" The cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. By the end of the 1950s even people who had grown up in completely different family systems had come to believe that universal marriage at a young age into a male breadwinner family was the traditional and permanent form of marriage. "

― Stephanie Coontz , Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage