The British Fertility Decline: Demographic Transition in the Crucible of the Industrial Revolution [Course Book ed.] 9781400857159

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THE BRITISH FERTILITY DECLINE

This book is the sixth in a series on the decline of fertility in Europe. A publication of the Office of Population Research Princeton University.

The British Fertility Decline Demographic Transition in the Crucible of the Industrial Revolution MICHAEL S. TEITELBAUM

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1984 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book ISBN 0-691-09405-5 This book has been composed in Linotron Times Roman Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

To my parents

Contents FIGURES

IX

TABLES

XI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XV

CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2:

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING FROM

3

1750 ΤΟ 1913

12

CHAPTER 3:

METHODS OF FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

52

CHAPTER 4:

TRENDS IN OVERALL FERTILITY, 1841-1931

75

CHAPTER 5:

NUPTIALITY COMPONENTS OF FERTILITY

97

CHAPTER 6:

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

CHAPTER 7:

ALTERNATIVE "EXPLANATORY" MODELS OF MARITAL FERTILITY DECLINE

CHAPTER 8:

114

153

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT OF FERTILITY DECLINE

192

CHAPTER 9:

CONCLUSIONS

218

APPENDIX

TWO SETS OF COUNTY BOUNDARIES, AND ERRONEOUS FIGURES FOR COUNTY VITAL RATES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND,

BY EDITH PANTELIDES AND ANSLEY J. COALE

228

BIBLIOGRAPHY

246

INDEX

263

Figures Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3

Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2a Figure 6.2b Figure 6.2c Figure 6.2d Figure 6.2e Figure 6.2f Figure 6.2g Figure 6.2h Figure 6.2i

Proportion of men and women marrying who signed by mark, 1840-1910, England and Wales Population estimates for the United Kingdom, 1701-1931 (in millions) Estimated English gross reproduction rates (GRR), 1541— 1901 Crude birth rates for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland General fertility rates for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland I f for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland I f by county, maps for British Isles, 1851 to 1931(6) Percentage of females single at ages 25-29 and 45-49 for England and Wales and Scotland, 1851-1931 Female singulate mean age at marriage for England and Wales and Scotland, 1851-1931 Index of proportions married (I m ) and proportions married aged 20-24, for England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, 1851-1936 Average of county I m s and their standard deviations, for selected countries and dates Average county Im by "quintals" for 1871 through 1931 Index of marital fertility (Ig), for England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, 1851-1931(6) Percentage of counties with specified Igs for Great Britain and Ireland, 1851-1931 Percentage of counties with specified I g s for Great Britain, 1851-1931 Percentage of counties with specified I g s for England and Wales, 1851-1931 (N = 45) Percentage of counties with specified I g s for Scotland, 1861-1931 (N = 33) Percentage of counties with specified I g s for Ireland, 1871— 1936 (N = 31*) Marital fertility (I g ) of France·. Distribution by department, 1831-1901 Marital fertility of Germany: Distribution by administrative area, 1869-1935 Marital fertility (I g ) of Italy: Distribution of province, 1861-1961 Marital fertility (I g ) of total population: Distribution of provinces of European Russia by level, 1897-1970

34 46 48 76 78 80 92-93 99 100

102 109 110 118 120 122 123 123 124 124 125 125 126

FIGURES Figure 6.3 Figure 8.1

Figure A.l

Figure A.2

Figure A.3

Figure A.4

Figure A.5

I g by county, maps for British Isles, 1871-1931(6) 130-31 Approximate cumulative total distribution of various books and pamphlets concerning contraception, England and Wales, 1830-1930 (in thousands) 209 Comparison of ratio (I g at earlier date) / (I g in 1901) to ratio (female population of registration county) / (female 236 population of county proper), Ireland, 1871 and 1881 Comparison of ratio (registered births in five precensal years) / (population zero to four) to ratio (population in registration county) / (population in county proper), Ireland, 1871 and 1881 237 Comparison of ratio (registered births 1886-1890) / (population zero to four in 1891) to ratio (I g 1891) / (I g 1901), Ireland 238 Index of marital fertility (I g ) in Antrim County, Down County, and the counties combined (including Belfast), 1871-1961 239 Index of marital fertility (I g ) by county, Ireland, 1871— 1961. (Births as registered, and adjusted for differences in boundaries in 1871 and 1881.) 241-44

Tables Table 2.1 Table 2.2

Table 2.3 Table 2.4 Table 2.5 Table 2.6 Table 2.7 Table 2.8 Table 2.9 Table 2.10 Table 2.11 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4

Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 3.7

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3

Change in employment in various economic sectors, 1851 to 1871 Industrial distribution of labor force and employers and workers on own account as percentage of whole: Great Britain Total servant population and percentage change from preceding decade: England and Wales, 1851-1931 Growth of population in England and Wales, 1841-1911 Gain ( + ) or loss ( —) by migration from towns, colliery districts, and rural residues, England, 1841-1911 Percentage illiterate among prisoners in England and Wales, 1836-1845, 1870, and 1900 Infant and child mortality in decennia 1841-1850 to 1911— 1920 Food supplies, United Kingdom, for 1880, 1909-1913 and 1924-1928 (pounds per person per year) Nutrients in 100 grams of bread Estimated populations of England and Wales, Scotland, Great Britain, Ireland and United Kingdom, 1701-1931 Gross reproduction rate in England (excluding Monmouth), 1541-1871 Correlations and regressions of /„, on Im* for the counties of Great Britain, 1851-1921 Recorded crude birth rates according to official registration data: 1841-1910 Adjustment factor corrected for R (births) and net migration Comparison of present under-registration estimates for England and Wales as a whole with those of Farr, Glass, and Wrigley and Schofield Registered crude birth rates Estimated crude birth rates Adjustment factors for London alone, surrounding counties alone, aggregation of London and surrounding counties, and England and Wales: 1841-1850 to 19011910 Average annual legitimate live births per 1,000 married women 15-44, England and Wales, 1851-1930 Index of overall fertility ( I f ) , 1851-1931(36) England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland Index of overall fertility ( I f ) for European countries, 1831— 1970

24

25 26 30 31 35 36 38 39 45 47 55 56 63

64 67 69

71 78 79 81-83

TABLES Table 4.4

Table 4.5 Table 4.6a Table 4.6b Table 4.6c Table 4A Table 5.1

Table 5.2 Table 5.3

Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5A.1 Table 5A.2 Table 5A.3 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4a Table 6.4b Table 6.4c Table 6.5a

Predecline ranges of I f , I g , I m , and I h for decades centered on census years 1851, 1861, 1871, England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and British Isles 85 Variability in overall fertility (I f ) for the British Isles, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy 87 Adjusted overall fertility (I f ), by county: England and Wales, 1851 to 1931 90 Adjusted overall fertility (I f ), by county: Scotland, 1861 to 1931 91 Adjusted overall fertility (I f ), by county: Ireland, 1871 to 1936 91 Crude birth rate and general fertility rate: England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, 1838-1938 94-96 Percentage of females single at ages 25-29 and 45-49, and males per 100 females aged 25-29 for England and Wales and Scotland, 1851-1931 98 Female singulate mean age at marriage, for England and Wales and Scotland, 1851-1931 100 Proportion currently married among females 20-24, and index of proportion married (Im), 1851-1931(36), with index scores 101 Index of proportions married (I m ) for European countries, 1831-1970 103-105 Mean county I m s and their standard deviations, for selected countries and dates 108 Proportion married (I m ), by county: England and Wales, 1851 to 1931 112 Proportion married (I m ), by county: Scotland, 1861 to 1931 113 Proportion married (Im), by county: Ireland, 1871 to 1936 113 Index of marital fertility (Ig) for European countries, 1831-1970 115-17 Index of marital fertility (I g ): England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, 1851-1931(36) 117 Variability in marital fertility (I g ), British Isles and selected other countries 121 Adjusted marital fertility (I g ), by county: England and Wales, 1851 to 1931 128 Adjusted marital fertility (I g ), by county: Scotland, 1861 to 1931 129 Adjusted marital fertility (I g ), by county: Ireland, 1871 to 1936 129 Year of 10 percent decline of I g from level of 1871, England and Wales 135

TABLES Table 6.5b Table 6.5c Table 6.6a Table 6.6b Table 6.6c Table 6.7 Table 6.8 Table 6.9 Table 6.10a Table 6.10b Table 6.10c Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 7.5 Table 7 A Table 7B Table A.l Table A.2 Table A.3

Year of 10 percent decline of I g from the level of 1871, Scotland Year of 10 percent decline of I g from the level of 1871, Ireland Year in which I g first declined to .600, England and Wales Year in which Ig first declined to .600, Scotland Year in which I g first declined to .600, Ireland Index of extramarital fertility (I h ) for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, 1851-1931(36) Index of extramarital fertility (Ilt) in European countries, 1831-1970 Variability in extramarital fertility (I h ), British Isles and selected other countries Adjusted extramarital fertility (I h ), by county: England and Wales, 1851 to 1931 Adjusted extramarital fertility (I h ), by county: Scotland, 1861 to 1931 Adjusted extramarital fertility (I l l ), by county: Ireland, 1871 to 1936 Simple correlations between I g , I h , I m for Great Britain, England and Wales, and Scotland: 1851-1931 Results of regressions on date of I g decline to 0.600, for five alternative models Regression residuals for the counties of England and Wales and Scotland, calculated from five alternative models in Table 7.2 Results of regressions on date of 10 percent decline of I g , for five alternative models. Residuals for Model V for the counties of England and Wales and Scotland Results of regressions on date of I g decline to 0.600, for five alternative models including I m as independent variable Statistics on significant independent variables in five alternative models in Table 7.2 Unadjusted index of marital fertility (I g ) by province and county, Ireland, 1871-1961 Index of proportion married (I m ) by province and county, Ireland, 1871-1961 Ratio of female population of registration county to county proper, Ireland, 1871 and 1881

136 137 140 141 142 144 145-47 148 151 152 152 156 164-66 171-73 177-79 181-82 185-87 189-90 229 230-31 234

[ ΧΙ» ]

Acknowledgments The bulk of this book was written while the author was University Lecturer in Demography at Oxford University and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. It was completed subsequently while the author was Visiting Fellow at the Office of Population Research, Princeton Uni­ versity, and Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Inter­ national Peace. During the course of the research enterprise, many individuals at various institutions provided valuable advice and assis­ tance, for which only the briefest of acknowledgment can be provided here. Overall guidance was provided by Professor Ansley J. Coale of Prince­ ton, who initiated the European Fertility Study of which this volume forms a part. Advice on the social and economic setting of Victorian and Edwardian Britain was kindly provided by Dr. J. M. Winter, Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Help on both the history and de­ mography of the period was provided by Professor E. A. Wrigley and the late Professor D. V. Glass, both of the London School of Economics, and by Professor T. H. Hollingsworth of the University of Edinburgh. Advice on the statistical analyses incorporated in Chapter 7 was given by Mr. Κ. I. Macdonald, Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. Computer assistance was provided by Mr. Kumah Tambyrajah of the Oxford Uni­ versity Computer Center. Finally, the first draft was given an exceptionally comprehensive re­ view by the late Dr. Frank W. Notestein of the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, who was responsible for significant im­ provements in the exposition and for catching a number of errors that had crept into the mountains of data presented here. Of course, the kind assistance provided by these gentlemen imposes upon them no responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation that may still be present in this volume.

THE BRITISH FERTILITY DECLINE

CHAPTER 1: Introduction It is now a commonplace that historical understanding requires knowl­ edge of the history of population change. This is particularly evident with reference to the European Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the major social changes of this period was the near-universal decline in fertility—a decline which across the whole of the European continent amounted to as much as 50 percent between 1850 and 1930. It is fair to say that this fertility decline rep­ resents one of the major transformations of European life. Yet the change was by no means homogeneous. The various regions and coun­ tries differed substantially in the original levels of fertility from which the decline took place, the timing of the decline, and the mechanisms of control employed. And unhappily, despite its central importance to our understanding of history and of socioeconomic forces, the nature and sources of this decline are but little understood. As Habakkuk (1971, p. 53) points out, "the development of the small planned family is still not completely charted. We know little about its chronology, about the methods by which it was effected, and about its fundamental causes." The goal of the present work is to provide a better chart of this general process by means of intensive analysis of the experience of the British Isles.

THE THEORY OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION

The best-known "explanation" of the European fertility decline is the theory1 of the demographic transition. Its basic premises are descriptive, with the history of population divided into three "stages." The first stage, viewed as characteristic of the human population throughout most of its history, achieves a long-term equilibrium of pop­ ulation size by high birth rates and high death rates. Infant mortality is high, and fertility of women similarly high, although probably never at the biological maximum of the species. The high rate of mortality is taken as inevitable in the absence of modern forms of agriculture, trans­ port, sanitation, and medicine. Given this high rate of mortality a sim'"Thcory" is used here in a qualified sense, referring to a descriptive rather than a predictive set of hypotheses.

INTRODUCTION ilarly high birth rate is required (by definition) for any population to persist. In order to maintain high fertility, societies in Stage I of the demographic transition are characterized by strong institutional pres­ sures favoring reproduction. These institutions are strongly supported by popular beliefs both sacred and secular, and effectively enforced by a variety of societal sanctions. Therefore, they are slow to change. In contrast to the encouragement of the birth rate by their norms and institutions, pre-industrial societies view the death rate as largely outside of institutional control. Nonetheless, the theory assumes that all societies covet health and long life, and that therefore any development that reduced mortality would be quickly adopted. In this sense the factors supporting high birth and high death rates are not consonant with one another. New organizational and technological methods of reducing mortality are rapidly seized upon by the society as soon as they become known, resulting in a continuous and relatively sharp decline in mor­ tality. The consequence is Stage II of the demographic transition, char­ acterized by declining mortality, but with fertility stable at pre-industrial levels. This is the first phase of the "population explosion," i.e., the rapid and unprecedented growth of population resulting from an im­ balance between birth rates and death rates. Stage III of the demographic transition is that in which the birth rate gradually declines toward equilibrium with the now low death rate. The decline in fertility is seen as conscious and rational on the part of the members of the society. However, the falling birth rate lags behind the decline in mortality due to the highly institutionalized nature of societal pressures favoring fertility. The decline in fertility cannot take place, the argument continues, until the traditional social and economic insti­ tutions supporting fertility are weakened, and new institutions emerge favoring a reduction in fertility to levels more commensurate with the lower levels of mortality. The theorists of the demographic transition attribute the adoption of the new smaller family ideal to the social and economic effects of the urban and industrial revolutions of the nine­ teenth century. Urban and industrial life are seen as modifying sub­ stantially the role of the family in production, consumption, recreation, and education. The reduction of the importance of the family is said to weaken the social pressures favoring high fertility, since it is the extended agrarian family through which many of these pressures are funneled by the society. The value of children is reduced by the growth of compulsory

INTRODUCTION

or near-compulsory education, which removes the children from the potential labor force. Also, it is argued that members of societies that are approaching Stage III of the demographic transition come to rec­ ognize that there has been a substantial decline in mortality, especially infant mortality. Whatever may be their eventual family-size goals, they perceive that the number of births required to achieve a certain family size of live children is lower than before. Under a multitude of major social transformations the pressures for high fertility weaken and the idea of conscious control of fertility grad­ ually gains strength. The adoption of this idea is not uniform across all segments of society. Instead, the idea is adopted in the beginning by the elite, those who are both better educated and therefore aware of the changing social milieu, and who also have greater access to knowl­ edge of methods required for reasonably effective fertility control. In the early stages no elaborate technology of fertility control is re­ quired, but rather only less favorable marriage patterns and the use of age-old folk methods such as coitus interruptus, abortion, and various crude contraceptive devices. Later, pressures arise for more effective and convenient means of fertility control, leading to the development of more modern instrumentalities. THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION IN BRITAIN

There is no doubt that the processes involved in the demographic transition took place in Britain during the nineteenth century. From the middle of that century to the 1930s both mortality and fertility levels declined by about 50 percent. The course of the mortality decline has been extensively analyzed and will be discussed only peripherally in the present work. The focus here is on the course and characteristics of the fertility decline, with special attention paid to the decline of fertility within marriage. The transition of the British Isles is of particular interest to demo­ graphic historians, primarily because of the leading role played by Brit­ ain in the Industrial Revolution and rapid urbanization which swept much of Europe during the nineteenth century. However, in addition to relatively "advanced" England, the British Isles also include Ireland, with its very low levels of industrialization and urbanization, and Scot­ land with its highly variable levels of these characteristics. Cultural var-

INTRODUCTION lability was also extensive, ranging from the harsh ruralism of the Western Irish and the Outer Hebridian Scots to the elegant urbanism of upperclass Victorian London. Similarly the diversity of religious affiliation was great, ranging from Irish Catholicism through Welsh Nonconform­ ity, English Chapel, Scottish Presbyterianism, and Anglicanism. The British Isles thus provide a great range in cultural, religious, and in­ dustrial variables within one political entity. Hence this study represents a systematic attempt to analyze the in­ troduction of deliberate control of fertility, and mainly marital fertility, in the diverse and rapidly-changing British Isles of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The unit of analysis is generally the po­ litical subdivision of the county, and specifically of the registration county in England and Wales. It will be noted that the analyses that follow are therefore at the aggregate or ecological level of analysis and are subject to the well-known interpretive risks of the ecological fallacy. This po­ tential problem is of sufficient importance to warrant explicit discussion. ON THE PROBLEM OF ECOLOGICAL CORRELATION

Data on fertility, mortality, and marriage behavior and on socioec­ onomic and cultural attributes do not exist at the individual level for nineteenth-century Britain. In principle, of course, individual-level sta­ tistics might be put together from the original census returns and vital registration documents (if they have not been lost or destroyed), but government authorities have not allowed access to these for the period under study here. Furthermore, the logical and practical problems in­ volved in linking such nominative records are daunting indeed. Since the data published on birth registration certificates were rudimentary in scope, analysis of the socioeconomic and cultural associates of fertility behavior depends upon access to data on each individual mother's census return. But the methodological difficulties inherent in linking these two forms of records are fundamental and perhaps insoluble. Successful methods along these lines may be developed and applied in the future, when necessary data are made available, and analysis at the individual may then become possible. But in the interim (which may be decades) we are confined to the use of the aggregated tabulations which have been provided by the registrars general. Such tabulations are at an ecological level of analysis, i.e. the data

