were in the Pacific. By the end of the year, both wars were over and millions of men were heading home after two or three years of service.

While they were gone, the women they left behind kept the wartime economy going, but many were looking forward to giving up their jobs for motherhood. In 1946, 3½ million babies were born – and a disproportionately large fraction of them did not have older siblings. This gave the firstborn boomers an extra dose self-confidence (as the oldest child) and self-interest (as the only child). 

The 1946 cohort of boomers graduated from high school in 1964 and 1965, becoming college students in the late ‘60’s. Given their firstborn bias, it's no surprise that when the group reached college, they tended to march and protest with little provocation. 

In fact, there was plenty of provocation:

1.   The Selma to Montgomery marches occurred soon after the firstborn boomers started college. Advocacy for racial equality caught their attention and generated widespread marches and protests during their early college years.

Selma Sympathy march at Marquette University, March 1965

2.  John F Kennedy had been assassinated in their last years of high school. Martin Luther King was assassinated before they graduated from college. Robert F Kennedy was assassinated two months later.

Marquette Student Union, 1966

3. The war in Vietnam was heating up, and it directly affected the firstborn boomers: virtually all the men faced being drafted into military service upon graduation.

War Moratorium March on Washington, November 15, 1969

4, Protests on campus heated up as the war dragged on and it became more difficult to avoid being drafted.

University of Maryland Cambodia Demonstration, May 4, 1970

5. The birth control pill, approved by the FDA during their high school years, became widely available while the group was in college. Meanwhile, Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” which led many women to question gender roles and domestic expectations. 

Betty  Friedan at Marquette University in 1966

Clearly, women were on the better side of history in the late 1960's. 

I entered college just before the first cohort of baby boomers. Upon graduation, I landed a job at Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois, programming some of the earliest electronic switching systems for telephones. At the time, men were so likely to get drafted that hiring women was a safer bet.

I later moved to the University of Wisconsin Physics Department, where I programmed research computers. I was able to modify my hours to fit my growing family, and had access to an early day care center as it was being established.

Mary Poppendieck with Dustin and Andrea in the University of Wisconsin Physics lab, 1973

Two of my sisters went to college a year ahead and a year behind me. Upon graduation, all three of us took jobs as programmers, which we held for decades, contrary to the expectation that women would stop working when they had children. 

How did this happen?  First of all, (as I mentioned) men were more likely to get drafted and leave than women were likely to get pregnant and leave, undermining that age-old excuse for not hiring women. Second, early computers often replaced secretarial work, so there was a bias in favor of hiring women as programmers. 

But perhaps the most important factor was the practical ability to manage the size of our families while the coalition of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm changed the way our generation thought about women, work, and family.