Why Did Americans Stop Having Dinner Parties?

Derek Thompson says Americans stopped hosting dinner parties in large part because women entered the workforce and men did not take over planning the family social calendar.

In the 1950s heyday of the dinner party and the cocktail party, one of two parents tended not to work. Labor force participation among adult women was something like 20 or 30 percent. Now it is like 60 percent. A spouse at home had time to plan gatherings, which is why so many sitcom plots turn on a boss coming to dinner. Derek Thompson says some of that hosting came from wanting to impress a husband's boss, and some from the isolation of stay-at-home parenthood. He supports women entering the workforce. What disappeared was a person whose main job included inviting people over, and he calls men's failure to pick up that calendar a huge reason hosting at home declined. A shortage of space does not explain the drop: average home size has increased significantly in the last 70 years, and a typical house in the 1950s was smaller.