INTRODUCTION

describe characteristics of aggregates of individuals rather than of in­ dividuals themselves. Each table seeks to classify nominative individuals into some more or less sensible scheme of categories, and then collapses the variety of individual behaviors and characteristics into these cate­ gorizations. With this collapsing procedure, the data become manage­ able and comprehensible, but considerable information is lost. Given the nature of ecological-level data, they must always be considered to be descriptive of the properties of aggregates rather than of individuals. Hence the finding of a clear-cut positive correlation between, say, fer­ tility levels and the proportions of a population that are academics cannot be taken to mean that academics necessarily have higher fertility than other occupations, but simply that districts with a high proportion of academics are also characterized by high fertility. In other words, the loss of detailed nominative information in the original process of data aggregation by the Registrars General makes it impossible for the analyst of such an association to tell whether it is in fact the academics of the district who are responsible for the high fertility. No data are available on the actual fertility of particular occupational groups for most of our period. Since the data are available only at the ecological level, analysis at this level is inevitable. Since ecological correlations and regressions are not equivalent to those at the individual level (W. S. Robinson, 1950), no firm inferences may be drawn from our analyses concerning the determinants of the behavior of individuals. However, ecological as­ sociations may be of great value in their own right, and need not be used (incorrectly) as substitutes for individual associations. From Durkheim onward, sociologists and other social scientists have concentrated upon the social characteristics of areas or aggregates of individuals, holding that human social behavior cannot be interpreted simply as the sum of individual psychological and behavioral states, but instead as emergent from the social context of the group or aggregate. As Menzel (1950) notes, a high ecological correlation between arrests and divorces in a given area ought not to be employed to argue that individuals who are arrested are more likely to become divorced (or vice versa), but it can properly be employed to argue that both arrests and divorces are common characteristics of the same social nexus—properties of social areas as such, rather than of individuals. As long as the nature of the

INTRODUCTION analysis in question allows of such a form of generalization, the em­ ployment of ecological associations is proper and useful. Of course, fertility may properly be viewed as a behavior both of the individual and the social aggregate. While it is obviously true that women give birth, not social groups, it may convincingly be argued that ulti­ mately the level of fertility is determined by the overarching social norms and values that operate to control individual behavior. Hence analysis of the decline of fertility must be at the macrolevel of the society or subsocietal social aggregate. Even one of the foremost scholars of fer­ tility behavior at the micro or individual level takes this view (Ryder,

1975): My premise is that the ultimate level of explanation of fertility is macro-analytic, that fertility is an aggregate property, a characteristic of the groups to which the couple belong and not directly of the couple themselves. The values and norms individuals employ to decide among alternative courses of action originate in the needs of their groups, and the modes of fulfillment of those needs which have evolved within that culture. Every society has standardized solutions to its important and pervasive problems in the form of injunctions and prohibitions, constraints and inducements, designed to affect individual actions. Norms and sanctions represent a societal blueprint for channeling behavior into directions which, however the individual might regard them in the abstract, are considered essential or desirable from the viewpoint of the group. . . . People are pressured to procreate. Given this orientation, it is worth asking why we conduct surveys in which individuals are asked a lot of questions, seeing that they cannot provide the really important answers. In my view, the chief function of such surveys is to measure behavior accurately, and also to determine, from individual responses to normative questions, what problems must be resolved at the higher sociocultural level of inquiry. The most important explanatory variables are those which identify and describe the social groupings with which the individual is affiliated. Hence in the present study, which deals with the posited fertility effects of social changes at a high level of aggregation (e.g., modernization, urbanization, industrialization, etc.), the use of ecological-level data is happily consistent with proper methodology. Another subsidiary problem of ecological-level data arises in the de-

INTRODUCTION

velopment of demographic and sociocultural measures for use in analy­ sis. Typically such measures (e.g., legitimate fertility rates in a county) are crudely standardized for the impact of the population size of the county by using ratios or proportions, e.g., the legitimate births per thousand population, or the number of industrial workers per thousand males of working age. However, as Hope (1976) and others have pointed out, the use of a series of such proportions as the variables in a multiple regression equation means that each contains a factor (the denominator) which may by definition be the same as, or highly correlated with, the denominators of the other factors. This may introduce a form of spurious correlation between ecological variables. The only way to tell is empir­ ically—by experimentally calculating regression equations using both such standardized ratios as well as the raw numerators from which they are calculated. If the two alternative approaches lead to widely divergent results (there is no real problem if the results are similar), a theoretical decision must be made as to whether it is the number or the rate of each attribute that is under analysis. In the present analysis, it is clearly the rates of relevant social phe­ nomena that are under analysis, not simply crude numbers of, e.g., urban residents or literate males. Under these conditions, the question of spurious correlation need not trouble us.2 Kuh and Meyer (1955, p. 402) put it this way: The question of spurious correlation quite obviously does not arise when the hypothesis to be tested has initially been formulated in terms of ratios . . . spurious correlation can only exist when a hypothesis pertains to undeflated variables and the data have been divided through by another series for reasons extraneous to but not in conflict with the hypothesis framed as an exact, i.e., non-stochastic, relation. Similarly, Briggs (1962, p. 162) notes: The correlation between the ratios can in no sense be regarded as spurious when it is to this correlation that interest attaches. The di­ vision by the common deflating variable is in this case part of the mechanism by which the correlation is created. 2Out of sheer curiosity, the regression analyses reported in Chapter 7 were also applied to raw numerator data. The results differed little from those based on standardized ratios.

INTRODUCTION

In summary, findings from the ecological-level analyses that follow may not properly be used to characterize the behavior of individuals, but are quite proper for analysis of aggregate-level phenomena such as fertility levels and modernization/urbanization. Those interested in the fertility behavior of individuals must apply analyses to individual-level data, data that are not available for the study period. Furthermore, the number of "explanatory" variables that exist at the level of the individual birth registration is severely limited, and hence analysis at the individual level would require nominative record linkage of each registered vital event with individual census returns (conceptually a difficult task and practically a nearly impossible one), or alternatively a resort to ecological data for "explanatory" variables.3

APPROACH OF THE PRESENT STUDY

The basic approach of my study is first, to document the fertility decline in terms of a set of refined fertility indices which take into account the age and marital structure of the female population, despite the critical absence of information on maternal age in the vital registration data. (For a description of the definitions and properties of these indices, see Chapter 3.) The basic data required for the calculation of the indices are the number of legitimate births occurring in the ten-year period surrounding the census, the number of married females in each fiveyear age group from fifteen to forty-nine, and the number of unmarried 1A partial compromise is to pursue ecological-level data at a lower level of aggregation, e.g., that of the hundreds of registration districts rather than that of the county. Such data, while still subject to the risks of the ecological fallacy, are likely to represent more homogeneous units than those represented by the county. Compilations of such data for England and Wales only have been under way for a number of years by Professor Dov Friedlander of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but are not yet completed. If this work can be brought to fruition, the fertility indices derived from them may represent a significant improvement over those developed here for purposes of analysis. However, many problems will still remain. For example, the problem of misallocation of births and deaths across county boundaries, discussed in Chapter 3 below, would be likely to become much more severe in dealing with district-level data, and the lack of district-level data for many of the "explanatory" socioeconomic and cultural variables will severely limit the scope of analysis, or alternatively will require the resort to county-level aggregates in any case. Nonetheless the district-level data being collected by Professor Friedlander represent a potentially useful source of more detailed information on the English fertility decline.

INTRODUCTION

females in the same age groups. The number of births (legitimate and illegitimate) by county is presented for each year in the Annual Reports of the Registrars General of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The number of married and unmarried women in each age group is presented in the (roughly) decennial censuses (for a listing of references to these censuses, see Bibliography). The annual birth data are collapsed into decennial data centered upon the relevant census year (e.g., births from 1896 to 1905 centered on 1901). Unfortunately, the vital statistics on births in the British Isles are known to be deficient during the early years of official registration. For this reason an extensive effort is necessary to adjust these early countylevel birth data for under-registration, using model life tables and the levels of mortality and intercounty net migration (see Chapter 3). After calculation and adjustment of an adequate set of fertility and nuptiality indicators are completed, measures of change in marital fer­ tility will be associated with indicators of social, economic, and cultural variation of plausible relevance to fertility behavior, using appropriate statistical techniques of both bi- and multi-variate form. Finally, an effort will be made to assess the possible import of factors other than those measurable in quantitative terms. These qualitative assessments will be conjoined with those arising from the quantitative analyses to yield my best interpretation of the factors related to the decline of marital fertility in Great Britain. It would be presumptuous to think that any single study can provide a fully satisfying explanation of a social phenomenon as ramified and as subtle as the nineteenth-century transformation in European or Brit­ ish fertility patterns. Realism requires us to recognize explicitly that such an explanation may simply be unattainable with available data and techniques. The present study is offered in the more modest hope that it may augment, at least to a small degree, our level of understanding of these profound changes in human behavior. First, however, we turn to consider in Chapter 2 the socioeconomic context in which these changes took place.

CHAPTER 2: The Social and Economic Setting

from 1750 to 1913 The demographic changes in nineteenth-century Britain must be understood in the context of the profound social and economic changes that characterized the century and a half beginning in about1750. During this period, British society was transformed from an essentially agrarian and rural-based economy to that of the world's leading industrial and colonial power. Hundreds of learned treatises have been written on the origins and consequences of this fundamental transformation, and the diversity and comprehensiveness of their analyses can hardly be ap­ proached here. My less ambitious purpose in this chapter is to provide a rudimentary outline of the most important social and economic changes of the period for those readers unfamiliar with British economic and social history. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE FROM 1750 ΤΟ 1850

Historians have yet to agree on why the first Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain. Favorable endowments of raw materials, high ag­ ricultural productivity, cheap labor supply, strong home demand, po­ litical stability, religious and cultural supports for wealth creation—these and many other factors have been analyzed and combined in different ways to explain why Britain was the pioneer. But since so many features of economic and social development have been deemed favorable to the economic breakthrough to self-sustained rates of growth, it is vir­ tually impossible to rank their relative importance. We seem to be confronting a classic case of what historians term "over-determination," which not even the mathematical approaches of the "new" economic history have explained (Floud and McCloskey, 1981). Perhaps it would be more useful to introduce some of the arguments currently debated in the research on Britain's Industrial Revolution. By convention, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is put at the middle of the eighteenth century, although historical ar­ gument continues on this and many other points discussed here. The century before 1750 was a period of relatively slow and stable buildup. There was a gradual accumulation of capital and a modest growth of the export trade, which tended to stabilize markets during fluctuations

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING in home demand, as did the presence of a true national market in London. State intervention in these gradual processes was minimal, other than the effects of enclosure as mandated by Act of Parliament. The Industrial Revolution in Britain was, therefore, unlike that of virtually all other nations, in that the process of economic growth was not explosive, was undirected by banks or political agencies, and was not expensive by contemporary or modern standards. In that pre-railway age, burgeoning economic activity did not require major capital invest­ ment. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of Britain's early Industrial Revolution was the unimportance of capital. The painful shifts of re­ sources away from consumption to investment, which have plagued modern nations in the course of industrialization, were simply unnec­ essary in Britain. Almost all discussions of the first Industrial Revolution in Britain contain implicit judgments of the shortcomings of her rivals for economic and military power. The Dutch, it is said, never succeeded in linking their vast trading wealth to home manufacture; the French were ham­ pered by rural overpopulation and an archaic and inefficient social and political system (Landes, 1969). Whatever the truth of these statements, they do underline the need to see Britain's economic breakthrough iri an international context. This has led one school of historians to describe the emergence of what it sees as the first world system of economic activity (Wallerstein, 1974). Others have taken a different and more limited view and emphasize the relative advantages Britain gained during the century after 1750 from the preparations for and outcome of warfare (Crouzet, 1964; John, 1954-55, 1967; J. L. Anderson, 1972). It is important to remember that Europe was at war for more than half of the fifty years from 1775 to 1825. Aside from the stimulus to iron, shipbuilding, and allied produc­ tion, warfare indirectly but crucially contributed to the growth of Brit­ ain's export trade. By the end of the twenty-three years of conflict against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the locus of world trade had shifted away from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. As was to happen after the two world wars in this century, a combatant country at one remove from the primary theater of operations was the only nation unequivocally to profit from conflict. Internally, chronic warfare had continuing social and economic effects, especially upon agricultural prices. The period from 1793 to 1815 saw not only a surge in food exports but

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING also a severe price inflation. This meant high rates of return for British landowners, but poorer prospects for the landless. Agricultural change began long before the Napoleonic period. De­ velopments highlighted or accelerated in the late eighteenth century were already in motion perhaps a century earlier. And it is in this incremental rather than exponential growth in the agricultural sector that many historians find an essential clue to the nature of Britain's Industrial Revolution. Land ownership in Britain (excluding Ireland) was unlike much of the Continent. The ascendancy of the landed aristocracy and wealthy middle class over the peasant or small owner-occupier had been firmly established long before 1750. Inheritance by primogeniture perpetuated the large holdings, which were often rented to well-to-do tenant farmers capable of substantial capital investment. The rising prices of agricultural commodities occasioned by the French wars (prices in 1814 were more than 100 percent higher than in 1790) were a stimulus to agricultural extension and intensification. In particular, high profitability provided great impetus to the investment necessary for the enclosure and devel­ opment of the so-called "waste" lands common in the eastern, north­ eastern, and east Midland counties of England. The capital required to drain the marshes and to clear and enclose the land limited this practice to the large landowners and their prosperous tenants, giving them further advantage over small-holders. In England, the marginal populations dependent upon common use of the waste—the squatters, itinerant traders, tinkers, poachers, labor­ ers, and small cultivators—had uncertain tenure, if any at all, and could be dispossessed without compensation for what they believed were their lost rights in common. The social distress of such groups that resulted, on occasion, from enclosure and more importantly from burgeoning agricultural prices was the progenitor of the so-called Speenhamland system of poor relief so vigorously denounced by Malthus. Such distress was not universal, since employment opportunities were improved to some degree in some places by enclosure, as labor was needed for the more intensive agriculture pursued in the enclosed fields. Yet the general pattern during the Napoleonic Wars probably was one of declining real wages as prices rose dramatically, matched by a substantial growth in the wealth of the landed classes. After the French wars, the agricultural boom which it engendered

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

was followed by a classical bust. There were sharp price declines from 1816 onward, especially in 1816 and 1819, and prices reached 1790 levels by 1830. The continued declines led to a severe depression in the ag­ ricultural sector: falling profits, unpaid rents, widespread unemploy­ ment. They also led to agricultural protectionism in the form of the Corn Laws; in response there were widespread political attacks upon agricultural interests by spokesmen for the growing urban and industrial population. Hence the period from 1793 to 1834 (when the old English Poor Law was repealed) was one of severe economic dislocation in agriculture, the primary sector of the British economy, and a period of intense social unrest. It is important to note, though, that since the fall in prices was more precipitate than wage fluctuations, real wages in the period after 1815 probably rose substantially for those in regular employment. What pro­ portion of the labor force did find regular work is, as yet, unknown; hence conclusions about movements in real incomes must be highly tentative. Studies of income distribution are equally inconclusive. Recent works on early national income estimates describe an increase in income in­ equality in the period 1800-1850 (Williamson, 1980). This evidence reinforces the "pessimistic" position on the question as to whether eco­ nomic growth was achieved at the expense of a decline in the standard of living (Hobsbawm, 1964). The "optimists," though, derive their con­ clusions from evidence of rising home demand, of the expansion of family employment and thereby of family incomes, and of a secular rise in real wages as measured in a number of series from 1815 (McKendrick, 1974; Hartwell, 1971; Flinn, 1974). The central phase of British industrial transformation also had its immediate origins in the late eighteenth century, at about the same time as the boom in agriculture began, although irregularity in movements of growth was still the rule and not the exception. British foreign trade nearly tripled from 1780 to 1800. Coal production doubled from 1750 to 1800. Pig iron production quadrupled from 1781 to 1880. Raw cotton consumption increased from 2.3 to 13.9 thousand metric tons between 1771-1780 and 1791-1800 (Mitchell, 1973). The national network of canals was established during the canal "mania" of 1780-1800 (Court, 1954 and E. L. Jones, 1981). Overall industrial production is estimated

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

to have doubled in the last two decades of the eighteenth century (Perkin, 1969). During the subsequent decades in the nineteenth century, the pace of British industrial transformation accelerated, especially after the mid1840s. Tangible exports rose tenfold in real terms, and imports by an even greater amount. Invisible exports—shipping, banking, insurance, returns of overseas investment—rose dramatically. Coal output rose more than twentyfold, pig iron more than thirtyfold, paper more than fortyfold. Raw cotton consumption increased over twenty-threefold, from 31.8 thousand metric tons annually during the first decade to 747.7 thousand metric tons in the last decade—with the most spectacular increase in this case occurring before 1875 (Mitchell, 1971). New in­ dustries such as engineering, steel, chemicals, gas, and electricity grew faster. Total industrial production is estimated to have grown during the nineteenth century by nearly fourteenfold (Perkin, 1969) or by at least twelvefold (Mitchell, 1971). It is in such a long-term economic context that nineteenth century fertility trends must be placed. Most important of all, Britain's economy after 1840 was able both to dominate international trade and to provide the goods and services necessary for the industrialization of the economies of Europe and America. Only after 1945, in the case of the United States, was one economy again so completely predominant in international economic affairs as was Britain in the 1850s and 1860s (Crouzet, 1977; Hobsbawm, 1968). While the long-term growth performance of the industrial sector was spectacular and unprecedented, it was by no means uniform. Devel­ opment moved by fits and starts, by boom and slump, by prosperity and depression. Indeed, recent studies have reiterated the conventional view that the period 1763 to 1866 was the classic period of the trade cycle (Court, 1954; McCloskey, 1981a). The early nineteenth century was dominated first by rising prices up to 1814, described earlier, and then by falling prices up to 1830. Sharp trade depressions occurred in 1797 and 1809-1810, and financial panics in 1797 and 1825-1826. The years 1816 and 1819 were ones of acute distress for agricultural labor, still the dominant employment sector, and the period from 1815 to 1832 expe­ rienced recurrent and severe trade depressions (Rostow, 1948; Court, 1954; Aldcroft and Fearon, 1972). The 1830s and 1840s were periods both of deep social unrest and of

