Australia Australia's McCrindle Research uses the name "Builders" to describe the Australian members of this generation, born between 1925 and 1945, and coming of age to become the generation "who literally and metaphorically built [the] nation after the austerity years post-Depression and World War II".
Soviet Union The Silent Generation in the Soviet Union is similar to
Sixtiers. These people were born into
Stalinism, raised during
collectivization, and were witnesses of the
Holodomor. So even though there was no
Great Depression in the Soviet Union, they still experienced a lack of resources and food as children. In the 1930s and 1940s many of them lost their parents or close relatives during
Stalinist repressions and later during
battles and German occupation in WWII. Sometimes this generation is called the "Children of
XX-th Congress".
United Kingdom Childhood and youth carrying
gas masks which were issued to British civilians in 1938 during the
Munich Crisis (1940) There was a slump in birth rates in the UK between the two major baby booms following each
world war. This roughly correlated with the economic downturn in the 1930s and World War II. The era of the Great Depression was a time of deprivation for many children, unemployment was high and slum housing was common. However, education was compulsory from the age of five to fourteen years old. Gaining a place at grammar school was a way for young people whose families could not afford them to be privately educated to gain full access to secondary schooling. In a time before widespread car use, children commonly played outside in the street and further afield without adult supervision. Toys of this era were quite simple but examples included dolls, model aeroplanes, and trains. Other popular activities included reading
comics, playing board games, going to the cinema, and joining children's organizations such as the
scouts. It was estimated that more than 85% of British households owned a wireless (radio) by 1939. The Second World War impacted the lives of children in various ways. Significant numbers of schoolchildren were
evacuated without their parents to the countryside to avoid the threat of bombing throughout the war years. The quality of education fell everywhere but particularly in urban areas for various reasons, including a shortage of teachers and supplies, the distress pupils suffered from air raids and the disruption caused by evacuations. The degree of supervision children received also fell as fathers left to fight and mothers joined the workforce. However,
rationing during World War II and the years after improved the health of the population overall with one study conducted in the early 2000s suggesting that a typical 1940s child ate a healthier diet than their counterpart at the start of the 21st century. Following the Second World War, the school-leaving age was raised to 15 with every child being allocated to one of three types of school based on a
test taken at the age of 11 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (selection between two types of school took place at age 12 in Scotland). The years after the Second World War saw a continuation of difficult social conditions; there was a serious housing shortage and rationing was at times more restrictive than it had been during the war. The late 1940s saw substantial social reforms and changes to the structure of the British economy. Economic conditions and living standards improved significantly during the 1950s and 60s. Unemployment rested at roughly two percent during this period, much lower than it had been during the depression or would be later in the 20th century. Consumer goods such as televisions and household labour saving devices became increasingly common. By the late 1950s, Britain was one of the most affluent societies anywhere in the world. In 1957, 52% of the British population described themselves as "very happy" in comparison to 36% in 2005. That year, Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan famously said: The idea of the "teenager" as a distinctive phase of life associated with rebellion against adult authority and older generations social norms became increasingly prominent in public discourse during the 1940s and 50s, though in many ways those reaching maturity in the years after the Second World War were quite traditionally conservative in experience and attitudes.
National service (
military conscription) was reintroduced after the war and continued throughout the 1950s. Young people would often attend ballroom dances to socialise and find potential romantic partners. The average age of first marriage in England and Wales fell reaching its lowest level in more than a hundred years by the late 1960s of 27.2 and 24.7 years for men and women respectively. Cultural norms and government policy encouraged marriage and women to focus on their role as homemaker, wife and mother whilst their husband acted as the household's primary
breadwinner. The treatment of those who did not meet society's expectations in their personal lives was often quite unsympathetic. Abortion and homosexuality were illegal whilst later investigations suggest that many women who gave birth out of wedlock had their babies forcibly removed from them. Laws were liberalised significantly in the late 1960s, but change was slower in certain areas in Scotland and Northern Ireland. this combined with a
global energy crisis and influx of cheap goods from Asia led to rapid
deindustrialisation by the mid 1970s. New jobs were either low wage or too high-skilled for those laid off. This situation led to significant political instability and industrial unrest causing a great deal of frustration and inconvenience to the general public. Meanwhile, another set of problems was developing in Northern Ireland where politics had become increasingly tense and divided during the 1960s. This developed into a sectarian conflict with the British Army involved known as
The Troubles which continued over several decades. This conflict caused more than 3,500 deaths. In 1979,
Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and brought about the end to some aspects of the
Post-war consensus on economic policy. For instance, her government created the
right-to-buy scheme which allowed renters to buy up their
council homes at a reduced prices. Middle aged people were one of the social groups which particularly benefited from this policy. Her policies have been described as giving millions of people direct ownership of
capital through
share or house ownership but have also been associated with high unemployment, rising poverty and social unrest. ,
Northern Ireland (2010) For several decades prior to 2010, women received the
State Pension from the age of 60 and men from the age of 65. A 2019 report stated that Pensioner
Poverty in the UK had increased rapidly during the 1970s and the 1980s but fell in the 1990s and early 21st century. According to the report 20% of the silent generation, which it described as individuals born from 1926 to 1945, had lived in poverty at the age of 70 in comparison to 45% of the Greatest Generation and 15% of baby boomers at similar ages. The report attributed the change to more
private pensions, increased home ownership and government policy. Commentators suggested that older people were somewhat insulated from the effects of the
austerity programme in the 2010s. Though pensioner poverty was rising slightly by the mid to late 2010s and early 2020s, especially among women. The average life expectancy was around 80 years old, a few years older for women than men, in the late 2000s and 2010s.
