Fertility Variation among the U. S. Foreign Stock Population in 1900

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, the United States population included a large number of first and second generation immigrants from European countries, often with relatively high fertility levels. This article investigates the degree to which fertility behavior changed as a result of social structural characteristics of the environment such as urbanization and children's role, the diffusion of fertility values and information from the native population, and the role of cultural values or resistance to change. On the whole, little evidence is found that adaptation was culturally unique, although groups maintained distinctive fertility levels over generations. Substantial evidence suggests that immigrant women modified their fertility behavior as a consequence of social structural factors and contact with the native U.S. population.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.