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

rapid advance in the industrial sector, apparently with continued price declines in the agricultural sector. The period 1839-1842 was marked by a severe trade depression, which shocked contemporary writers. The literary and documentary response, which has done much to color our view of the meaning of industrialization, can be seen in Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton (1844), Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845), and Friedrich Engel's The Condition of the Working Class in 1844 (1845). To turn to Dickens is to find literary evidence of the other key development of the period, to which many attributed the end of the instability of the 1830s and early 1840s—the railways. In the twenty years between 1830 and 1850, the basis of the mainline railway network was established in an unprecedented boom of invest­ ment and construction. In two decades, transportation in Britain was transformed from relatively poor roads and inadequate canals (as com­ pared with Continental countries)1 to the most rapid, efficient, and in­ expensive network in Europe. The appearance of the railways provided stimulus for both the industrial and the agricultural sectors. They forced down transport costs, encouraged the development of capital markets, stimulated competition, and destroyed monopolized local markets. They also stimulated demand, in large part due to the outlay on construction followed by the generation of productive jobs operating the railways themselves (Mitchell, 1964; Floud and McCloskey, 1981). Agricultural development was furthered by opening distant markets to farmers and by providing transport for the tools of the newly devel­ oping agricultural technology: machinery, fertilizers, oil cake, and tested seeds. In the construction of railways, Britain by 1851 was far ahead of her potential industrial rivals—three times the trackage per unit area of Belgium, New York, and Pennsylvania, and seven times greater than Germany and France. (See discussion of transportation below.) Recent studies of the social savings of transport innovation attribute to railways a greater contribution to economic growth in Britain than in America. Here too the controversy continues, but the tendency in recent interpretations is to suggest that railways played an important, though not a decisive or leading role, in the process of British economic development (Gourvish, 1980; Hawke, 1970). 1To be sure, for areas within reach of the sea, coastal shipping provided transportation generally superior to that of Continental Europe.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

Overall, the years between 1815 and 1847 appear to have been the period of the most rapid internal economic development ever in Britain. Industrial output over the entire thirty-two-year period grew at an av­ erage annual rate of 3.5 percent (Court, 1954). The Prince Consort's Great Exhibition in 1851 was intended as a demonstration to all the world of Britain's industrial preeminence. The 1850s saw the start of the protracted mid-Victorian boom which has often been described as the "Good Years," "The Great Victorian Boom," and "Mid-Victorian Prosperity." The success of this period was in part the realization of the potential generated by the previous halfcentury's industrialization. While the prosperity of this era frequently has been exaggerated—it did not, for example, bring to most people what might now be considered a reasonable degree of security and comfort—it did represent a time of great capital accumulation and rel­ atively dynamic economic growth. Overall industrial growth from 1847 to 1873 averaged 3.2 percent per annum, somewhat slower than in the 1815-1847 period (Deane and Cole, 1969). But wages increased sub­ stantially—in nominal terms by 30 percent between 1851 and 1886, and by a greater percentage in real terms due to declining living costs from 1876 to 1886, during the "Great Depression" (Hunt, 1981). It was not only the industrial sector that benefited from the "boom"—the agri­ cultural sector, by now reduced in its relative importance in the econ­ omy, revived substantially from the depression of the 1840s, and entered into a period of relative prosperity and stability (E. L. Jones, 1968), although the shift of population from the rural to the urban sectors continued. Railways continued to expand, and, indeed, it was in this period that the full fruits of railway construction from 1830-1850 were reaped. Not all sectors flourished during the mid-Victorian boom.2 Perhaps the worst depression of the nineteenth century occurred in 1858. More­ over, the cotton famine in Lancashire due to the American Civil War caused severe distress in the 1860s. By that time, too, a major and irreversible contraction in the agricultural sector had begun. Until the 1870s, Britain was nearly self-sufficient in food production. But in the single decade from 1868 to 1878, Britain shifted to the importation of 2For

a "severely qualified" assessment of the Great Victorian Boom, see Church (1975).

[18]

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

more than half her wheat consumption and nearly half her required meat—wheat and meat having by then become two dietary staples. The dramatic turn to imports was largely a response to plentiful new lowcost supplies from abroad. The sources of these cheap foodstuffs were the extensive farming areas of the New World and Eastern Europe, opened up due to the advances in bulk transport by rail and by steamship. Such developments meant falling food prices, favorable for the urban dwellers (by now the majority), but catastrophic for the British agrarian sector. The price of wheat declined nearly 50 percent from its 18481868 average by 1893-1902. Meat product prices fell 25-30 percent from 1871-1875 to 1894-1898 (Court, 1954). The response of Continental states such as France and Germany to similar price declines was protectionist intervention, but in Britain the free market held sway. The worst impacts were in heavily agricultural Ireland, where price declines led to a dissolution of the Irish land system, and in the Scottish Highlands, where they led to a land reform; in both regions there was very substantial out-migration. The period 1873-1896 was one of widespread agricultural depression. Agricultural workers in England and Wales declined in number by over 35 percent from 1871 to 1901 and, astonishingly, by 1911 there were more workers in the single industry of coal extraction than in the whole of agriculture (Saville, 1959). In addition to this crisis in the agricultural sector, the general economic situation from 1873 to 1896 is characterized by the rather misleading phrase "The Great Depression" (Saul, 1969). Wholesale prices declined by 40 percent in the period, a greater fall than that between 1814 (the end of the war boom) and 1851. Rates of interest and agricultural rents declined. Key indicators such as profits, capital accumulation, and in­ vestment also slumped, and business liquidations increased. There were three trade slumps in short order (troughs in 1879, 1886, and 1894), interspersed with two recoveries (peaks in 1883 and 1890). Nonetheless, while some industrial and agricultural proprietors were badly hurt, the sharp declines in cost of living meant that real wages were actually increasing substantially. According to Ashworth, real in­ come per capita rose by 17 percent in the 1870s, and even faster in the 1880s and early 1890s—perhaps 25 percent per decade. The pace de­ clined somewhat in the late 1890s and early 1900s to perhaps 17 percent per decade, but was still high (Ashworth, 1960). Using data from Phelps

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

Brown and Hopkins, one can calculate a 63 percent increase in the real wage index for England from the beginning to the end of the Great Depression (calculated from Wrigley and Schofield, 1981, Table A9.2). Unemployment, too, was not more severe than during the mid-Vic­ torian period. Although the quality of unemployment data for the period is poor, Court (1954) estimates an average unemployment rate of about 6 percent of the work force from 1883 to 1913, and perhaps 6.5 percent in the 1880s. Ashworth notes that peaks of unemployment were expe­ rienced in 1879, 1885, 1886, and 1893, but that the average level from 1880 to 1914 was no higher than from 1850 to 1875. Furthermore, reg­ ularity of employment increased over the period and the number of voluntary hours worked declined, i.e., there was an increase in discre­ tionary leisure among the working population (Ashworth, 1960). The problem of casual labor, especially but not only in port cities, remained a serious one, and formed the focus of repeated and unsuccessful at­ tempts at social reform in the late Victorian period (G. Stedman Jones, 1971; Harris, 1972). Regionally, London and the south of England ex­ perienced relatively high rates of unemployment, while Scotland, Wales, and the north of England were districts of low unemployment—a pattern that was to be almost completely reversed in the period between World Wars I and II (Court, 1954). Hence the Great Depression was a period of rapidly increasing real wages and relatively secure employment for the average person—in fact a period of remarkable late Victorian growth in average standard of living. Why, then, the term Great Depression and the widespread myth of economic stagnation? First, this perception reflects the plight of the articulate middle classes who were suffering more than the generality of the population (Saul, 1969; Court, 1954), but it is such vocal opinions that are recorded and remembered. Second, it is quite true that growth rates of the leading sectors of the economy were decelerating as in­ vestment fell with declines in profitability. Third, the industrialization of competitor economies was well under way. Consequently Britain's domination of international trade was bound to come to an end. Fourth, in the view of some, the international competitiveness of the British economy waned due to the complacency and conservatism of British marketing and entrepreneurship in general (Aldcroft, 1964; McCloskey, 1981a). Such economic and social trends surely suggested a deterioration of

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

the future earning prospects of the nation. But during the Great Depres­ sion itself they were largely latent, and unsuspected by the mass of the population, whose current circumstances were improving substantially. The rise in average standards of living which masked underlying de­ terioration in the economy was reversed after 1896. Prices began to rise again, first slowly, then more rapidly after 1905. By 1914 prices had recovered their full losses from 1873. The period from 1896 to the start of World War I was one in which the British economy lost its remarkable Victorian growth pattern and entered a period of substantially slower advance. The early twentieth-century economy was by no means stag­ nant or declining, but real incomes in 1905-1914 were less than 7 percent above the average for the 1890s (Ashworth, 1960), and hence growth in real income was markedly lower than during the preceding three decades of the so-called Great Depression. In the context of rising expectations generated by the experiences of the recent past, this created a sense of relative deprivation and dissatisfaction. In summary, British industry from 1870 to 1913 did not stagnate, nor was the period of the Great Depression from 1873 to 1896 one of wide­ spread hardship. In fact, British output doubled between 1870 and 1913, the structure of employment showed notable change, and most impor­ tant, the standard of living improved markedly over the period. None­ theless, it was a period of decelerating growth, and the 1890s are often referred to as the "climacteric" of British industrial growth. By the outbreak of World War I, the British advantage of leadership of the industrial world had been lost, for over the same period output for the world as a whole quadrupled. In 1870, Britain produced one-third of the world's manufactures, but by 1913 she produced only one-seventh, and her total output had been overtaken by those of the burgeoning United States and Germany (Ashworth, 1960). Transportation, Communication, and the Centrality of London

The growth of transportation (railways) and communication (post, tele­ graph) in nineteenth-century Britain exceeded that of all other indus­ trialized countries. In addition to stimulating the industrial and agricultural sectors, the railways reinforced trends toward the social and economic integration of the British nation. The process had gone a long way by 1870, when the railway network in the United Kingdom stretched to 15,537 miles, but by 1900 the network had increased by a further 41

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

percent to 21,855 miles. By this time virtually all areas of the United Kingdom were linked with one another. Railway growth was not limited solely to trackage. Between 1870 and 1911 the railways were democratized—transformed from the height of technological transport for the upper and middle classes to the yeoman transporter of the masses, via the growth of workmen's trains and fares, third-class passage, and excursion and season tickets.3 A further integrating force facilitated by the widespread railway net­ work was the Post Office. The number of letters sent increased by over 300 percent between 1870 and 1913, while the number of postcards rose from nearly zero in 1870 to 926 million in 1913. National newspapers, magazines, and distribution of books became feasible with the growing effectiveness of the post. Between 1870 and 1913 the number of news­ papers and the amount of printed matter sent increased by over 1,000 percent, from 125 million to 1,380 million. Parcel post, introduced by the Post Office in 1883, handled nearly 80 million parcels by 1900 and 138 million in 1913. The number of telegrams sent quadrupled between 1870 and 1885 (Ashworth, 1960). At the hub of these powerfully integrative forces was the leviathan town of London. To a much greater extent than Germany and France, England (and to a considerable extent the United Kingdom as a whole) was dominated economically by its capital—by the centrality of London. Wrigley (1967) has shown that this dominance was apparent by the eighteenth and indeed even the seventeenth century. In 1700, London's predominance was such that it was more than twenty times the size of any rival, and accounted for about 60 percent of the total urban pop­ ulation of England. During the nineteenth century it grew no more rapidly than other large towns, but its well-established dominance was certainly maintained and indeed enhanced by the growth of Londoncentered transport, communication, and commerce. Hence the rapid growth of efficient and "democratized" transport and communication in Britain, coupled with the centrality of London, fa­ cilitated a degree of social, cultural, and economic integration that would be achieved only decades later in her Continental competitors. As I 3Railways were used by poorer workingmen as early as the 1840s, especially in the northwest and northeast (see Hobsbawm, 1968).

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING shall suggest later, this attribute may have had considerable impact upon the degree to which demographic trends were homogeneous or diverse. SOCIOECONOMIC CHANGE, 1850-1914 The years 1850 to 1914 saw major changes in several social, economic, and political factors that affected the quality of life of the majority of the British people. Occupational Structure

In the latter half of the nineteenth century there were profound alter­ ations in the British occupational structure. In the two decades of the "Good Years," from about 1850 to 1870, agricultural employment de­ clined by 25 percent, while employment in coal-mining, iron and steel, and machinery and shipbuilding increased by 63, 101, and 115 percent respectively (see Table 2.1). The percentage growth in cotton textiles was smaller, but this sector was already the largest source of industrial employment in 1851, and increased further, by nearly 94,000, by 1871. In this twenty-year period there was a reduction of nearly half a million in agricultural employment, and an increase of comparable size in the industrial sectors. Occupational changes continued with the onset of the Great Depres­ sion (Table 2.2). There was little or no change4 in manufacturing em­ ployment until the end of the century, when there ensued an apparent decline. However, employment in mining (primarily coal) continued to rise dramatically during the period, and indeed continued to rise right up to 1921. By 1911, those in mining occupations were almost as nu­ merous as those in agriculture, fishing, and forestry, the latter category having been declining steadily since 1841 at least. A clear pattern of proportionate growth was also shown by transport and communications, commerce and finance, and professions and entertainment. The relative growth in transport and communications and in commerce and finance was symptomatic of the growth in internal trade, as real incomes rose 4Ashworth (1960, p. 73) has argued that during this period there was in fact some increase in the proportion of workers engaged in manufacturing industries, even though this is not apparent from the census data. However, any such increase, if real, was undoubtedly quite small.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING Table 2.1 Change in employment in various economic sectors, 1851 to 1871

Sector

1851

1871

Absolute change

% change

Agriculture Coal-mining Iron and steel Machinery and shipbuilding Cotton textiles

1,904,607 193,111 95,350 80,528

1,423,854 315,398 191,291 172,948

-480,753 +122,287 + 95,941 + 92,420

-25.2 + 63.3 +100.6 + 114.8

414,998

508,715

+ 93,717

+ 22.6

SOURCE: Calculated from data in Court, 1954, p. 182

and as improved transport and specialization of production led to the replacement of locally produced goods with those from other regions of the country. The growth of the professions and entertainment cate­ gory was also related to improved standards of living, insofar as they affected demand for services and leisure-time activities. Private domestic service employment grew rapidly during the "Good Years" (see Table 2.3). The decades of the 1850s and 1860s each saw increases of nearly a quarter in such employment. After 1871, growth tapered off, and employment in the service sector actually declined between 1891 and 1921 (followed by a sharp increase by the time of the Census of 1931). The growth of domestic employment during the mid-Victorian period was likely due to the prosperity of the middle classes, for the acquiring of domestic servants was one of the primary uses of middle-class surplus income. It is therefore perhaps a bit puzzling that domestic service declined only marginally, if at all, during the Great Depression, when profits declined and real wages rose. Banks (1954, chap. 5) accepts that the decline in numbers of servants did not begin until near the turn of the century, but argues that they were becoming scarcer and more ex­ pensive between 1851 and 1871, and that there was a shift in employment away from male servants toward the less expensive female domestics. For the middle classes during this period, domestic servants were ap­ parently viewed as necessities rather than luxuries. Overall, then, the period from the 1870s to the 1910s saw a relatively constant proportion of labor in manufacturing and in private domestic services, rising proportions in mining, transportation and communica­ tions, commerce and finance, and professions and entertainment, and

6.7 9.4 10.6 11.8 12.80 14.05 15.39 18.22 19.37 21.00 22.46

Year

1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1951

Mining

3.1 3.3 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.5 5.9 6.9 7.3 6.1 3.9

Agriculture , Fishing and Forestry

23.1 22.2 19.0 15.0 12.3 10.4 8.7 7.8 6.7 5.7 4.5

5.8 5.4 5.5 6.2 6.7 6.3 8.0 5.2 4.1 5.4 6.3

Construction 36.6 40.1 39.8 39.8 39.5 38.6 32.9 34.6 38.7 35.0 39.5

Manufacture , Electricity and Gas 3.0 4.4 4.8 5.2 5.9 7.5 9.3 8.0 8.1 8.0 7.8

Transport and Communications Professions and Entertainment

2.9 5.7 6.3 3.1 7.1 3.2 3.4 8.3 3.8 9.2 5.0 10.3 4.4 11.0

13.2 3.7 4.1 16.0 7.0 14.2

Commerce and Finance 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.3 1.2 0.8 1.0 0.9 0.9 1.1 1.4 1.1

4.8 1.6 1.2 5.4 3.4 4.6

0.7 1.0

Armed Forces

Other Government Services

Other Services



14.3 2.0 5.6 9.0 4.5 7.0 4.9 7.8 2.3 6.8

Private Domestic Service

Percentage Distribution of Labor Force (excluding those whose industry unknown)

SOURCE: Adapted from Clark, 1957, p. 514 NOTE: Percentage in Agriculture, fishing, and forestry in 1931 corrected to 5.7 percent from stated 65 .7 percent, apparently a printing error.

