American Women’s Transition to Adulthood in Comparative Perspective

Elizabeth Fussell, Tulane University
Anne H. Gauthier, University of Calgary

In this paper we compare the transition to adulthood for women in the United States with that of women in countries with contrasting social, economic, and policy contexts. We use simple measures that impose an analytic framework on the data to illustrate differences in the degree of adherence to a “traditional” pattern of family formation between cohorts and nations. We use data from the United States’ National Survey of Family Growth and the Family and Fertility Surveys for Canada, Germany, Italy, and Sweden to compare the experience of two cohorts of women: one that came of age in the 1970s and another in the 1980s. We compare these cohorts in terms of the timing of their acquisition of family statuses (leaving the parental home, cohabitation, marriage, and childbearing), the prevalence of these transitions within cohorts, and the combinations of statuses that the cohort acquires by a given age.