Overview

In the 1960s, there began three of the greatest social and cultural changes of the Western world. The first was secularisation in the form of the rapid decline of Christianity, most evident in Europe, Canada and Australasia, and which may spread across the world's peoples and faiths. The second was a demographic revolution both in those territories and elsewhere, in which family structure was revolutionised by plunging fertility and marriage rates that may lead the world eventually from population growth. The third was the revolution in women's identities, a transformation in the social construction of gender involving the search for autonomy in sexual expression, education and economic life—an impulse which may, too, spread far across humanity. The hypothesis of this book is that the incidence and spread of these three trends from the 1960s were intimately and causatively interconnected. All three phenomena were sudden though not uniform in their impact. This volume will test their connectedness in four nations—Canada, Ireland, UK and United States—which over the last fifty years have represented different, often seemingly contradictory, points on the journey towards a secular society.