Iceland - A portrait of America : the demographic perspective

The lives of Americans have changed spectacularly from the colonial times to the present. The late eighteenth-century American woman, for example, would most likely have been of English extraction and lived in a rural community somewhere on the East Coast, such as in Massachusetts or Virginia. If she were in her mid-20s she would already be married and would eventually give birth to about seven children, though some would die in childhood. She would consider herself lucky if she lived to see her 70th birthday. She would work with her husband on a family farm, focusing mostly on tasks in and around the house. The family would live modestly but fairly well as compared with people in many other countries. Conveniences we take for granted today were still far in the future, as families relied on outhouses rather than indoor plumbing, hand washing of clothes and dishes rather than machines of convenience, candles (often homemade) rather than lightbulbs, and communication in person or by slow mail rather than tweets, texts, e-mails, telephones, or even telegrams. The final battle of the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain, for example, was fought two weeks after the treaty ending the war had been signed in Europe but before any of the combatants in New Orleans received word of it.

The typical American woman today is still of European extraction, though many around her are not. She lives in a metropolitan area farther south and especially west, such as in Houston, Chicago, or Phoenix. If she is still in her mid-20s she likely lives alone, with friends, or a cohabiting partner, though by the time she is in her 30s she more likely than not is married and will have two children. While she has primary responsibilities for taking care of the children, she also works for payperhaps to hedge her bets against future family instability and divorce. She will live long and have a good chance to live to see her 80th birthday, if not her 90th. While she might struggle to achieve a middle-class standard of living, she has more money and conveniences than her grandparents and considerably more than several generations before.

All of this is to illustrate that the United States is a country that has experienced profound changes. The gentlemen farmers who founded the nation on Enlightenment principles in the eighteenth century, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, gave way to the nation builders and industrialists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Andrew Jackson, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Henry Ford. The past one hundred years have been equally tumultuous, as our country witnessed two world wars, a deep depression, and yet also the consolidation of the welfare state and tremendous growth in living standards. Even if we narrow the window to the last fifty years, by any measure the change in American society has been astounding. Consider thisin the United States between 1960 and 2010

The population increased from 179 million to 309 million.

The percentage of births to unmarried women soared from 5 percent to 41 percent.

The number of immigrants who entered annually increased from about 270,000 to over 1 million. The percentage of immigrants who were from Europe declined from 75 percent to 12 percent.

The percentage of the population who had finished high school rose dramatically from 41 percent to 87 percent.

Median family income rose from $36,000 to $60,000 (in 2010 dollars), though accompanying declines in poverty were more moderate, from 22 to 15 percent. Notably, the African American poverty rate, while still

After no progress from 1960 to 1980, the earnings of full-time working women as a percentage of mens began to rise from 60 in 1980 to 77 in 2010.