Religion, masculinity and fertility decline

Abstract

This paper provides the sketch of a new mechanism explaining the delay of Catholic fertility, namely the changing norms of masculinity and fatherhood, through a comparative study of the first fertility transition in Switzerland (1880–1930). Comparative analysis of religious discourse attests to striking differences in norms of respectable masculinity. In the Protestant canton, men were especially targeted and strongly incited to change their sexual behaviour and limit their offspring in order to comply with a new model of the good husband and father. The religious teachings had an impact due to the social position of the persons enouncing the norms, to the efficient diffusion reaching the majority of men, and to the effective sanctioning, as the example of pastoral enquiries demonstrates. In the Catholic canton by contrast, men were not specifically addressed; the religious discourse supported the husband's rights to frequent sexual intercourse and encouraged him to trust Providence to bring up many children, thus sustaining high levels of fertility. The political repression of public discourse on sexuality defeated every attempt of contesting the husband's marital rights and the Catholic doctrine of procreation. Sexual taboos were particularly severe for women and their total ignorance of sexual matters weakened their bargaining power in fertility decisions. In the last part of the paper, using quantitative methods, we tried to demonstrate that these norms and mechanisms did indeed influence men's behaviour in the Protestant sample. For this purpose, we measured comparatively the results of some indicators introduced to capture the impact of the norms of respectable masculinity, regarding men's responsibility in contraception and men's ability to maintain dependent children. We hope thus to strengthen the position of a growing number of scholars who state that historical demographers cannot avoid incorporating gender into their explanations of historical trends of fertility and who foster the bridging of qualitative and quantitative methods. ☆ This text is a revised version of a paper presented in April 2008 at Umeå University Sweden, during the international workshop “The Practice of Birth Control and Historical Fertility Change”. The author wishes to thank the organizers and participants, in particular Dr Simon Szreter, for their helpful remarks. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and to the copy-editors of The History of the Family for improvements of language.

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