Labor Force (excl. Women in Agriculture) , millions

Table 2.2 Industrial distribution of labor force and employers and workers on own account as percentage of whole: Great Britain

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING Table 2.3 Total servant population and percentage change from preceding decade: England and Wales, 1851-1931 Census year

Total

% change

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931

908,138 1,123,428 1,387,872 1,453,175 1,549,502 1,370,773 1,314,024 1,209,704 1,410,713

+ 23.7 + 23.5 + 4.7 + 6.6 -11.5 -2.2 -7.9 + 16.6

SOURCE: Censuses of England and Wales (as compiled in McBride 1976, Table 7.1)

declining proportions in agriculture, fishing, and forestry. (This trend is confounded somewhat by the separation of private domestic service from "other services" beginning in 1901. A further limitation is that posed by the crudity of census employment categories, for which un­ fortunately there can be no retrospective refinement.) (Hunt, 1981) Stability and Gradualism in the British Isles

Social stability was the one major attribute that characterized Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that cannot be attributed to the other major European countries at this time. Despite the rapid economic changes consequent upon the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain, it can be convincingly argued that British social structure at the outbreak of World War I did not differ dramatically from those that had been established by 1840, at least in comparison to the changes that did occur over this period in the rest of Europe. Relative to her Continental rivals, Britain's development between 1850 and 1914 was gradualistic and evolutionary, in virtually all cases tending toward an improvement by degrees in the life of the majority of the British population. A long list of factors furthering this stability might be pro­ vided, among which would be at least the following: 1. Political stability and peace—political institutions over the period were characterized by relative continuity, and Britain avoided the major disruptive impact of the Franco-Prussian War, including the rising of the Paris Commune. By the 1860s a party system had arisen, one that later developed a pattern of stable alteration of power.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

2. Gradual rise in real wages—despite the so-called Great Depres­ sion, conditions of life generally improved for most of the population. 3. Improved housing conditions—new and relatively decent housing for the working classes became available, facilitated by the new avail­ ability of suburban land due to improved railway transport and the provision of workmen's trains and seasonal tickets. 4. Cultural homogeneity—most of Britain in this period was char­ acterized by relatively low levels of ethnicity and of long-distance spatial mobility, with most movement to relatively nearby areas similar in cul­ tural form. 5. Secure food supply and increasing food consumption—there were no food crises over this entire period; indeed food supply grew due to cheap importation from America and Eastern Europe, and consumption levels improved across a broad cross-section of the British population. 6. Gradual improvements in health and general sanitary conditions— nothing spectacular, but a steady improvement, with the notable ex­ ception of persistently high rates of infant mortality until after the turn of the century. 7. Growth of consumerism—increasing real wages and declining food prices provided a new market for mass consumer goods, and gave the broad base of the working class access to some of the products of the Industrial Revolution for the first time. 8. Growth of mass popular culture, including newspapers and other media, sports, and other forms of entertainment such as music halls— another symptom of the improved circumstances of the mass of the population; improved literacy levels allowed for the homogenizing ef­ fects of a mass press, and rising real wages allowed enjoyment of "nonnecessities" such as football and music halls. 9. Absorption of the meritocracy and intelligentsia into the ruling elite, thereby avoiding disaffected elites characterizing the Continent— elites enlisted to operate apparatus of State and Empire. 10. Insularity in British politics—despite the concern for Empire, which increased in the 1890s, Britain was largely insulated from the instabilities of others in Europe; the situation was quite different in France and Germany, for example. 11. Migration as escape—between 1851 and 1910, well over 13 million persons emigrated from the United Kingdom (Mitchell, 1971), a number approached by no Continental country. Most sought better opportunities

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING in the British colonies and former colonies of the New World, and were thereby removed from the rolls of the disenchanted in the United King­ dom. Of course there were also important factors tending toward instability in Britain. Foremost among these was the undermining of the British monopoly position in international trade, with the consequent "climac­ teric" with all of its implications. The impact of this sea change in British fortunes was not felt strongly, however, until after World War I (and indeed it may be remarked that the declines in the relative economic and political fortunes of the United Kingdom have continued steadily up to the year of this writing). There was also the destabilizing impact of rural depopulation, with its negative impacts upon rural stability. However, a majority of the population of England and Wales, at least, was urbanized by the 1850s or even earlier, so much of the impact of this change had already been felt before the period under discussion. Finally, there is the undoubted reality of growing labor militancy and the emergence of a combative labor movement, especially in the mining and transport industries. Much of the impact of this development was not felt until the early 1900s, however, and indeed, some have argued that the economic problems at this time, such as rising food prices, were contributory factors to the growth of labor militancy. In the main, while class consciousness in Britain during this period may have been deeper than elsewhere in Europe, it was not focused upon political issues. Instead it manifested itself in community, kin, neighborhood, and pa­ rochial culture (G. Stedman Jones, 1974). One explanation offered by Hobsbawm (1964) was the role of skilled workers in Britain as an ar­ istocracy of labor: their pride in their high status within the working class generated a defensive mentality and a general opposition to changes raising the status of the lower orders, thereby cementing and stabilizing the status quo. Whatever the reasons, there was nothing in Britain to compare to the revolutionary activities underway in France, Russia, and Germany. Income Distribution

The accurate measurement of income distribution is a notoriously dif­ ficult enterprise, even with modern data and survey techniques. Only fragmentary historical data are available. Basing his estimates on those

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

by Baxter for 1867 and Chiozza Money for 1908, Ashworth estimates that in this period relative income shifted away from the aristocracy and toward the working class, with the middle class maintaining a nearly constant relative position. In absolute terms, of course, the middle class were substantial gainers during this period. However, the growth in real income for the lower classes was also substantial, both relatively and absolutely, and their life chances and lifestyle must have improved by an even greater proportion due to the growth of social services (espe­ cially education), improved general health and sanitary conditions, and more progressive taxation (Ashworth, 1960, pp. 248-49). Williamson's recent work also has suggested a diminution of income inequality after 1850 (Williamson, 1980). Hence the latter part of the nineteenth century was by no means a period of increasing impoverishment. If anything, the relative lot of most of the lower classes improved. Yet there was still much poverty, with at least a tenth of the population living the submerged life of the poverty-stricken underclass, and a further fifth submersible in any crisis (Treble, 1980). And, paradoxically, while the general standard of living of the mass of the population may have improved somewhat, the trend in general nutritional standards was unclear (see discussion below). Urbanization

For the first eight decades of the nineteenth century, there was a marked shift of the British population from rural to urban areas. Cairncross (1953) calculates that the population of towns increased from about 8.4 million in 1841 to about 23.8 million in 1911, an increase of 182 percent (see Table 2.4). In contrast, the population of rural districts grew from 6.2 million to 7 million over the same period, an increase of only 13 percent. Finally, the greatest percentage increase of all was shown by the colliery districts, which increased from 1.3 million in 1841 to 5.3 million in 1911—a percentage increase of 304 percent. By far the ma­ jority of these increases may be attributed to natural increase—in the towns and the colliery districts, 83 and 84 percent respectively of the increase was due to natural increase. For the rural areas, there was a net out-migration which was exceeded by natural increase to some de­ gree, giving rise to a moderate increase in population. Net gains and losses by migration in England and Wales from 1841 to 1911 have also been calculated by Cairncross and are reproduced

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING Table 2.4 Growth of population in England and Wales, 1841-1911 (in thousands)

%

Net gain/ loss by migration 1841-1911

Migration as % of natural increase

Population increase 1841-1911

1841

1911

Natural increase 18411911

Towns Colliery Rural

8,422 1,320 6,166

23,775 5,334 6,961

12,701 3,383 5,302

2,652 651 -4,507

+ 20.9% + 19.2 -85.0

+182% + 304 + 13

North South

7,784 8,125

19,602 16,468

11,826 9,540

-7 -1,198

-0.1 -12.6

+ 152 + 103

15,914

36,070

21,366

-1,210

-5.7

+ 127

Population

All

SOURCE: Cairncross, 1953, p. 78

here as Table 2.5. Absolute growth of the towns peaked in the 1840s, with a secondary peak in the 1870s. However, the former was evenly divided between London and eight large northern towns (especially Liverpool and Manchester) and was heavily affected by Irish immigrants fleeing the famine, while the latter inflow was much more concentrated into London, and indeed represented the period of greatest migration to the metropolis (See Table 2.5). As early as 1851, over 50 percent of the population of England and Wales could be classified as urban, and by 1891 this figure had reached 72 percent. Cairncross's estimates of urbanization are even higher; by his definitions of rural districts, only 39 percent of the population of England and Wales lived in them in 1841, declining to no more than 19 percent by 1911 (Cairncross, 1953). However, there was no rural de­ population as such; in 1911 the population of the rural areas was higher in absolute terms than in 1841 (see Table 2.4). There were important variations in the growth rates of the major urban areas over this period. The growth of cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, which had far exceeded that of London during the earlier part of the nineteenth century, slowed substantially, while in relative terms the pace of growth in London increased. Hence there was a changing regional balance in the urban population of England over the period. In Scotland there were no equivalents of the northern metropolises of England. Scottish urban growth was concentrated in the south, and especially in the Glasgow-Edinburgh axis. Scotland at the end of the

+271 + 28 +294

Net Migration North South England

+104 -226 -122

-229 -513 -743 + 81 -141 - 60

-254 -430 -683

+ 91

+ 11 + 43 +244 +289 +533

+ 11 -19

+ 32

+262 +186

1861-71

SOURCE: Cairncross, 1953, p. 70 NOTE: Totals may not conform to components due to rounding errors

-159 -284 -443

+ 5 - 2 +230 +287 +517

- 6 + 2 +348 +312 +660

Rural 12 Northern 12 Southern Allrural

+ 34 - 5

+ 28 - 7

+103

- 4

+ 58

+ 82

+244 +196

1851-61

+274 +249

1841-51

9 Northern

Colliery

Towns Large: London 8 Northern Textile: 22 Northern Industrial: 14 Northern 1 1 Southern Residential: 9 Northern 26 Southern Northerntowns Southerntowns Alltowns

+133 -281 -148

-263 -574 -837

+ 84

+ 30 + 27 +311 +293 +605

- 6 -11

+ 93

+ 307 +188

1871-81

-318 -300 -617

-349 -496 -845

+ 90

+ 22 + 45 - 59 +197 +138

- 89 - 6

+ 4

+169 + 21

1881-91

- 41 - 14 - 54

-237 -423 -660

+ 85

+ 60 + 83 +112 +409 +521

- 51 +25

- 41

+226 +144

1891-1901

-238 -264 -502

-153 -142 -295

+114

+ 18 +129 —199 -122 -321

- 81 + 7

- 52

-232 - 90

1901-11

Total

90

7 -1,198 -1,210

-1,644 -2,863 -4,507

+ 651

+ 140 + 327 + 986 +1,665 +2,652

- 153 - 1 6

+

+1,251 + 893

Table 2.5 Population gain ( + ) or loss ( —) through migration from towns, colliery districts, and rural residues, England, 1841-1911 (in thousands)

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

time period could be characterized as consisting of two quite different sectors: a large urban industrial concentration in the south, and a vast depopulated hinterland in the north especially, but also in the southwest and Border counties. Feminism and Growth of Female Employment in the Modern Sector

The latter half of the nineteenth century was the time of the rise of the feminist movement and the rapid growth of female employment, es­ pecially in sectors other than agriculture and domestic service. The growth of the feminist movement has been examined intensively by Banks and Banks (1964). The movement had its locus primarily among middle-class women, and hence its primary concerns were those of this relatively small group. There was little contact with working-class women, who formed the bulk of the female population, and Banks and Banks conclude that the movement had little or no impact upon fertility be­ havior. There were, however, important changes during this period in the level of female employment in the industrial sector. This was especially true of the cotton industry, centered in Lancashire and surrounding counties, which employed the largest group of women of any industry in the country. By 1881, nearly two-thirds of the total employed in the industry were women. Employment growth in this sector after 1851 was not large compared with that in coal-mining, iron and steel, and ma­ chinery and shipbuilding, since the most rapid growth of the cotton industry occurred in the earlier part of the century. The cotton industry, however, remained one of the country's largest employers of labor, and especially of female labor, and one of the main pillars of its exports. It also accounted in part for the growth of Manchester and Liverpool to the status of major cities in England, as already noted. However, the number of women employed did not increase as a proportion of total employed between 1881 and 1914; indeed, it declined slowly.5 The primary declines were in the traditional sectors, counter­ balanced by increases in the more modern industries and in the nondomestic service sector. The pattern, then, was generally one of a gradual shift of female employment from the traditional to the modern sectors— 5"The percentage of females in the occupied population of Britain fell from 31.8 percent in 1871 to 29.2 percent in 1901 and was 29.6 percent in 1911" (Ashworth, 1960, p. 192n.).

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING though no more rapidly than the comparable shift experienced in the male population. Child Employment and Education

The first effective factory law limiting child employment was passed in 1833, and prohibited the employment of children under nine years of age. (A similar unenforced prohibition had been law since 1819.) This 1833 law applied to textile mills only. It also limited work by children aged nine to twelve to nine hours per day and those thirteen to seventeen to twelve hours per day. The primary effect of this law was not these notional limits, but rather the establishment of a factory inspectorate to ensure the law's enforcement. In 1842, the employment of children less than ten years old under­ ground in the mines was prohibited. But their employment above ground was legal and common. Precisely at the middle of the century, during the years 1847-1853, came legislation that established for the first time legal norms for the working day in the mills for adults as well as children: 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. with IV2 hours off for lunch, and half-day closing on Saturdays. Such limits affected only a minority of employed children, for they were not extended to nontextile industries until 1867 (see Hunt, 1981). Eventually free and compulsory education provided the final answer to the problems of child employment which had been under discussion for over half a century. The early factory acts had required that factory children be educated, and the Poor Laws provided for the education of children under their care. These provisions were never implemented, due to rivalry between the Anglican and the Nonconformist churches, each of which was determined to control such a system. Finally in 1870 an Education Act established a national primary system for children five to thirteen, though as a result of a continuing battle for control by the churches it was still based upon local control and taxation. Attendance was not compulsory, however, until 1880 (and even then there were some exceptions), and it was not free until 1891 (see Hurt, 1979). Literacy

The measurement of literacy is fraught with problems in the absence of explicit information on the subject in British decennial censuses. Indirect measures such as school attendance and the volume of popular publi-

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

cations have been proposed, but also criticized (Schofield, 1973). Direct measures may also be drawn from numerous surveys in the 1830s and 1840s, but the methods used to determine literacy are variable or un­ known, and comparable data are not available for other periods in any case. Only one direct measure of nineteenth-century literacy is available for England—the proportion having the ability to sign the marriage register. Since at that period reading was taught before writing and school attendance was brief and intermittent, Schofield (1973) thinks that many students quit school after attaining some ability to read but little or no ability to write. He argues, therefore, that the proportion able to sign was less than the proportion able to read, but greater than the proportion able to write, and suggests that the proportion able to sign roughly corresponds with the proportion able to read fluently. Hence he views it as a plausible "middle-range" estimate of literacy. The corresponding estimate of illiteracy, that is, the proportion of those marrying who signed the register by "mark," is shown in Figure 2.1 for England and Wales from 1830 to 1910. Illiteracy so measured declined rather slowly until about 1850, but then it began to drop pre­ cipitously for both sexes. By 1870 only 20 percent of the males and 27 percent of the females were signing the marriage register by mark. Hence by this measure illiteracy had been reduced to fairly low levels before the decline of the birth rate got under way. By 1910 only about 1 percent were signing the registers by mark. 0.6

0.5

Women

ο 0.4 ί­ α:

O

α. ο

0.3 Men

£ 0.2

1840

1850

I860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

Figure 2.1 Proportion of men and women marrying who signed by mark, 1840-1910, England and Wales

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

Roberts (1973), however, notes that the ability to sign one's own name was only a first step toward literacy, and that many of those able to do so were actually unable to read or write. He prefers the data on the literacy of prison populations because he believes that in the nine­ teenth century nearly all of the people going to prison were "ordinary members of the community" and "not a special class of professional criminals," so that prison figures are crudely representative of the lit­ eracy situation among the broad mass of the population. Table 2.6 presents these figures as estimated from a chart. The proportions of illiterates suggested by these results are substan­ tially higher than those given by the proportions signing by mark. It should be noted, however, that the discrepancy is not as large as it first appears. The prison data relate to the prison population of all ages, whereas the data from the registers relate exclusively to the younger newly-married group. At a time when illiteracy was declining rapidly the literacy of the newly marrying would be considerably higher than that of a cross-section of the population. Table 2.6's results also show a rapid drop of illiteracy, but indicate that, at least among prisoners, almost one in five remained illiterate at the turn of the century, when less than 7 percent were signing the marriage registers by mark. For us, however, the important fact is that from the middle of the nineteenth century onward illiteracy was declining rapidly among both sexes, and that a substantial part of this decline came before the Edu­ cation Acts of 1870 and 1880 and, indeed, before there had been a considerable decline in fertility. Public Health Sanitary conditions in the burgeoning towns and cities of Britain were poor, as was amply shown by Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary

Table 2.6 Percentage illiterate among prisoners in England and Wales, 1836-1845, 1870, and 1900

Year

% illiterate among prisoners

1836-1845 1870 1900

Over 90 45 19

SOURCE: Interpolated from chart in Roberts (1973, p. 130)

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

Condition of the Labouring Population in 1842. Outbreaks of cholera occurred in 1831-1832,1848-1849,1854, and 1866-1867 (Perkin, 1969). The early cholera outbreaks, plus increased deaths in 1838 from typhus in the poorer districts of London, gave rise to Chadwick's report. The Public Health Act of 1848 established a General Board of Health (which included Chadwick as a member), with authority to establish local public health authorities upon petition or in districts where the death rate rose excessively. In the five years that followed, 182 towns came under the act's provisions. But in 1854 the board was discontinued, and there was no further central authority on public health until 1919. In part as a result of the growth of attention to public health in the mid-nineteenth century, in part as a reflection of improving levels of nutrition (see below), there was a major decline in mortality.6 The crude death rate declined by about a third between 1861 and 1901. Life ex­ pectancy rose from 39.9 years (male) and 41.9 (female) in the period 1838-1854 to 51.5 years (male) and 55.4 (female) in 1901-1912—an increase of about 29 percent and 32 percent for males and females respectively, most of which occurred after 1865. But the declines in infant and child mortality lagged, as may be seen in Table 2.7. Recorded infant mortality in 1891-1900 was as high as in 1841-1850,

Table 2.7 Infant and child mortality in decennia 1841-1850 to 1911-1920

Years

Infant mortality per 1,000 births

1841-1850 1851-1860 1861-1870 1871-1880 1881-1890 1891-1900 1901-1910 1911-1920

153 154 154 149 142 153 128 100

Index

Mortality under 5 yrs. per 1,000 living

Index

100 101 101 97 93 100 84 65

66.0 67.6 68.6 63.4 56.8 57.7 46.0 34.6

100 102 104 96 86 87 70 52

SOURCE: Register General of England and Wales, Decennial Supplement, 1921, Part III, p. Ixx

6For a discussion of the causes of these declines, see McKeown (1976) and Razzell (1965).

