Reconsidering the Historical Roots of Cohabitation: A Comparative Perspective on the Role of the Previously Married

Megan M. Sweeney , University of California, Los Angeles
Patrick Heuveline, University of California, Los Angeles

Few social transformations have captured the attention of contemporary family demographers more than the late 20th century rise of nonmarital cohabitation. Consistent with the classic demographic notion of young adults as “the engines of social change,” studies of the revolutionary rise in cohabitation across the globe have generally focused on young and/or unmarried people. Yet suggestive evidence of a somewhat earlier emergence of cohabitation among the previously married than never married population has received remarkably little rigorous attention to date, despite considerable interest in understanding the historical roots of cohabitation and the possible interrelationships between cohabitation and divorce. Our study offers a fresh perspective on the origins of the cohabitation revolution, focusing on cohabitation’s late twentieth century rise among the separated and divorced. We analyze data on the rise of cohabitation among women from selected countries in the Fertility and Family Survey (FFS), with retrospective relationships histories collected largely in the early to mid-1990s. We include data from seven countries in the FFS, including those with upper age thresholds of at least 49 years and with non-marginal levels of cohabitation at the time of survey: Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Latvia, New Zealand, and Switzerland. We use both birth and separation cohorts to rigorously document the historical rise of cohabitation among previously-married women in our study countries, as well as investigating the potential educational selectivity of the early cohorts of previously-married cohabitors. Taken together, we expect that our results will extend the narrative of the late twentieth century cohabitation revolution.

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 Presented in Session 31. Time Trends in Family and Household Types