Late nineteenth and early twentieth century childlessness

Citation: Morgan, S. Philip (1991) Late nineteenth and early twentieth century childlessness. AJS (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Late nineteenth and early twentieth century childlessness
Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

The author uses the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Census to analyze the childlessness in the late XIX and early XX centuries. His argument is that there is a strong cultural and historical continuity in the process producing childlessness. He argues that current behavior is not new and revolutionary (just to remind you, roughly half of the white women born in the early to mid 1950s were childless at age 25 and 20% were expected to remain childless). He finds that in some northeastern states, levels of childlessness approached 30% for women born in the mid-19th century. Other states in the South and West had levels of 6-8%. Nationally, childlessness increased across cohorts born in the latter part of the 19th century. Nonmarriage and delayed marriage account for some of the variability. But his argument is that fertility control within marriage played a major role in producing these differentials. Furthermore, own-children methods were used to present evidence that of fertility control among childless women early in marriage. The argument is not that women born in the mid-19th century intended to be childless at young ages, it is instead that they were willing and able to postpone childbearing. In other words, rather than a stopping behavior (standard description of fertility decline see for example the development of M and m in the Coale-Trussel model), a spacing behavior may have played an important role given the evidence of fertility control early in marriage. Besides, as in the contemporary period, it was women of higher socioeconomic status who were most likely to postpone childbearing (this implies that those women had the skills, knowledge, and resources to more effectively control their fertility). With fertility delay came experience and circumstances that made it less likely that women would ever marry and/or have children. These arguments are basically the same those used to account for contemporary childlessness in U.S. In essence, childlessness in the past, as in the present, was most often caused by a series of postponements. The reasons to postpone marriage and childbearing may be summarized as: 1) given the ineffective means of birth control available, women may have postponed births as a long-term strategy to ensure fewer children and 2) delay brings older ages and longer exposure to the risk of disease. Both increase the risk of subfecundity and sterility. Also, harsh economic conditions could have fostered delays in marriage and childbearing. Here it is important to keep in mind that part of these women experienced the Depression in 1929, which might be responsible for disrupting and delaying patterns of family formation.