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

although two of the intervening decades showed slightly lower rates. It is, of course, likely that the completeness of death registration improved over this period, but plausible adjustments for under-registration in the early decades would still not lead one to conclude that a substantial and continuous decline in infant mortality had occurred before the turn of the twentieth century. The pattern of decline in child mortality is clearer, though the decline from 1841-1850 to 1891-1900 is still only about 13 percent. The really important decline in both infant and child mortality took place in the decades after the turn of the century, long after the onset of decline in marital fertility. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that general health and sanitary conditions improved in the latter half of the nineteenth century, for the overall mortality rates did decline and there were no more widespread outbreaks of cholera after 1866-1867, nor of typhus after 1838. Nutrition

McKeown and Record (1962); McKeown, Record, and Turner (1975); and McKeown (1976) have argued that there was a major improvement in nutrition which accounted for a large portion of the improvement in mortality conditions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and Wales. Other available evidence suggests countervailing trends in nu­ trition. For male adults, the diet during the second half of the nineteenth century may have been considerably better than during the first half. The average rural person from 1800 to 1850 lived almost entirely on bread and milk, with little meat, vegetables, or even beer. By the second half of the century, the usual diet contained much more meat and veg­ etables. The urban diet from 1800-1850 was described by Drummond and Wilbraham (1940) as simply "bad." It consisted primarily of bread, potatoes, and strong tea, and only potatoes and porridge for the very poor. The bread was usually adulterated, and available meat of poor quality. The role of the potato was very important, and the potato blight of 1845-1846 thus had a major impact in the towns. After 1860, the average urban diet improved with declining food prices and the greater availability of meat. Bread consumption per capita increased through the third quarter of the century, as did that of tea, sugar, and several other foods (Burnett, 1966). Bread prices declined due to the opening of extensive cultivable

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

lands in Europe and North America, and per capita consumption of bread reached a high around 1880. From this time, bread consumption declined with a rapid increase in consumption of meat and other foods previously viewed as luxuries. Mackenzie (1966) provides estimates of per capita supplies in 1880, 1909-1913, and 1924-1928 in Table 2.8, drawn from the work of Greaves and Hollingsworth. Although data on some foods are unfortunately not available for 1880, between 1880 and 1900-1913 there were marked increases in the availability per capita of meat, fish, eggs, butter, margarine, and sugar, while there were declines in potatoes and wheat—the staples of the poor in the first half of the century. Indeed, the availability of meat, fish, and eggs had risen by 1909-1913 to levels equal to or greater than those experienced fully fifteen years later, in 1924-1928. Hence the period between 1880 and World War I was almost certainly one of improving nutritional standards for a large proportion of the people. However, Drummond and Wilbraham argue that for the "un­ derclass" of desperately poor, who still depended primarily upon bread

Table 2.8 Food supplies, United Kingdom, for 1880, 1909-1913 and 1924-1928 (pounds per person per year) Food Dairy Total as milk solids Liquid milk Cheese Meat (carcass weight, including bacon & ham) Poultry and game Fish Eggs Butter Margarine Other fats Sugar Potatoes Other vegetables (including legumes and tomatoes) Fruits Wheat flour Other cereals

SOURCE: Mackenzie, 1966, p. 136

1880

1909-1913

1924-1928

na 213 8

33 219 7

35 217 9

91 na 18 11 12 0 na 64 296

131 5 41 16 16 6 4 79 243

129 6 41 15 16 12 6 87 230

na na 280 na

78 68 211 26

105 97 198 16

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

for their sustenance, there was a deterioration of the quality of bread in these years, with consequent negative impacts on nutritional status. They attribute this to the substitution of the roller mill for the timehonored stone mill. This new technology facilitated separation of the wheat germ, which lengthened the shelf life of the flour. It also eased the production of white bread, highly prized by rich and poor alike, and white bread consumption proliferated rapidly. But the absent germ also contained much of the grain's nutritional value, according to Drummond and Wilbraham. Examination of modern estimates of key food nutrients in whole wheat as compared to (unenriched) white bread suggests that there may indeed have been a decrease in available calcium, phosphorus, iron, potassium, thiamin, and niacin (see Table 2.9). However, there is no evidence of important decreases in protein, and total food energy, fat, and carbo­ hydrates may have increased (see Table 2.8). In light of these data, the validity of Drummond and Wilbraham's assertions (1940) that rollermilled white bread lead to widespread dietary deficiencies and marked declines in physique must be considered doubtful. Perhaps more important was the unfavorable nutritional situation among women of the working class, and particularly of the very poor among them. Hewitt (1958), Burnett (1966), and Oddy (1976), among others, point to the unequal sharing of food within the family. Oddy (1976) infers from the writings of Smith, Booth, and Rowntree that in the typical working-class family, available food was allocated in such a way that the women (and children) were perpetually undernourished. This distribution pattern was "normal behaviour in working-class cul­ ture" (p. 225), and was believed to be right by the women themselves, knowing as they did that the welfare of the family depended upon the ability of the man to work.7 Testimony just after the turn of the century from factory inspectors, social workers, and doctors indicated that ane­ mia, general debility, and digestive troubles were almost universal among working-class women (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1940). Especially for the women among the very poor, dietary deficiencies combined with frequent pregnancy to impose a severe burden on health:

'Widespread alcoholism was also a drain of family resources that could have been used for food purchases (see Harrison, 1971).

241

290

270

36.4

30.6

35.6

8.7

9.1

9.1

3.2

3.0

2.6

.2

.2

50.5

1.5

55.4

49.3

SOURCE: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1963, Table 1

Whole-wheat, made with water French or vienna white— Unenriched, made with water Standard U.S. white— Enriched, made with 3%-4% nonfat dry milk

Food and description

2.0

1.9

2.6

84

43

84

97

85

254

2.5

.7

2.3

507

580

530

105

90

256

Trace

Trace

Trace

.25

.08

.30

.21

.08

.10

2.4

.8

2.8

Trace

Trace

Trace

Carbohydrate Vitamin PhosFood PotasA RiboAscorbic Water energy Protein Fat Total Fiber Ash Calcium phorus Iron Sodium sium Value Thiamine flavin Niacin acid (%) (cal.) (gr.) (gr.) (gr.) (gr.) (gr.) (mg.) (mg.) (mg.) (mg.) (mg.) (IU) (mg.) (mg.) (mg.) (mg.)

Table 2.9 Nutrients in 100 grams of bread

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

The poor women just became steadily more anaemic until at an early age their health was gravely undermined. Their waxen, sickly, green­ ish faces were one of the commonest sights in the streets in Victorian days. (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1940) Infant and Child Nutrition

Under these circumstances, it may be inferred that prenatal malnutrition was a common occurrence during the latter half of the nineteenth cen­ tury. Further, it appears that the practice of breast-feeding declined markedly during the century, to be replaced by artificial feeding of quite inadequate quality (Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deteri­ oration, 1904). Widespread employment of women in the Victorian factories made nursing less convenient, or even impossible, at the same time that the development of feasible (no matter how dangerous) meth­ ods of artificial feeding on cow's milk and water provided a plausible alternative. An infantile diet of cow's milk and water is now known to be nutri­ tionally inadequate. Further, the danger of disease from unpasteurized and unsanitary milk (especially in the towns) and from the artificial feeding practices themselves suggests an increasing prevalence of infan­ tile infection as well as malnutrition, exerting upward pressure on infant mortality and causing poorer health and nutritional status among the young who survived (Ackroyd and Kevany, 1973, p. 16). In 1857, Routh (cited in Hewitt, 1958, p. 139) reported that French foundling hospitals using wet nurses were far more successful in keeping their charges alive than were those using artificial feeding: "In Lyons and Parthenay, when children were suckled at the breast, the mortality was respectively 33.7% and 36% whereas in Paris, Rheims, and Aix, where they were brought up by hand, it was respectively 50.3%, 63.9% and 80%." English commentators on Routh's article (published in the same issue) indicated that similar experience had been seen in English foundling hospitals.8

8 The Lancet in 1838 reported on a French hospital using artificial feeding methods in which 78 percent of infants died before the age of one year. Cited in Drummond and Wilbraham, 1940, p. 373. See also Sussman, 1977 for evidence of the lethality of wetnursing.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

The problem of infection from fresh milk was reduced somewhat late in the nineteenth century when sterile condensed milk became available. It was used in large quantities for feeding children, but it was skimmed and hence also insufficient nutritionally (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1940, p. 373). In addition, it seems likely that the major improvements in average meat, fish, and dairy consumption did not greatly benefit the very poor children (nor their mothers) of the late nineteenth century. Rowntree found that among the poor working-class families in York (with weekly incomes of less than twenty-six shillings), the bulk of the available meat went to the working man in the family, while the children ate bread and "scrape," such as dripping, margarine, or jam (Oddy, 1976). Such socially determined allocation of food within the family may partially explain the slowness of the decline in infant and child mortality, and perhaps also the otherwise anomalous fact that despite rising per capita food availability, there was a 40 percent rejection rate for recruits to the Boer War, and the authorities found it necessary to reduce the minimum height for infantry men from 5'6" to 5'3" in 1883, and to 5Ό" in 1902 (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1940, p. 404).9 These latter ex­ periences led to the establishment of an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, charged with the task of identifying the causes of the poor physique and ill health of much of the population. Reporting in 1904, the committee documented the sharp decline in breast-feeding of infants, and attributed it to maternal neglect and to chronic and nearuniversal ill health and malnutrition of the mothers. The committee reported that at least a third of poor children actually went hungry, and most did not have a balanced diet. A survey in Sheffield in 1900 indicated that 60 percent of mothers in working-class districts "were feeding their babies on wholly unsuitable foods" (Drummond and Wilbraham, 1940). Finally, another factor undoubtedly contributing in some measure to infant mortality was the apparently widespread use of gin and drugs to quiet babies. Popular baby nostrums such as Godfrey's Cordial, Atkin­ son's Royal Infants' Preservative, and Mrs. Wilkinson's Soothing Syrup all contained opium, laudanum, or morphine. Laudanum itself, which

'Recruitment for the Boer War took place during an economic boom; hence the recruits may well have been an unusually unrepresentative sample, biased toward those incapable of finding employment even in a buoyant labor market.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

was cheaper than the prepared syrups, was also used in homemade nostrums of laudanum, aniseed, and treacle. Sales were large, partic­ ularly in factory areas where mothers often worked during the day. There can be no real doubt that such use of powerful opiates on children must have contributed to infant and child mortality, both directly and indirectly through their depressive effects upon appetite and hence nu­ trition (Hewitt, 1958). Hewitt infers that the mortality impact may have been great, though in absence of reliable data no quantitative estimates can be developed. We may conclude that while there were substantial improvements in average food availability after 1850, such improvements did not nec­ essarily extend to women and children of the very poor among the working class. It is possible that their nutritional levels may actually have declined in the 1880s and 1890s with the spread of roller-milled bread and the unsanitary quality of the urban milk supply.There can be little doubt that the decline in breast-feeding resulted in a net worsening of infant nutrition, although we cannot put a clear time scale on this change. Widespread nutritional deficiencies, combined with the use of powerful addictive and appetite-reducing child nostrums, may have con­ tributed to the lateness of declines in infant and child mortality despite overall improvements in health and food supply. BRITISH FERTILITY AND MORTALITY BEFORE 1837

Although the focus of this research is upon the fertility decline of the latter half of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to introduce briefly the still unresolved debate concerning the level of fertility in the eight­ eenth and early nineteenth centuries. The source of the debate is es­ sentially one of data deficiency. Birth and death registration was the responsibility of ecclesiastical authorities in England and Wales until 1836, in Scotland until 1854, and in Ireland until 1864. The completeness of ecclesiastical death and (especially) birth registration is highly suspect, leading to extensive and conflicting interpretations of available data. In particular, a major controversy has arisen as to whether the sharp in­ creases in population size, acknowledged by all, derived primarily from a decline in mortality or an increase in fertility. A survey of this debate from differing outlooks may be found in Flinn (1970), Hollingsworth

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

(1969), Krause (1963), McKeown (1976), McKeown and Brown (1955), Razzell (1965), and Wrigley and Schofield (1981). In brief, some researchers suggest that fertility levels increased during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Others suggest that the available data are insufficient to prove a fertility increase, and that a more likely explanation of the substantial increase in population during this period is a decline in mortality, due to the introduction of modern forms of sanitation, agriculture, and transportation. The debate will certainly not be resolved here, for the present work is restricted by design to the period for which official registration data are available, i.e., from the mid-nineteenth century onward. However, the debate is of some pos­ sible relevance in explaining the causes of the fertility decline that clearly took place in the late nineteenth century. It is difficult to dispute that very rapid growth occurred before 1800 although there is disagreement as to whether that growth was continuous or sporadic (see Table 2.10 and Fig. 2.2). Wrigley and Schofield's recent estimates (1981, Table A3.1) of eighteenth-century English population suggest that growth increased from low levels during the century's first three decades to nearly 0.7 percent per year by the middle and over 1.1 percent by the end of the century. The fragmentary evidence for Scotland is suggestive of far less sub­ stantial growth during the second half of the eighteenth century, whereas the available data for Ireland (Connell, 1950) suggest very substantial growth during the period prior to the devastating famine and mass emigration produced by the failures of the potato crop. The most convincing evidence to date on this matter is that produced by Wrigley and Schofield in their monumental The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (1981). This work presents a splendid recon­ struction of fertility and mortality trends in England (excluding Wales and Monmouth) over three centuries, based principally on a painstaking method employing back projection of nineteenth-century census data. With regard to the debate under discussion here, Wrigley and Schofield's data do indeed show a significant increase in overall fertility in the latter half of the eighteenth century. As shown in Figure 2.3 and Table 2.11, fertility, as measured by the quinquennial gross reproduction rate, in­ creased from 2.339 in 1751 to a peak of 3.056 in 1816—an increase of 31 percent. This is followed by a rather sharp decline to a level of 2.531

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING Table 2.10 Estimated populations of England and Wales, Scotland, Great Britain, Ireland and United Kingdom, 1701-1931 (in millions) England and Wales" 1701 1711 1721 1731 1741 1751 1761 1771 1781 1791 1801 1811 1821 1831 1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931

5.8 6.0 6.0 5.9 5.9 6.1 6.6 7.1 7.5 8.2 9.2 —

12.0 — —

17.9 20.1 22.7 26.0 29.0 32.5 36.1 37.9 40.0

Englandb

Scotland"

5.1 5.2 5.4 5.3 5.6 5.8 6.1 6.4 7.0 7.7 8.7 9.9 11.5 13.3 15.0 16.7 18.9 21.5

1.0

— — — — — —

Great Britainc 6.8

Ireland0

United Kingdom'

2.5 2.8

— —

9.4

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

3.0

—

—

—

—

—

1.3

3.1

10.5

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

1.5 1.6

9.7 10.7 12.1 14.2 16.4 18.6 20.9 23.2 26.2 29.8 33.1 37.1 40.9 42.8 44.8

3.5 4.0 4.8 5.2 6.0 6.8 7.8 8.2 6.5 5.8 5.4 5.1 4.7 4.4 4.4 4.4 4.2

—

2.1 — —

2.9 3.1 3.4 3.7 4.0 4.5 4.8 4.9 4.8

7.4

— —

14.5 16.0 18.1 21.0 24.1 26.8 27.4 29.0 31.6 34.9 37.8 41.5 45.3 47.2 49.0

"Values for 1701-1801 from Brownlee, 1916; values for 1821 from A. Newsholme, Vital Statistics (1923), p. 52; values for 1851-1931 from United Nations Demographic Yearbook (1955), Table 4 (values interpolated for Northern Ireland, 1931) bWrigley and Schofield, 1981, Table A3.1: England excluding Wales and Monmouthshire cValues for 1701-1801 from Deane and Cole, 1969, p. 6

in 1836, which is consistent with previous analyses of Hollingsworth (1969, p. 349), Huzel (1969), and Wrigley (1976). If overall fertility did rise in the late eighteenth century and fall in the early nineteenth as indicated by these data, a central question for our purposes here is whether these changes resulted from changes in marital fertility or from changes in nuptiality. The former would suggest

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING 50

United Kingdom Great Britain

Dash lines indicate missing intervening values.

England 8t Wales

40

(Λ _J

-I

5

30

< -I

3 CL O Q-

Ireland Scotland

1701

1741

1781

1821

1861

1901

1941

Figure 2.2 Population estimates for the United Kingdom, 1701-1931 (in millions)

pre transitional control mechanisms on marital fertility, while the latter would be consistent with longstanding interpretations of so-called "MaIthusian" controls via regulation of nuptiality. On this question, Wrigley and Schofield are quite declarative: ". . . it is remarkable that although back projection identified a rise in fertility as the principal agent of population growth, in doing so it proves to be paying tribute to the primacy of nuptiality in directing the course of events . . . (p. 268)." Similarly, Wrigley and Schofield (Table A3.1) also show declines in nuptiality from 1816 to 1836 as measured by the crude marriage rate, to levels lower than any since the early 1700s. Hence on present evidence the changes in fertility in the century following 1750 may have been of considerable magnitude, but of quite a different character from those of the later demographic transition under scrutiny here. Wrigley and Schofield describe the period after 1850 as representing a clear break with the nuptiality and fertility pat­ terns of earlier centuries, a demographic revolution to match the eco­ nomic revolution three-quarters of a century earlier (p. 438). As we

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING Table 2.11 Gross reproduction rate in England (excluding Monmouth), 1541-1871 Year

GRR

Year

GRR

1541 1546 1551 1556 1561 1566 1571 1576 1581 1586 1591 1596

2.869 2.655 2.795 2.311 2.322 2.477 2.130 2.176 2.322 2.353 2.358 2.243

1601 1606 1611 1616 1621 1626 1631 1636 1641 1646 1651 1656 1661 1666 1671 1676 1681 1686 1691 1696

2.354 2.339 2.194 2.153 2.229 2.107 2.105 2.094 2.152 2.089 1.852 2.008 1.810 1.977 1.899 1.906 1.939 2.170 2.159 2.184

1701 1706 1711 1716 1721 1726 1731 1736 1741 1746 1751 1756 1761 1766 1771 1776 1781 1786 1791 1796

2.337 2.245 2.052 2.245 2.266 2.213 2.202 2.366 2.218 2.273 2.339 2.315 2.370 2.392 2.501 2.581 2.488 2.623 2.767 2.764

1801 1806 1811 1816 1821 1826 1831 1836 1841 1846 1851 1856 1861 1866 1871

2.693 2.931 2.868 3.056 2.981 2.855 2.588 2.531 2.492 2.374 2.403 2.444 2.507 2.553 2.537

SOURCE: Wrigley and Schofleld, 1981, Table A3.1

shall see, this demographic revolution was revolutionary not only in its sweep and magnitude, but also in its components and causes.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING GRR

3.0

2.6

2.4 2.2 2.0

1551

1601

1651

1701

1751

1801

1851

19 Ol

Figure 2.3 Estimated English gross reproduction rates (GRR), 1541-1901. From Wrigley and Schofield, 1981, Fig. 7.6

THE KIND OF EVIDENCE AVAILABLE ABOUT FERTILITY TRENDS FROM 1837 ONWARD

England and Wales

Fortunately, from the middle of the nineteenth century onward the study of fertility trends becomes much simpler in England and Wales, where ecclesiastical registration of vital events was replaced by civil registration in 1857. There was a good deal of sophistication about the collection of data on mortality, because that subject preoccupied Gov­ ernment statisticians. Until the 1930s, however, births were somewhat taken for granted. As will be seen in the next chapter, even their reg­ istration was not substantially complete for some years. Meanwhile, however, the growing accuracy of age-reporting at the census provides a reasonable, reliable means of correcting for those deficiencies. The main difficulties lie in the paucity of information col­ lected about births. It was limited to the place, time, and legitimacy of live-born children, and remained thus limited until the Population (Sta-