General trends An analysis of
British Election Study surveys for the
1964 to
2019 general elections suggested that the Silent Generation as a cohort became more likely to vote for the
Conservative Party as they grew older. The results suggested that at 35 years old, people born from 1928 to 1945 were about 5 percentage points less likely to vote Conservative than the national average, but that by the time they were 70 years old, they were about ten percentage points more likely to do so than the national average. They were, however, by the end of the time period studied, less likely to vote for the Conservatives than the next youngest age group, baby boomers. An article on the analysis commented that it is conventional wisdom that people become more conservative as they get older but that is not true of all the age groups the analysis covered and environmental factors are also important in influencing the development of voter behavior.
United States As children and adolescents during the
Great Depression As a cultural narrative, the Silent Generation are described as children of the
Great Depression whose parents, having revelled in the highs of the
Roaring Twenties, now faced great economic hardship and struggled to provide for their families. Before reaching their teens, they shared with their parents the horrors of
World War II but through children's eyes. Many lost their fathers or older siblings who were killed in the war. They saw the fall of
Nazism and the catastrophic devastation made capable of the
nuclear bomb. When the Silent Generation began coming of age after World War II, they were faced with a devastated social order within which they would spend their early adulthood and a new enemy in
Communism via the betrayal of post-war agreements and rise of the
Soviet Union. Unlike the previous generation who had fought for "changing the system," the Silent Generation was about "working within the system." They did this by keeping their heads down and working hard, thus earning themselves the "silent" label. Their attitudes leaned toward not being risk-takers and playing it safe.
Fortune magazine's story on the College Class of '49 was subtitled "Taking No Chances". This generation was also heavily influenced by the transformations brought about by the
Golden Age of Radio, the rise of trade unions, the development of
transatlantic flight and the discovery of
penicillin during their formative years. As with their own parents, Silents tended to marry and have children young. American Silents are noted as being the youngest of all American generations in the age of marriage and parenthood. As young parents, the older members of this generation primarily produced the
later baby boomers, while younger members of the generation and older members who held off raising a family until later in life gave birth to
Generation X. Whereas divorce in the eyes of the previous generation was considered aberrant behavior, the Silents were the generation that reformed marriage laws to allow for divorce and lessen the stigma. This led to a historically unprecedented wave of divorces among Silent Generation couples in the United States. Critics of the theory that Silents tend towards conformity and playing it safe note that, at least in the United States, leaders of 1960s-era rebellion/innovation/protest such as
Muhammad Ali,
Bob Dylan,
Noam Chomsky,
Martin Luther King Jr., and
Jimi Hendrix were members of the Silent Generation, and not
baby boomers, for whom these figures were heroes, although the majority of their followers were Boomers. Widely seen as "following the rules" and benefiting from stable wealth creation, their Boomer and Gen X children would become estranged from them due to their different views regarding social issues of the day and their relatively decreased economic opportunity, creating a different generational
zeitgeist. For example, the Boomer children were instrumental in bringing about the
counterculture of the 1960s, and the rise of left wing, liberal views considered
anti-establishment, which went directly against the "work within the system" approach that many Silents had practiced.
Gen X children grew up in the 1970s and 1980s with the threat of
nuclear annihilation hanging over them and a resultant bleak view of the future, contributing to their generational disaffection, in contrast to the optimistic outlook of their Silent Generation parents. The style of parenting from the
Lost Generation or the
Interbellum Generation (older members of the
Greatest Generation) was known to the Silents and the generations before them originated in the late 1800s, when the Lost Gens were children or teenagers. Representative of this was the idea that "children should be seen but not heard". These ideas were ultimately challenged following the 1946 publication of the book
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by
Benjamin Spock, which influenced some Boomers' views on parenting and family values when they became parents themselves. The book also influenced how baby boomers were parented. These less-restrictive behavioral standards, seen as overly permissive by the Silents, further estranged those Boomers from their parents and, among other things, gave rise in the 1970s to the term
generation gap. This was to describe the initial conflict of cultural values between the Silents and
Generation Jones (younger baby boomers) and to a lesser extent their
Generation X children in the 1980s, although it was not quite as extreme as it was between the
Greatest Generation and the "Leading Edge Boomers" (older baby boomers) in the 1960s. ==Demographics==