Given the importance attached to the inculcation of appropriate gender roles and the emphasis placed on the creation of an orderly and stable home and family in the years following World War II, it should come as no surprise that many American parents were virtually obsessed in the 1940s and 1950s with ensuring that their children entered into appropriate relationships with the opposite sex. This was especially true of the parents of girls. While boys could find other paths to manhood through working or entering into military service, post-war culture emphasized that the only acceptable option for girls was to marry and start a family – and to do so as soon as possible.

Not only were parents anxious for their daughters to find husbands, but the nation as a whole looked to marriage as the solution to many of Cold War America's perceived problems. In the period following World War II, the United States suffered a ‘masculinity crisis’. American manhood, it was feared, was in jeopardy. During the war, while men were overseas, their wives and teenage children had become independent and self-supporting. Between 1940 and 1945, the number of women working outside the home rose by more than 50 per cent. Most of the new female workers were married. By the end of the war, nearly 25 per cent of married American women had jobs outside the home.