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

tistics) Act of 1938. We shall have to employ indirect means of account­ ing for differences in the age distributions of married women and indeed of all women in the childbearing ages. The only major exception to this paucity of information came from the Census of 1911. In it, currently married women with husband present were asked about the total number of children ever born, the children surviving, the marriage duration, and the age at marriage of the wife. Extensive cross-tabulations of these data with the occupational status of the husbands yielded a mine of information that was published in two volumes (England and Wales, Census of 1911, Vol. XIII).The data are invaluable for the study of differential fertility by social class, but for the study of time trends they have grave limitations. This is true primarily because women living with their husbands and reporting on the total number of their children in 1911 are variously selected samples of their own marriage classes as we move backward in time. Glass (1973) describes these problems as follows: First, the marriages of very long duration, reflecting the patterns of fertility of the 1870s and earlier years, are inevitably overweighted by young ages at marriage. This can be corrected to some extent by reweighting. The second bias derives from the definition of the uni­ verse covered by the fertility questions—namely currently married couples, with husband present. But "currently married" excludes cou­ ples whose marriage remained unbroken until the end of the wife's reproductive period and became broken (primarily by death of the husband) thereafter. Given both level of mortality and sex differential in the death rates, this means that the women married in, say, the 1870s and 1860s and included in the fertility census represented only a fraction of those women who were still alive in 1911—about 52 percent of the women married in 1871/5 and 32 percent of the women married in 1861/5 and alive in 1911. An intensive analysis of the 1911 fertility data as a basis for interpreting the decline of fertility in England and Wales has been made by Innes (1938). In this study, however, we shall respect Glass's warnings and confine ourselves to examination of the annual stream of births regis­ tered as they occurred.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

Scotland

Until 1861 Scotland was enumerated as part of the Census of Great Britain. After the establishment of a separate Registrar General for Scotland, the Scottish Census was implemented separately but concur­ rently with that of England and Wales. Official vital statistics were not initiated in Scotland until 1855. In contrast to the early data for England and Wales, these early Scottish data are believed to be substantially complete (Royal Commission on Population, 1950, p. 208, n. 1). With the exception of the single year 1855, early fertility data for Scotland were limited to rudimentary in­ formation on the place, time, sex, and legitimacy of the births. Ireland

With neither border nor majority religion in common, Ireland was never an integral part of Great Britain, as has been amply demonstrated by the politico-religious strife to this day. Statistically, Ireland has been treated as a quite separate entity. The first official census of Ireland was taken in 1813, but Froggat (1965) has raised serious doubts as to its reliability. From then on decennial censuses were taken, though these were of indifferent quality until 1841. Official vital registration in Ireland did not begin until 1864, and is not considered to have become relatively complete until 1875 (McKeown, Brown, and Record, 1972). After the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, Irish data collection was divided into two separate Registrars General, and in the Free State the census year was shifted to that ending in "6" instead of "1" on the British pattern, all of which conspire to present awkward problems of data handling. Irish data for the 1920s may be especially unreliable because of the turmoil of the period. Difficulties Arising from Organizational Fragmentation

As the foregoing makes clear, data on the population of the British Isles are not available in an integrated and consistent format. Instead, we sometimes have three and even four separate Registrars General, each with his own peculiarities of method, coverage, and presentation. This practice is the source of numerous difficulties in the analysis of British fertility. From the mid-1800s onward, all necessary distributions

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING

by age, county, and so on are given in wholly separate tables, and rarely if ever are the data integrated into a total for Great Britain or the United Kingdom. This becomes a particular nuisance when dealing with com­ plex multidimensional distributions, which in some cases are available for only England and Wales or Scotland, but never for both together. In fact, Great Britain as a whole is rarely discussed, and Scotland is treated as a quite separate country. The common practice is to talk of trends in England and Wales, with maps and data stopping at the Scottish border. As will shortly become apparent, the practice of ignoring Scotland can be very misleading. Whatever the Scots may say about the English and vice versa, both belong to the same political and economic entity in the same sense that Brittany is part of France. Examination of fertility behavior in England and Wales alone may lead the investigator to the conclusion that Great Britain is a homogeneous and minimally region­ alized country. One need only include Scotland to show that this is far from true. Moreover, the belief that Ireland is different is nowhere more clearly justified than in the trend of its fertility. Inadequacies of its data make close scrutiny impossible, yet they are quite sufficient to show that Ireland is indeed something else.

CHAPTER 3: Methods of Fertility Measurement This chapter has two purposes: first, to explain the measures of fertility that will be used here, and have been used in the entire series of studies of the European fertility transition of which this book is a part; second, to examine the degree of completeness of birth registration in the early part of our period, and to make adjustments for major defects. This second problem relates exclusively to the early data for England and Wales and for Ireland. The Scottish data begin later, but, as has already been noted, are thought to be relatively complete from 1855 on. The Irish series starts later and is thought not to be complete until about 1875. Moreover, as we shall see, there are peculiar difficulties in 1871 and 1881 arising mainly from mismatches between the boundaries of census and registration counties that require adjustments. As I have already noted, however, the early accuracy of that series is not crucial to our present interests. THE DEMOGRAPHIC INDICES

The methods used here derive from the work of Coale (1969) and are being used by a number of colleagues in studies that include most of Europe. They represent almost the obverse of the usual procedure. Conventional practice makes use of standard age distributions, whereas the indices used here make use of standard age schedules of fertility. The usual procedures apply actual age schedules of fertility (whether observed or estimated by indirect methods) to a standard age distri­ bution, which may be an actual population, a rectangular population, a life-table population, etc. The procedure used here compares the observed number of births with the number that the actual age distri­ bution would have produced if the standard age schedule of fertility had applied. That standard is a schedule approaching the highest docu­ mented level of human fertility—that of the Hutterites in 1921-1930.1 The ratio is that of the observed number of births to the number that the actual age distribution would have produced if the fertility had been 1The Hutterite fertility schedule for married women represents the highest of those described by Henry (1961) as "natural fertility," i.e., that fertility that is not affected by fertility-reducing social practices which are themselves dependent upon the number of children already born. The matter is discussed in the text following.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

that of the Hutterites. In a sense this answers the question: What pro­ portion was the actual fertility of the maximum fertility ever observed? This question in itself is interesting but as we shall see directly, pro­ ceeding in this fashion we can also allocate the degree to which reduction below the maximum came from a reduction of marriage, as distinct from a reduction in marital fertility itself. The index of overall fertility (I F ) is defined as:

XF1Wi where B T is equal to the average annual total number of births in the ten-year period centered on the census year, F1 is the standard agespecific fertility rate of the Hutterite married women aged i, and w, is the number of women aged i as shown by the census. The denominator, therefore, is the expected number of births that Hutterite rates of childbearing would have produced in the population under study. Thus we are comparing the childbearing performance of the group studied not with some theoretical biological maximum, but with one of the maximum actual performance levels thus far reported. Roughly speaking, how­ ever, the IF tells us what proportion the actual births formed of the maximum number that the women in question could have produced. The index of marital fertility (I G ) is a major component of I P and is the most important of the indices used in this study, since we are pri­ marily interested in the course of marital fertility in the British Isles. I G indicates the degree to which married women approach the number of births they would have produced if they were experiencing the Hutterite fertility schedule. It is defined as follows:

SF1Iti1 where B L is equal to the average annual number of legitimate births in the ten-year period surrounding the census, FT is the standard fertility schedule, and m, is the number of married women aged i as shown by the census. The index of illegitimate fertility (I H ) similarly measures the degree to which the fertility of unmarried women in the unit under study ap-

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

proximates that of the Hutterite fertility schedule. Ih is defined as fol­ lows: Ih =

B1 SF1U1

where B1 is the average annual number of illegitimate births, F1 is the standard fertility schedule and U1 is the number of unmarried women aged i shown by the census. The index of proportions married Im is a fertility-weighted average of the extent to which the proportion married falls below 100 percent in the childbearing ages. Im is defined as follows: SF1W1 (m,/w,) SF1W1 where F1 is the standard fertility schedule, w, is the number of women aged i, and m, is the number of married women aged i as shown by the census. The formula is written in this form to emphasize the fact that Im is a weighted average of the proportion married in which the weights are the births that would have occurred at each age if the Hutterite schedule of fertility had applied. None of the preceding indices is independent of the age structure of the population under study. This is necessarily so because we do not have information about the age structure of fertility in the British pop­ ulation. However, since we do know the proportion of women who are married at each age, it is possible to construct an alternative index of the proportion married, (Im*), which is free from the influence of age structure. This alternative index may be defined as follows: Im* =

XF1 (m,/w,) SF1

A comparison of Im and Im* shows that the latter differs from the former in the absence of the number of all women in each age group in both the numerator and the denominator. Empirically, however, the two measures differ little in Britain. For example, in Great Britain for the eight periods shown in Table 3.1, the simple correlation between Im and Im* is below .98 only once and below .99 only three times. In view of this close empirical relationship, we shall henceforth make use only of

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

I m , given its useful arithmetical relationships with the other indices em­ ployed here which are described below. Properties of the Fertility Indices As we have seen, the Hutterite fertility schedule was chosen as a standard because it represents the highest reliable schedule of natural fertility on record. The term "natural fertility" has a definite meaning here: it is that fertility which occurs in the absence of deliberate birth control (Henry, 1961). This definition does not require that fertility be at the biological maximum. Indeed, fertility is considered to be "natural" even if couples employ a practice, such as prolonged lactation or ab­ stinence during lactation, that they know will lengthen interbirth inter­ vals. The crucial criterion is whether or not behavior is modified by the parity of the mother. If a couple adheres to a taboo on intercourse during lactation (perhaps because of a belief that sperm poisons the milk of a nursing mother), but does so after the first birth the same as after the seventh, then fertility if considered to be natural—such a lack of adjustment to birth order indicates no intention to limit the number of births. On the other hand, abstinence practiced only after a high order of birth is evidence of controlled fertility. Henry presents twelve schedules of natural fertility, of which the Hutterite schedule is the highest. One useful property of the indices described above is their arithmetic relation to one another, which is as follows: If= Ig ' Im + Ih ' (1 -Im)

Obviously, in a context of IowI h , If is approximately equal to the product of Ig and Im. In effect this means that the overall fertility level in such a situation amounts to the product of the index of marital fertility and

Table 3.1 Correlations and regressions of I,„ on Im* for the counties of Great Britain, 1851-1921 Year

r

Intercept

Slope

Year

r

Intercept

Slope

1851a

.982 .995 .995 .995

-.03 -.04 -.03 -.04

.96 .98 .97 .98

1891 1901 1911 1921

.973 .995 .994 .989

-.01 -.02 -.01 + .01

.92 .96 .97 .94

1861 1871 1881

Counties of England and Wales only

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

the index of the proportion married. Thus, in Britain where illegitimate births are a numerically negligible part of the total, If amounts approx­ imately to the product of Im and Ig. Clearly, the overall level of fertility is equally subject to changes in the level of marital fertility and/or pro­ portions married. These measures thus allow us to partition the effects of changes in marriage and in marital fertility upon the overall level of fertility. It may be, for example, that a decline in overall fertility (If) is attributable entirely to a change in marriage patterns with marital fer­ tility (Ig) remaining constant or even increasing at the same time. Pre­ sumably such a decline in overall fertility would derive from quite different social, cultural, and economic forces than would a decline in fertility within marriage. Under-Registration of Births for England and Wales The crude birth rate calculated from registered births and the pop­ ulation enumerated in the decennial censuses rises from 32.48 in 1841— 1850 to 35.33 in 1871-1880, before the unmistakable modern decline begins (see Table 3.2). Some historians believe that this increase was caused by the stimulus of rapid economic growth during the Victorian era. This belief must be evaluated in the light of what has long been known about the degree of under-registration of births in the first dec­ ades after civil registration was initiated in 1837. According to the es­ timates of Glass (1951), the rise in the birth rate of nearly three points was almost wholly an increase in the completeness of registration (the registered birth rate rose by 8.8 percent, while completeness of regis-

Table 3.2 Recorded crude birth rates according to official registration data: 1841-1910 Years

Birth Rate

1841-50 1851-60 1861-70 1871-80 1881-90 1891-1900 1901-10

32.48 34.10 35.09 35.33 32.37 29.82 26.59

NOTE: Rates have been calculated on consistent basis using denominator equal to geometric mean of the two census estimates of population size. These rates are, therefore, not exactly the same as those published by the Registrar General, though the differences are minor.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

tration according to Glass increased by 7.1 percent). In other words, virtually all of the recorded increase in the birth rate from the 1840s to the 1870s was spurious. Indeed, it is plausible to speculate that there was no increase in the birth rate in England and Wales over this period, since Glass's estimates of under-registration were conservative ones, and only a slightly greater increase in completeness would imply a nearly constant birth rate. It is generally agreed that registration did not closely approach com­ plete coverage until the late 1870s, after the Act of 1874 placed re­ sponsibility for registration upon the parents. Estimates of completeness have been calculated by Glass (1951) and by Farr (cited in Glass, 1951). The estimates are only slightly different from one another, but both are inadequate for our purposes since they apply only to England and Wales as a whole. It is highly likely that whatever under-registration prevailed in England and Wales was not uniform over the entire country, but rather varied from county to county and region to region. A modest degree of under-registration for England and Wales as a whole could represent an amalgam of extensive under-registration in some counties and regions with virtually complete registration in others. Historians and demographers interested in regional variations in fertility behavior would therefore need to obtain estimates of under-registration by county or other geographical unit. Under-RegistraHon of Births by Counties

This section presents data on the under-registration of births in each of the forty-five counties of England and Wales from 1841 to 1910. These calculations make possible estimates for the various fertility indicators for each county adjusted for under-registration.2 The method employed involves estimation of births in a given decade by reverse projection from the census at the end of the decade. The method implicitly assumes that the census is more accurate than the vital registration, an assumption that is reasonable for the nineteenth century. The first official national census of Great Britain was carried out in 1801; hence by 1841 there had been forty years of experience in 2Much of the remainder of this chapter is a revision of portions of a previously published paper (Teitelbaum, 1974). The author is grateful to Population Studies for permission to include this material.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

census-taking, although it is certainly not possible to say with assurance that enumeration was complete. In contrast, civil vital registration was not mandated until 1837 and indeed was adopted in part due to the great inaccuracies thought to inhere in the previous ecclesiastical reg­ istration system. At the beginning of the period under study, the ad­ ministrative structure for vital registration was new and unseasoned, and was hence likely to be deficient. Furthermore, the 1836 Act mandating civil registration made the local registrar rather than the parents re­ sponsible for the completeness of registration. The voluntary coopera­ tion of the citizenry, newly required, could be expected to develop only slowly, especially when the Anglican Church, to some degree, opposed civil registration (Glass, 1951, p. 70). The procedure employed here to estimate the under-registration in­ volves four steps: 1) definition of characteristic survival rates under age ten for each county; 2) reverse projection to birth of the population aged zero to nine; 3) adjustment for the rate of increase in the flow of births over the decade; 4) adjustment for net migration. 5The births thus estimated are then compared to the number and rate of registered births to obtain an estimate of under-registration by county for each decade. Characteristic survival rates under age ten for each county were de­ fined using registered childhood mortality and model life tables (Coale and Demeny, 1966). In the West model life tables appropriate to Eng­ land and Wales,3 the survival from birth to ages less than ten are defined well enough by the death rate of children under five. While ideally 5m0, the death rate in the stationary population under age five, would be required, 5M0, the death rate under five in the actual population, is sufficiently close to 5m0 to allow the choice of life table (but see ad­ justments described below).4 In some cases, SM0 estimates were available in published form, but generally this rate was calculated from raw data, using deaths from all causes to children zero to four and the geometric

3Professor E. A. Wrigley has kindly pointed out to me that North model life tables may be somewhat more suitable for England and Wales in 1851, 1861, and perhaps 1871 than are the West models, though neither set is ideal. The use of the North model life tables would, however, make little difference to the final correction factors (Wrigley, personal communication, 1978). 4By convention, M is age-specific death rates at ages 0-5 for an actual population, 5 0 while 5m0 refers to the corresponding rates in the life table population.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

mean of the population zero to four in the two surrounding censuses. Unfortunately, the requisite data are not available for calculating countylevel 5M0 for the decade 1841-1850. There being no evidence of major declines in mortality between this decade and the next, the SM0 figures for 1851-1860 were used as proxies for the 1841-1850 rates. If in fact the levels of 5M0 in 1841-1850 were higher than 1851-1860,5 our esti­ mates for 1841-1850 understate the degree of under-registration. Once the appropriate model life table has been identified for each county from the death rate of children under age five, the Vio^o value of that table is applied to the population under age ten at the end of the decade to yield a crude estimate of the annual number of births during the decade that is consonant with the census count of children under age ten at the end of the decade. This estimate is imprecise in part because the use of model life tables implicitly assumes a stationary population, hence a zero rate of increase in births. A positive rate of increase in births would: 1) affect the relation of 5m0 and 5M0 by causing a more steeply sloping age distribution under age five; 2) affect the relation of the population zero to nine and the number of births in the preceding decade for a similar reason—the age structure in a growing population is more steeply sloped than in a sta­ tionary population. For the moderate rate of increase and the childhood death rates of nineteenth-century Britain, the above effects are quite small. With a rate of increase of births (Vbirths) equal to .01,5M0 is greater than sm0 by only about 1 percent. The change in sm0 from one level of mortality in the model life table to the next (i.e., a difference of 2.5 years in the expectation of life at birth) at the levels of mortality characteristic of nineteenth-century England and Wales is about 10-11 percent; hence a rate of increase in births of .01 instead of zero leads to an error of about one-tenth of a mortality level, or a difference in the mean duration of life of about one-quarter of a year. Within the range of mortality conditions experienced in England and Wales over the period of study, 10L0 differs by about 2.5 percent from level to level. Therefore the growth of population could result in an error in estimated births of something like .25 percent. 5They may well have been, given the reference to the period as the "Hungry Forties" and the cholera epidemic of 1847-1849.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

