Below-Replacement Fertility in Nineteenth Century America

Abstract

A 19th century example of below-relacement fertility in a large population is presented in an effort to broaden the discussion and to provide a historical perspective. White women of native parentage living in the urban areas of the Northeastern US in the late 19th century did not reproduce themselves. This statement is based on the data found in the 1:750 Public Use Sample of the US Census of 1900. Table 1 shows the mean number of surviving children born to 45-54-year-old urban white women of native parentage residing in the Northeast the North Central states and the South in 1900. The mean number of surviving children per woman in the Northeast was 1.8; in the North Central states and in the South it was 2.4. For a population to exactly reproduce itself each woman on average needs to bear 1 daughter who survives to the mean age at childbearing. Assuming that the mean age of women in the 45-54-year-old group was 50 and that the mean age at childbearing was 25 the mean age of their daughters would be 25. If the sex ratio at age 25 were 1:1 then exactly 2 children would be needed to produce the requisite 1 daughter or about 11% higher fertility than that attained in the Northeast. Ever-married 45-54-year-old white women of native parentage in the Northeast had an average of 2.1 surviving children. Those Northeastern women had an average of 3.0 children ever born. Women in the North Central states had about 13% more children and those in the South about 26% more. 8 observations are offered as to why the fertility of white women of native parentage in the urban Northeast was so low and in particular why it was lower than the fertility of their counterparts in the North Central region and in the South: 1) below-replacement fertility in 19th century America was not caused by taxes and transfers associated with the modern welfare state; 2) the availability of modern coitus-independent means of fertility control played no role in producing below-replacement fertility in the US in the late 19th century; 3) values today associated with low fertility do not seem to have been widely articulated in the media of the 19th century; 4) below-replacement fertility among urban white women of native parentage in the Northeast in 1900 was not associated with high levels of labor force participation among married women; 5) the regional fertility differences in 1900 do not seem to be attributable to corresponding differences in the occupational distributions of males; 6) labor force participation rates of 10-14-year-old children are nearly identical across regions; 7) the lower fertility of urban white women of native parentage in the Northeast is not associated with substantial interregional differences either in the proportion of children attending school or in their average months of annual attendance; and 8) the 1900 census does not appear to contain data suggesting that children of urban whites of native parentage in the Northeast left their parents homes either much earlier or much later than did their counterparts in the other 2 regions. Factors commonly thought to be important contributors to current below-replacement fertility were largely or even totally absent in the Northeastern US at the end of the 19th century.

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