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Glossary

Founded by Dotsie Bregel, The National Association of Baby Boomer Women is the only association devoted to addressing issues concerning 38 million of the healthiest, wealthiest, and best educated generation of women to ever hit midlife, Baby Boomer Women. With the goal of connecting, encouraging and supporting all Baby Boomer Women, we are dedicated to empowering women to explore their passions and live life to the fullest.

Note: the 38 million figure refers to Baby Boomer Women in the United States. There are, of course, Baby Boomers in Canada, Europe, Australia, as well as in the rest of the world.

Boomers grew up at a time of dramatic social change. In the United States, that social change marked the generation with a strong cultural cleavage, between the proponents of social change and the more conservative. Some analysts believe this cleavage played out politically since the time of the Vietnam War to the mid-2000s, to some extent defining the political landscape and division in the country.

In 1993, Time magazine reported on the religious affiliations of baby boomers. Citing Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the articles stated that about 42% of baby boomers were dropouts from formal religion, a third had never strayed from church, and one-fourth of boomers were returning to religious practice. The boomers returning to religion were “usually less tied to tradition and less dependable as church members than the loyalists. They are also more liberal, which deepens rifts over issues like abortion and homosexuality.”

It is jokingly said that, whatever year they were born, boomers were coming of age at the same time across the world; so that Britain was undergoing Beatlemania while people in the United States were driving over to Woodstock, organizing against the Vietnam War, or fighting and dying in the same war; boomers in Italy were dressing in mod clothes and “buying the world a Coke”; boomers in India were seeking new philosophical discoveries; American boomers in Canada had just found a new home and escaped the draft; Canadian Boomers were organizing support for Pierre Trudeau. It is precisely because of these experiences that many believe those born in the second half of the birth boom belong to another generation, as events that defined their coming of age have little in common with leading or core boomers.