The effect of an increase in births on the relation of the population aged zero to nine and the number of births during the preceding decade is also quite small. With an annual rate of increase of births of 1 percent (''births = -01), at levels of mortality comparable to those of nineteenthcentury England, the effect on the number of births estimated by our procedure is about .15 percent. The total error resulting from rates of increase in births on the order of .01 is .40 percent. The direction of this effect is as follows: If rb,rth is positive, SM0 is greater than if rbirth is zero, thereby leading to an overly high estimate of mortality and a consequent overestimate of births. Conversely, if rbirth is negative, 5M0 is smaller than when rbirth = 0, leading to an underestimate of births. The effect of a non-zero rb,rth on the relation of the population zero to nine to the number of births in the preceding decade is in the same direction. As a rough adjustment for this small effect, the births estimated by the method described above were reduced by a factor equal to .40 times the rate of increase in births. This is consistent with the small effects described above: with rbirths = +.01, the estimate of births is reduced by .40 percent; with rbirths = —.01, the estimate of births is increased by .40 percent. The larger the absolute value of rbirths, the larger the upward or downward adjustment. Given the small range of rhirths, this adjustment is rarely of important magnitude. The births estimated by the above methods were further adjusted for the effects of net migration. The annual net migration rate for each county was first estimated as the difference between the annual intercensal rate of increase and rate of natural increase. Since this migration took place over ten years,6 the effect of migration on the average size of a cohort that lived through the decade would be approximated by multiplying this annual net migration rate by 5.0. However, since the projected population was aged zero to nine and hence was born through­ out the decade, the appropriate factor in allowing for the effect of migration on the estimated number of births is half as large—about 2.5. The estimate of births previously described was therefore reduced by a factor equal to 2.5 times the annual net migration rate. 6Migration rates were obviously not uniform from year to year (e.g., consider the late 1840s following the Irish famine), but given the absence of reliable annual migration data the only alternative is to average migration over the decade.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT Deficiencies of the Method of Adjustment

There can be no doubt that the method employed here to estimate the degree of under- and over-registration of births in England and Wales is imperfect. In all likelihood, the estimates given understate the true degree of under-registration for the country as a whole. Moreover, there is an additional error of unknown direction, but of greater mag­ nitude, for each individual county. In the first place, the method used implicitly assumes an accurate enumeration of children zero to nine in the census. We may have little confidence that such enumeration was achieved. The censuses as a whole may have been incomplete, and age misreporting plus differential incompleteness by age may have resulted in special undercounts of the population zero to nine. On the other hand, the census is unlikely to be subject to an overcount, and an overcount of the child population is particularly unlikely. Thus the use of the population zero to nine as the basis of the estimates provides a conservative or understated estimate of the under-registration of births. A second factor that makes it highly likely that the present estimates are deficient to some degree is the under-registration of infant mortality, especially in the first decades of the study period. During the early days of the English registration system, infants who were born and died soon after birth were often not registered as either births or deaths. At best they might have been reported as stillbirths, but notification of stillbirth was not required until 1874, and aggregate data were not published until 1927. Hence the estimates of child mortality that were used to select a life table by which population of children aged zero to nine was carried back to birth were almost certainly underestimates of the true levels of child mortality, particularly in the earlier decades of the study. Except for mortality very soon after birth, it seems likely that the registration of deaths in nineteenth-century Britain was more complete than birth registration. Death registration was a byproduct of the regulation of burials and was of interest in adjudicating the inheritance of property as well as being a factor in the effective administration of public health codes. In summary, then, the present method of estimating the degree of faulty registration of births, both under- and over-registration, is derived from two sources of data: the number of children in the following census aged zero to nine, which is subject to a likely but unknown level of

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

underenumeration, and the level of mortality defined by the childhood mortality rate in the decade, which is also subject to a likely but unknown degree of under-registration. Overall, then, we may expect that the estimates of under- and over-registration of births as presented here are biased, on average, toward a fuller registration than actually took place, especially in the earlier years. Findings

Adjustment factors for under-registration, calculated according to the methods described above, are presented in Table 3.3. (An "adjustment factor" is the ratio of estimated births to registered births.) The degree of under-registration in England and Wales as a whole is highest in the earliest decade for which data are available. For 1841-1850, the ad­ justment factor is calculated at 1.061, indicating registration was about 94 percent complete (1.0/1.061 = .942). In the following two decades, the correction factor declines to 1.028 and to 1.019, and from 1871 onwards to a factor of almost exactly 1.00. Hence overall these calcu­ lations suggest that under-registration in the three decades between 1841 and 1870 was deficient, but decreasingly so, and that registration became essentially complete by the decade 1871-1880. The only exception is the decade 1901-1910, when the adjustment factor is 1.016.7 In this regard, it must be remembered that an adjustment factor of 1.0 does not imply complete registration, but rather registration as complete as enumeration of children zero to nine in the following census (assuming accurate mortality registration). Few would argue that British censuses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved 100 percent enumeration; indeed, small under-enumerations have been found in modern censuses through the use of post-enumeration surveys. With respect to the adjustment factors for 1901-1910, it is notable that the census of 1911 on which the estimates are based included the first special census of fertility, in which detailed schedules on children ever born and children alive were completed by all married women with husband present.8 The enumeration of children zero to nine in such a setting 7It would have been of interest to calculate adjustment factors for the next decade to see if 1901-1910 is simply an aberration; unfortunately World War I intervenes, making the birth and death data for 1911-1920 difficult to interpret. 8See Registrar General of England and Wales, Census of 1911, 1917 and 1923.

Table 3.3 Adjustment factor corrected for R (births) and net migration

1841-50 1851-60 1861-70 1871-80 1881-90 London Surrey Kent Sussex Hampshire Berkshire Middlesex Hertfordshire Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire Northamptonshire Huntingdonshire Bedfordshire Cambridgeshire Essex Suffolk Norfolk Wiltshire Dorset Devon Cornwall Somerset Gloucestershire Herefordshire Shropshire Staffordshire ·> Worcestershire J Warwickshire Leicestershire Rutland Lincoln Nottinghamshire Derby Cheshire Lancashire W. Riding E. Riding N. Riding Durham Northumberland Cumberland Westmorland Monmouthshire South Wales North Wales

1.065 1.113 1.029 1.104 1.062 1.072 1.134 1.041 1.033 1.037 1.023 1.002 1.039 1.021 1.090 1.035 1.064 1.046 1.063 1.074 1.081 1.038 1.041 1.018 1.126

0.992 1.041 1.025 1.045 1.035 1.008 1.116 1.053 1.030 1.027 1.013 1.015 1.008 1.039 1.083 1.024 1.020 1.028 1.018 1.011 1.013 1.039 1.026 1.129 1.015 1.007 1.023 1.021 1.016 1.012 1.024 1.027 0.998 1.026 1.021 1.020 1.018 0.986-1 1.042/ 1.005 1.008 1.022 0.996 0.980 1.015

0.979 1.027 1.015 1.041 1.008 1.018 1.117 1.022 1.013 1.017 1.020 0.997 0.997 1.003 1.092 1.011 1.018 1.015 0.999 0.998 0.983 1.009

1.089 1.052 1.019 1.057 1.083 1.039 1.081 1.012 1.063 1.029 1.013 1.076 1.051 1.028 0.995 1.081 1.105 1.143

1.030 1.087 1.028 1.037 1.023 1.039 1.114 1.032 1.024 1.012 1.009 1.009 1.009 1.005 1.066 1.013 1.009 1.012 1.011 1.042 1.004 1.039 1.028 1.035 1.052 1.035 1.037 1.029 1.017 1.014 1.021 1.021 1.011 1.024 1.044 1.014 1.025 0.988 1.037 1.026 1.009 1.020 0.992 1.028 1.056

England and Wales

1.061

1.028

1.019

London Region

1.069

1.040

1.015

1 OAA 1-UOD

1.000

0.962 1.028 1.010 1.018 1.003 1.013 1.083 1.037 1.018 1.003 1.016 0.984 1.002 1.006 1.088 0.980-1 1.007J 1.013 0.999 0.991 1.005 0.998"» 0.999 * 1.010 0.986 0.993 0.998 0.998 1.008 0.988 0.995 0.987 0.995 1.003 0.998 1.004^ 0.996 > 0.987J 1.005 0.989 0.984 0.983 0.999 0.998 0.991

1.004 1.006

1.000

1.012 1.007 0.998 1.016 1.008 1.020 0.982 1.015 1.022 1.000

1.004 1.017 1.005 1.006 1.UUJ

0.984 1.008 0.986 0.977 0.994

18911900 0.939 1.058 1.032 1.024 1.011 1.012 1.094 1.046 1.018 1.005 1.014 0.991 1.009 1.008 1.110

1901-10

1.006 1.022 1.007 1.013 0.994 1.004 1.002

0.943 1.051 1.037 1.049 1.029 1.028 1.056 1.061 1.043 1.045 1.017 1.046 1.062 1.039 1.055 1.047 1.045 1.001 1.026 1.005 1.034 1.025 1.002 1.055 1.030 1.007 1.011 1.016 1.011 1.084 1.045 1.037 1.005 1.031 1.014

1.003>•

1.027

1.002 0.990 0.988 1.012 0.996 0.947

1.022 1.016 0.999 1.011 1.036 1.032 1.027

0.999

1.001

1.016

0.998

0.996

0.995

11.UU3 rsAi 1.012 0.995 1.001 1.004 1.004 1.001 1.005 1.000

1.019 1.000

J 1.011

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

might well have been a bit more complete than in the previous enu­ merations. In contrast, there would be no reason to expect an improve­ ment in registration in 1901-1910 as compared with decade 1891-1900. In sum, then, the apparent under-registration for 1901-1910 may rep­ resent more an improvement of enumeration than a deterioration of registration. As a check on the plausibility of the present estimates of underregistration, the present adjustment factors may be compared with two other sets of estimates for England and Wales, one by Glass (1951) and the other by Farr, and with a third set by Wrigley and Schofield (1981) for England excluding Monmouth (Table 3.4). The two estimates for England and Wales, obtained by quite different methods, never differ by more than 1.7 percent from the present estimates. They are generally higher, especially Glass's estimates for 1841-1850 and 1851-1860. Sev­ eral points may be made in this regard. First, it should be recalled that the characteristic life tables employed here for 1841-1850 were defined according to 5M0 estimates for 1851-1860. If the true mortality levels in 1841-1850 were higher than so estimated, as seems likely, the estimated adjustment factor would be higher in proportion, and thereby closer to the estimates of Farr and Glass. Second, it should be noted that Glass has adjusted his own estimate for 1841-1845 upward from 1.082 to approximately 1.094 in order to take account of the view of contemporary official statisticians that death registration in this period was deficient by about 2 percent. While it might at first glance be tempting to adopt a similar adjustment for the present estimates for that period, it must be recalled that we do not Table 3.4 Comparison of present under-registration estimates for England and Wales as a whole with those of Farr, Glass, and Wrigley and Schofield Estimates Present Farr Glass Wrigley and Schofieldb

SOURCES:

1841-50

1851-60

1861-70

1871-80

1.061 1.069 1.079» 1.078

1.028 1.030 1.042 1.049

1.019

1.004

1.018 1.020 1.033

1.007

—

—

Farr in Glass, 1951, p. 71; Glass, 1951, p. 83, Table 9; Wrigley and Schofield, 1981 "Glass's adjustment factor for 1841-50 estimated from Glass, 1951, p. 85, Table 12 bEngland and Wales excluding Monmouthshire

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

actually have county-level SM0 estimates for 1841-1850, and have instead used the rates for 1851-1860 as proxies. Since death registration was likely to be more complete in the latter decade, this procedure has implicitly adjusted in part for under-registration of deaths in 1841-1850, assuming there was no substantial improvement in mortality conditions from one decade to the next. In this regard, we may note that the estimated SM0 for England and Wales in 1851-1860 is about 2.5 percent higher than the registered rate for 1841-1850 (Registrar General of England and Wales, 1923, Table 3). While this could represent a real deterioration of mortality conditions, it seems more likely that it resulted from an improvement of death registration as the registration system became better established. Finally, it is possible that the estimates by Glass are affected by age misstatement of the number of children aged two to four, a possibility that is specifically raised by Glass (1951, pp. 77-78). While the popu­ lation zero to nine could also be affected by this type of error, the twoto-four age-span is probably more subject to it (United Nations, 1967, pp. 17-22). Unfortunately, it is not possible to estimate the degree to which these differences in approach are the source of the small disr crepancies in under-registration estimated for England and Wales as a whole.9 The estimates by Wrigley and Schofield are generally higher than the present estimates and than those of Farr and Glass as well. Several possible explanations are discussed in Wrigley and Schofield (1981, pp. 635-36). It should of course be noted that their estimates relate to a more restricted universe (England less Monmouthshire) than do the others. Even so, for all periods the range of the various estimates of under-registration is within 2.0 percent, which may well be smaller than the limits of precision of the data and various methods employed. On the whole, this narrow range provides reassurance as to the plausibility of estimates employed here. 9 If enumerated populations by single years of age were available for nineteenth-century censuses of England and Wales, it would be possible to gain some insight into the pattern and magnitude of age misstatement. Unfortunately, the only published tables by single years of age have apparently been "corrected" or smoothed for age heaping. We are left, then, with textual references to characteristic nineteenth-century age heaping at multiples of ten years. See, for example, Registrar General of England and Wales, Census of 1891, vol. IV, General Report, pp. 27-28.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

A principal concern of this investigation is whether the degree of faulty registration was of the same magnitude throughout England and Wales, or whether it varied instead from county to county and region to region. The data presented in Table 3.3 suggest that the latter is indeed the case. As may be seen, in most counties the adjustment factors were highest in the early decade of the period under study and declined to levels closer to 1.0 by the end of the century. However, significant deviations and differences abound. The counties with the largest ad­ justment factors for the earliest decade are Surrey (1.113), Sussex (1.104), Middlesex (1.134), Essex (1.090), Shropshire (1.126), South Wales (1.105), and North Wales (1.143). While the estimates for the various counties do show some erratic changes, some of these deviations show consistency over the decades. In particular, Surrey, Middlesex, and Essex continue to show exceptionally high adjustment factors in the later decades (see discussion below). The remarkable behavior of the estimates for the county of London are of particular interest to demographic historians. In 1841-1850, the adjustment factor in London is very close to that of England and Wales as a whole. The same is the case for 1851-1860. However, by 1861— 1870, the calculated adjustment factor for the county of London indi­ cates an apparent over-registration of births in the county of London. Were this decade to be the only case of such over-registration in London, it could be dismissed as an aberration of the data or the method. How­ ever, there is a consistent trend toward greater and greater overregistration in London throughout the century. An adjustment factor of .939 is reached by 1891-1900, representing an indicated over-registra­ tion of 6.5 percent (1.0/.939 = 1.065). Such adjustment factors, if they truly represent the actual situation, suggest that crude birth rates in London in the earlier part of the study are under-estimates of the true crude birth rates, while registered crude birth rates in the later part of the study period represent over-estimates of the true situation (see dis­ cussion below). Effect of Under-Registration Estimates upon Crude Birth Rates

Calculations of the registered crude birth rate for the seven decennial periods, 1841-1910, are presented in Table 3.5. In several cases as noted, counties have been aggregated due to intradecadal alterations in reg­ istration county boundaries.

Table 3.5 Registered crude birth rates

1841-50 1851-60 1861-70 1871-80 1881-90 London Surrey Kent Sussex Hampshire Berkshire Middlesex Hertfordshire Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire Northamptonshire Huntingdonshire Bedfordshire Cambridgeshire Essex Suffolk Norfolk Wiltshire Dorset Devon Cornwall Somerset Gloucestershire Herefordshire Shropshire Staffordshire ι Worcestershire I Warwickshire Leicestershire Rutland Lincoln Nottinghamshire Derby Cheshire Lancashire W. Riding E. Riding N. Riding Durham Northumberland Cumberland Westmorland Monmouthshire South Wales North Wales

31.03 28.96 32.03 29.75 30.12 29.99 27.62 32.37 32.86 31.36 33.84 35.71 35.51 35.05 31.26 32.19 30.98 30.11 30.10 29.27 32.71 29.92 30.28 26.36 26.85

32.53 32.71 30.13 32.74 31.90 32.25 32.07 37.71 34.59 32.97 29.90 37.30 32.72 31.49 29.77 32.77 31.91 27.85

33.53 30.10 31.99 30.55 30.72 30.69 29.59 31.52 32.86 32.07 34.77 33.65 34.66 33.22 31.92 32.43 31.94 31.21 31.25 29.70 34.12 30.02 31.17 25.59 29.70 40.95 33.76 36.88 34.33 30.85 32.66 35.35 34.46 34.22 37.42 37.66 33.68 29.92 42.14 34.21 32.70 /29.69 36.48 34.75 29.55

35.27 32.43 33.76 30.82 31.45 33.41 31.73 32.01 33.81 32.63 35.31 33.49 35.22 32.67 32.83 32.35 32.03 31.34 31.63 31.29 33.97 30.67 32.18 26.98 32.73 40.93 34.68 36.27 35.71 30.69 33.05 34.11 35.86 35.09 37.95 37.96 34.47 29.03-1 44.13 J 36.85 34.00 30.15 36.13 36.21 32.01

35.27 31.05 32.43 29.98 31.16 31.81 31.84 32.01 33.04 31.63 34.68 31.71 33.51 32.36 33.23 32.11 30.81 31.15 29.54 29.90 30.24 30.99 32.44 28.84 31.24 41.28 34.17 37.36 37.10 30.70 32.64 36.72 37.69 35.13 38.51 38.29 35.34

England and Wales

32.48

34.10

London Region

30.91

32.79

61 jj.Ol

18911900

1901-10 27.18 22.98 23.64 20.20 23.48 22.57 27.05 22.22 23.47 21.78 23.45 22.76 22.02 22.89 27.61 23.71 23.62 23.67 21.54 21.94 21.52 21.85 24.03 21.71 24.19 30.85 25.62 28.56 26.09 20.37 25.06 29.33 28.17 25.23 27.58

30.45 24.51 26.21 23.99 26.22 25.88 28.27 25.31 27.05 25.97 29.15 25.81 26.26 26.32 30.20

38.07 35.13 31.14 37.92 36.32 31.39

33.13 28.54 30.55 27.71 29.74 29.61 32.44 29.05 30.37 29.65 31.67 28.02 30.67 29.27 33.42 31.53-( 30.29 J 29.37 28.16 28.43 28.60 29.28-1 29.74 J 27.15 28.60 36.38 30.94 32.96 33.84 27.63 30.45 35.91 33.19 31.59 34.50 32.31 32.72 >• 33.25 37.72 33.96 33.32 28.63 34.39 33.41 27.97

35.62 32.35 29.51 24.87 34.38 33.71 28.76

33.62 30.39 26.28 20.49 32.50 30.54 24.51

35.09

35.33

32.37

29.82

26.59

34.48

34.20

32.41

29.19

26.38

A1 .ol Ol 41

"j J

77/.77 & (Δ 26.32 25.26 25.45 25.70 Oil fi1 Zo.yi 25.89 26.80 34.62 28.75 31.39 30.90 23.85 27.64 31.83 31.69 29.36 31.38

-1 J

30.14 }>· 26.66

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

The registered crude birth rates indicate a "ski-jump" pattern for births in England and Wales as a whole and for most individual counties. There is a substantial increase in the crude birth rate from 1841 to 1860, followed by a leveling off between 1861 and 1880, followed finally by a very large decline from 1881 onward to the end of the century. The crude birth rates as adjusted for faulty registration by the factors described in the text are given in Table 3.6. As noted above, these adjustment factors tend to be highest in the earlier decades and lowest at the end of the study period. The effect of these adjustments is to reduce, if not eliminate, the increases in crude birth rate from 18411850 to 1861-1870, leading in effect to a substantial flattening of the "ski-jump" phenomenon. Implications

Adjustment for faulty registration tends to reduce greatly the apparent increase in crude birth rates which appears in many counties of England and Wales during the decades 1841 to 1860. While some degree of increase seems to persist after these adjustments, it cannot be concluded that this represents a genuine increase in birth rate. It has already been noted that the adjustment factors for under-registration employed here are almost certainly underestimates of the true degree of birth underregistration, due in part to the likely under-registration of infant mor­ tality. This under-registration was greatest in the earlier decades. The magnitude of this influence cannot be determined, but certainly it would serve to induce the "ski-jump" effect in the series of birth rates. Another factor, the degree of underenumeration of children zero to nine in the census, could have further consequences in the same direc­ tion. Although we cannot obtain quantitative estimates of the degree and trend of underenumeration, it is once again likely to have been greater in the earlier decades, contributing to the overall tendency to­ ward underestimation of the true birth rates in these decades. Hence, both the data themselves and a priori arguments suggest that little confidence can be placed in the small apparent increases in crude birth rates from 1841 to 1860 that remain after adjustment. A conserv­ ative interpretation would be that the data are not inconsistent with fairly constant birth rates over this period, and that arguments seeking to explain the apparent increase in the registered rates therefore may be taken as moot.

