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Austria Family Developments after the 1960s
Beginning in the 1970s, a number of trends appeared that
represented a dramatic change in attitudes toward the ideals of
marriage and family. There was a sharp drop in the birth rate and
a decrease in family size, accompanied by a greater prevalence of
people who never married, people who divorce, single-parent
families, cohabitating couples, and marriages without children.
In the early 1990s, fewer Austrian women were bearing
children--an estimated 20 to 30 percent will never have a child--
and those who have children are bearing fewer. After the end of
the "baby boom" of the early 1960s, the Austrian fertility rate
dropped steadily from 2.82 to an all-time low of 1.44 in 1989
(then increased marginally to 1.50 by 1991). Family size has
shrunk correspondingly. Marriage without children was twice as
common in 1990 (32.9 percent) as in the previous generation, and
the number of families having three or more children dropped by
more than half (to 10.7 percent). Families having one or two
children accounted for roughly one-third and one-fourth of
families, respectively, in the early 1990s. Large families are
most common among farmers, who have a historical and economic
tradition of having many children, and among working-class women
having little education.
Between 1970 and 1990, the number of single-parent families
increased almost five times faster than the traditional twoparent families. In 1990 there were 235,000 single-parent
families in Austria, about 15 percent of all families. Nearly 90
percent of single parents were women. Some of these single-parent
households resulted from women's conscious choice to bear
children without marrying. More often, however, divorce was the
cause; more than one-half of single parents were divorced. About
one-third of the single parents were unmarried, and about onetenth were widows or widowers.
One of the consequences of these trends was that the average
size of an Austrian household dropped from 2.9 in 1971 to 2.6
persons in 1990 and is expected to drop further. Almost 60
percent of the population lived equally divided between one- and
two-person households in 1990. A large number of single-person
households result from women's long life expectancy, which causes
them to outlive their spouses.
The frequency of marriage has also declined since the 1960s.
Of the women born in the late 1930s, only 8 percent remained
single, compared with an estimated 25 percent of women born in
the 1960s. One reason for the rise in the unmarried population is
the increasing number of educated women who have professional and
economic alternatives to traditional wife-mother roles. Another
reason for the smaller number of marriages is that cohabitation
without marriage has become more frequent and socially
acceptable.
Austrians are also marrying later. In 1991 the mean age of
marriage was 25.6 years for women and 28.0 years for men, an
increase over earlier decades. In 1981 about 59 percent of women
and 82 percent of men were single between the ages of twenty and
twenty-five, compared with 70 percent and almost 90 percent,
respectively, at the end of the decade. For those between twentyfive and thirty years of age, the figures showed a similar rise
in the numbers of the unmarried--33 percent of women and over 50
percent of men were still single at the end of the decade,
compared with 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, in 1981.
The declining number of marriages is accompanied by an
increased frequency of divorce. The divorce rate in Austria
increased from 15 percent in the early 1960s to more than 33
percent in the early 1990s. Divorce granted on the basis of "no
fault" or mutual consent became legal in Austria in the early
1980s. The divorce rate was highest in Vienna and lowest in
Tirol, an indication that traditional and religious values are
least binding in urban areas and more persistent in a traditional
Alpine setting. Women who are employed outside of the home and
have their own sources of income demonstrate a greater readiness
to divorce than "traditional wives."
More than one-third of all divorces in Austria occur within
the first five years of marriage; thereafter, the frequency of
divorce decreases with the length of marriage. In a survey in the
early 1990s, more than one-half of people polled identified
extramarital sex, selfishness, and inflexibility as the primary
causes of divorce.
Illegitimacy has also become more frequent. Beginning in the
1960s, the percentage of illegitimate births increased steadily,
from 11.5 percent in 1965 to 25 percent in 1991. For first-born
children, the rate was over 33 percent. These figures reflect
tolerant attitudes toward illegitimacy in many regions in the
Alps where illegitimate children were a traditional aspect of the
Alpine agrarian way of life. Wage-laborers and servants within
the households of landowning farmers frequently were unable to
marry, but their offspring enjoyed a high degree of social
acceptance because illegitimacy was common and provided the
landowners with the next generation of laborers. Although the
traditional agrarian structure of these regions has changed
considerably, the tolerance of illegitimacy remains. In other
parts of Austria not having comparable traditions, illegitimate
birth is not stigmatized to the same extent as it was earlier.
More than half of the illegitimate births in Austria are
legalized by marriage, and the great majority of second- and
third-born children are legitimate. The fact that the social
welfare system provides more extensive benefits for single
mothers than for married ones also can be interpreted as a
financial incentive for initial illegitimacy in some cases.
These changes in Austrian life-style patterns are viewed by
some Austrians with great apprehension, and they interpret the
increasing rate of illegitimacy, cohabitating, single-parenting,
divorcing, and decreasing birth rate as a reflection of a crisis
for the traditional religious and social values on which the
family is based. However, the diversification of life-styles also
can be interpreted as an inevitable consequence of the
modernization of a traditional society, as well as part of the
development of a more pluralistic society within which no
particular life-style enjoys a position of predominance.
Data as of December 1993
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