Baby Boom and Echo



Baby Boom and Echo

Questions Page 151

1. Suggest three difficulties war veterans would have had in readjusting to civilian life. How did Canada try to ease this transition?

- On returning home to civilian life, many war veterans would have found that their former jobs had been filled in their absence. Those who had left for the war in their late teens and early twenties would need to pick up where they left off in their education and planning for their future. The government tried to ease their transition by giving them priority when hiring for government jobs, passing laws to allow veterans to return to their pre-war jobs and counting military service toward workplace seniority, and arranging to provide low-cost home mortgages and education loans.

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2. Why were marriage rates high after World War II? How did this affect demography?

- people were eager to resume normal lives after years of hardship. Many marriages had been delayed because of the war. Youth immigrating to Canada and the US were of the age to get married. The demographic effect was a rapid rise in the number of children born immediately after the war -the start of the baby boom.

3. Explain how both immigration and societal values accelerated the baby boom.

- most of the people arriving from other countries were young (less than 35); So essentially, North America got many babies that would have been born in Europe.

- marriage, home, and family were as important to these new arrivals as they were to others in Canada at the time.

- Societal values held marriage and family as the norm and even as the best route to respectability. To remain unmarried could raise suspicion of personality problems, or perhaps of homosexuality.

- sex outside of marriage was not tolerated. These values combined to accelerate the baby boom.

5. A great many Canadian marriages from the 1940s and 1950s lasted for a long time. Develop a list of five good reasons that could be used to account for this.

- The values of the time generally assumed that marriage was forever

- Divorce was not available other than for people who could prove infidelity or physical abuse. The Divorce Act was not passed until 1968 which eased the requirements for divorce.

- The gender roles of the time also contributed to longer lasting marriages. Women were likely to be busy with children and domestic matters rather than work outside the home, making it more difficult for women to choose to leave a marriage and strike out on their own.

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