Table 3.6 Estimated crude birth rates 1841-50 1851-60 1861-70 1871-80 1881-90 London Surrey Kent Sussex Hampshire Berkshire Middlesex Hertfordshire Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire Northamptonshire Huntingdonshire Bedfordshire Cambridgeshire Essex Suffolk Norfolk Wiltshire Dorset Devon Cornwall Somerset Gloucestershire Herefordshire Shropshire Staffordshire ι Worcestershire' Warwickshire Leicestershire Rutland Lincoln Nottinghamshire Derby Cheshire Lancashire W. Riding E. Riding N. Riding Durham Northumberland Cumberland Westmorland Monmouthshire South Wales North Wales

33.06 32.22 32.95 32.84 31.99 32.16 31.32 33.70 33.93 32.52 34.62 35.79 36.91 35.77 34.08 33.32 32.98 31.51 31.99 31.43 35.37 31.06 31.51 26.83 30.23

35.43 34.41 30.70 34.59 34.55 33.52 34.65 38.17 36.75 33.91 30.28 40.12 34.39 32.37 29.61 35.44 35.27 31.84

34.55 32.70 32.90 31.68 31.42 31.87 32.96 32.54 33.65 32.46 35.09 33.95 34.98 33.38 34.02 32.84 32.22 31.60 31.59 30.96 34.25 31.20 32.04 26.50 31.23 42.39 35.01 37.95 34.91 31.27 33.34 36.09 34.83 35.02 39.07 38.21 34.53 29.57 43.68 35.10 33.01 30.29 36.19 35.72 31.20

35.01 33.78 34.60 32.21 32.54 33.67 35.40 33.69 34.82 33.50 35.77 34.01 35.51 33.95 35.54 33.14 32.68 32.22 32.20 31.63 34.42 31.85 33.00 30.46 33.22 41.23 35.50 37.02 36.28 31.05 33.83 35.03 35.78 35.99 38.75 38.72 35.08 28.61-1 45.98·» 37.03 34.28 30.81 36.00 35.48 32.49

37.47 35.40 30.70 37.06 36.11 31.38

31.88 29.33 30.86 28.21 29.83 29.99 35.13 30.11 30.93 29.73 32.16 27.56 30.72 29.45 36.35 30.88-1 30.51 J 29.75 28.14 28.19 28.73 29.22"» 29.72·» 27.44 28.20 36.13 30.88 32.90 34.12 27.28 30.30 35.46 33.03 31.67 34.43 32.43~| 32.58 > 32.81J 37.92 33.60 32.77 28.13 34.34 33.34 27.71

England and Wales

34.45

35.07

35.75

35.48

London Region

33.06

34.09

34.98

34.40

jXI/ . yQT/

r

34.54 31.90 32.91 31.20 31.40 32.39 35.57 32.72 33.45 32.18 35.38 31.61 33.40 32.45 36.30 32.45 31.37 31.62 29.52 29.84 29.73 31.28 32.46 29.20 31.45 41.21 34.72 37.64 37.84 30.14 33.14 37.54 37.68 35.27 39.16 38.48 35.56 Λ1 .yz OO 4i

18911900 28.59 25.93 27.05 24.56 26.50 26.19 30.93 26.47 27.54 26.09 29.56 25.57 26.50 26.52 33.52

1901-10

25.91 26.93 34.64 29.31 31.38 31.09 24.36 27.84 32.24 31.49 29.48 31.45

25.64 24.16 24.52 21.20 24.16 23.20 28.56 23.58 24.47 22.76 23.85 23.82 23.38 23.78 29.13 24.83 24.68 23.70 22.10 22.06 22.25 22.40 24.07 22.91 24.92 31.06 25.91 29.01 26.39 22.09 26.18 30.43 28.32 26.02 27.96

30.23 >•

27.38

36.01 32.42 29.22 24.56 34.80 33.59 27.24

34.35 30.88 26.26 20.72 33.67 31.53 25.16

32.34

29.86

27.01

32.33

29.08

26.25

T7 Ii.HC\ Iy 26.65 25.13 25.48 25.79 T7 ΠΟ 11. UZ

J

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

The effect of the present adjustments for under-registration are of special importance for the county of London. As described above, our estimates indicate an under-registration of about 6 percent in the earliest decade, declining steadily to an indicated over-registration of similar magnitude by the end of the study period. There must, of course, be real doubts as to the existence of an over-registration of births. It is easy to imagine that a new registration system such as that of England and Wales in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s would fall well short of reg­ istering all live births. It is harder to believe that births could appear in the register that did not actually occur, as would be indicated by the apparent estimates of over-registration for London. One possibility is that a significant proportion of births in London occurred to women residing in the surrounding counties, because preg­ nant women may have sought out hospitals or homes at which births might be felt to be safer. The result would be inflated birth rates in London and correspondingly deflated birth rates in the surrounding counties, since registration in England and Wales in this period was by place of occurrence rather than place of residence. A second possibility is that there was differential migration of children zero to nine from London to the surrounding counties. Such a differ­ ential migration would mean that children born in London would not be living there at the end of the intercensal decade, so that the reverse projection of the London population under ten would understate the number of births.10 Both possible explanations involve a transfer of either births or chil­ dren across the county borders between London and its surrounding counties. This fact presents a useful opportunity to apply an empirical 10A third possibility is that many children born in London were sent outside the me­ tropolis to be nursed and weaned, in order to protect them from the dangers of city life. This pattern of "countryside wet-nursing" behavior was common in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries in the metropolitan Paris region of France. However, there is no indication that such a practice was common in London. English pediatricians had been urging mothers to breastfeed their own children from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Wet nurses were sometimes used in middle- and upper-class homes, but they generally continued to reside within the household. Certainly if countryside wet-nursing was a practice common enough to affect the London data to the extent estimated, there would have been considerable mention made of the practice in the literature of the period, as there was for Paris.

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

test of the plausibility of the estimates of over-registration for London. For according to both explanations, over-registration in London would have to be balanced by a comparable volume of under-registration in surrounding counties. In other words, estimates of the completeness of registration for the aggregation of London and its surrounding counties should show no over-registration; in effect, the under-registration in the surrounding counties would cancel out the over-registration in London itself. Estimates of adjustment factors for the aggregate of London and the four surrounding counties of Surrey, Kent, Middlesex, and Essex are assembled from Table 3.3 and presented in Table 3.7 along with the comparable factors for these counties alone and for England and Wales as a whole. It is apparent that the over-registration of London is indeed cancelled out by under-registration in the surrounding counties. The adjustment factors for the aggregated five counties are very close indeed to those for England and Wales as a whole, and show no sign of sub­ stantial over-registration. These data may be viewed as a satisfying em­ pirical validation of the hypothesis that apparent over-registration in London was the result of some combination of events that caused the births of children (less than ten years of age at the census date) to be registered in London although the children were enumerated in the surrounding counties. Table 3.7 Adjustment factors for London aione, surrounding counties alone, aggregation of London and surrounding counties, and England and Wales: 1841-1850 to 1901-1910

1841-50 1851-60 1861-70 1871-80 1881-90 London alone Surrounding counties alone Surrey Kent Middlesex Essex Aggregation of London and surrounding counties England and Wales

18911900

1901-10

1.065

1.030

0.992

0.979

0.962

0.939

0.943

1.113 1.029 1.134 1.090

1.087 1.028 1.114 1.006

1.041 1.025 1.116 1.083

1.027 1.015 1.117 1.092

1.028 1.010 1.083 1.088

1.058 1.032 1.094 1.110

1.051 1.037 1.056 1.055

1.069

1.040

1.015

1.006

0.998

0.996

0.995

1.061

1.028

1.019

1.004

0.999

1.001

1.016

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

As for which of the explanations of this phenomenon seems more plausible, we have only fragmentary data on which to base a judgment. The first possibility, that of births within London to women from the surrounding counties, is plausible. The data available on the number of maternity institutions are fragmentary at best, and refer to periods later than those with which we are concerned. Nonetheless they do provide some crude idea of the possible magnitude of this phenomenon. In 1925 there were 277 lying-in homes registered in London, with 830 beds in total. In addition, there were 148 beds in municipal maternity homes, 677 in general specialized hospitals, and 540 in Poor Law institutions. Hence of 2,195 maternity beds available in London Administrative County, about 38 percent were in lying-in homes and 31 percent in general and specialized hospitals. The number of such institutions in earlier years is unclear. Registration of lying-in homes did not become compulsory until 1915, and in 1916 the number registered was only 183. But the 1909 Report of the Midwives Act Committee estimated that there were over 300 lying-in homes in London in 1902. In the Annual Summary of Marriages, Births and Deaths in England and Wales, and in London for 1911 and 1912, the Registrar General estimates that about 1 percent of all births occurring in "the principal institutions receiving maternity cases" were to women resident outside of London. It is impossible to know what is meant by the term "prin­ cipal" here, but if the Poor Law institutions were included and the numerous small lying-in homes excluded, the 1 percent estimate could represent substantially less than half of the actual births occurring to nonresidents, since they would presumably not have access to Poor Law institutions and would therefore be concentrated in the lying-in homes and hospitals. Accordingly something on the order of 2-3 percent (or perhaps even higher) of births registered in London in 1911 and 1912 could be accounted for by nonresident women, representing perhaps half or even more of the indicated over-registration. To what extent the same is true of earlier decades cannot be determined from available data. The other explanation, that of differential centrifugal migration of children zero to nine (i.e., of young families), is also plausible. It should be recalled that the method employed to estimate under- and overregistration explicitly takes into account the net migration rates for all ages. (Age-specific migration rates are not, of course, available.) In

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

1891-1900, when the adjustment factor was 0.939 for London, the an­ nual rate of net migration was -.003816 (i.e., 0.38 percent net outmigration per year). Before adjustment was made for this overall rate of net migration, the adjustment factor was 0.930. In order to account for this degree of over-registration, annual net out-migration of children zero to nine would have had to be - .030089, nearly 7.9 times greater than the overall net migration rate. If half of the over-registration were accounted for by birth transfer (above), net out-migration of children zero to nine would have to be at an annual rate of .015004, exceeding overall net migration by a factor of 3.9. Net out-migration rates for children of between 1.5 and 3.0 percent per year seem very large indeed, but there are unfortunately no quan­ titative data available that would allow a test of their plausibility. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the outward movement of working-class families was encouraged by the high land cost of Central London and by cheap commuter railway fares (Ashworth, 1954, chap. 6). Hence it is conceivable that centrifugal migration of families with young children did exceed that of the overall population by some factor. It seems unlikely, however, that this factor could be large enough to account for a major proportion of the indicated over-registration. Chil­ dren aged zero to nine do not out-migrate by themselves; hence the outward migration from London would have had to consist almost en­ tirely of very large families if the multiples estimated above were to be approached. We can have little confidence that this was the case, al­ though there are unfortunately no quantitative data on migration rates by family size or by age that would allow an empirical test of this possibility. It should be noted that the two explanations have quite different implications for the use of the adjustment factors. If the adjustment factors arise entirely from births to women resident outside of London being registered in London, the adjustment factors truly represent the magnitude of registration errors. If on the other hand the adjustment factors arise from rapid rates of net out-migration of children zero to nine, the adjustment factors do not represent true errors but rather the flow of migration. Undoubtedly both forces are at work to some extent, but it seems likely that the birth transfer phenomenon is of considerably greater importance than the migration flow. Confirmation of this view will require more complete and more direct data than presently available

FERTILITY MEASUREMENT

on the proportions of births registered in London born to residents of surrounding counties. For the purposes of the analyses of fertility be­ havior that follow, I have taken the calculated adjustment factors into account in the calculation of fertility indices for the counties of England and Wales. As has already been noted, there are also serious problems in using the Irish data for counties prior to 1891. The difficulty comes from mismatches in the definition of county boundaries for the purposes of birth registration and for those of census enumeration. There is also some difficulty from the changing definitions of county boundaries. This is conspicuously the case in Counties Antrim and Down in which the allocation of Belfast changes so drastically that the only simple way of handling the difficulty is to combine the counties. The other problems are more difficult, but these difficulties have been overcome by the work of Pantelides and Coale presented in the Appendix. In principle they have used the ratios of females in the census county to those in the registration county to estimate correction factors for 1871 and 1881. It is these adjusted values that are used in this study. Of course, since the values for Im concern only census county data, no adjustments are re­ quired in that case. Undoubtedly the new figures for counties are not entirely correct but they fall into place so well that serious errors seem unlikely.

CHAPTER 4: Trends in Overall Fertility,

1841-1931 OVERALL FERTILITY TRENDS AS MEASURED BY THE CRUDE BIRTH RATE

From one point of view the crude birth rate is anything but crude. If it is based on accurate data, it measures quite precisely one of the most important demographic facts of a community's life. It tells us exactly the rate at which the population is being augmented by birth, just as the crude death rate tells us how the community is being depleted by death, and the difference of these rates tells us exactly the rate at which the fund of life is being changed by life's initiating and terminal pro­ cesses. What crude rates do not tell us, and the reason for their name, is the behavior of the components of these rates. If, as here, the interest is in reproductive behavior and its components of change, then the crude birth rate is indeed a crude measure, and from its course one can only obtain a sense of the general trend over time, or the nature of the differences in the fertility of various places or various components of the population. The crude birth rate is the number of births of a given place and year divided by the average size of the population during that year in thousands. Typically the mid-year population is taken as an estimate of the average population. Clearly such a measure is insensitive to levels and trends in reproductive performance because it: 1) is dis­ torted by changes in the age structure of the population; 2) is distorted by the sex composition of the population; 3) yields no information about the extent to which changes in fertility arise from changes in the fertility of marriage or in changes in the marriage pattern; and 4) yields no information about the ways in which the trends and differences are influenced by the prevalence of illegitimacy. Of course, the validity of the trends and differences in the crude birth rate also depends on the accuracy of both the registration and census data on which they are based. Crude birth rates adjusted for underregistration have already been presented for England and Wales by decades in Table 3.6. The annual series of such rates, but not adjusted

TRENDS IN OVERALL FERTILITY

for under-registration, are presented in Figure 4.1 for England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The series of crude birth rates for England and Wales and Scotland are very similar. From rates between 34 and 36 in the 1860s and early 1870s, both show substantial declines after 1880. By the turn of the century the rates for England and Wales are about 3 percent lower than those for Scotland. Ireland is quite a different story. Here the registered crude birth rates are usually substantially lower than those of Scotland and England and Wales. They decline substantially from about 27-28 per thousand in the 1870s to about 23 in the 1880s, where they remain stable through the turn of the century. For us, the important fact is that fertility as measured by the crude birth rate began its decline in the late 1870s throughout the British Isles. FERTILITY TRENDS AS MEASURED BY THE GENERAL FERTILITY RATE

The general fertility rate is defined as the number of births per 1,000 women aged fifteen to forty-four. Unlike the crude birth rate, therefore,

40 O I-


Im

refand

England 8i Wales

Scofland

proportion >• married

20 - 24 Ireland

1851

J

L

1871

1891

1911

1931

Figure 5.3 Index of proportions married (Im) and proportions married aged 20-24, for England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, 1851-1936

The highest Im among the three under study was .509 occurring in England and Wales in 1871 and the lowest was .324 in Ireland in 1901. This range within the British Isles covers essentially the full range of pretransitional experience among all the countries of northwestern Eu­ rope. The national figures for Im were highest for England and Wales, intermediate for Scotland, and lowest for Ireland in each year. Indeed, the lowest Im up to 1931 for England and Wales was higher than the highest Im for Scotland, and in turn Scotland's lowest Im exceeds Ireland's highest. Although at different levels, the time trends in Im for England and Wales and Scotland were rather similar. Both indices rose 5 percent from 1851 to 1871, and both had fallen somewhat by 1891. In England and Wales they remained steady until 1911, but in Scotland there was a gradual upward trend. By 1931, Scotland's Im was a bit higher, and

NUPTIALITY that for England and Wales a bit lower than the maximum for 1871. Ireland, on the other hand, had a completely different course, falling sharply from 1871 through 1901 and then rising rather sharply. For Scotland, the index was only 84 percent of that for England and Wales in 1861 and rose to only 89 percent by the end of our period. For Ireland the index fell to only 68 percent of that for England and Wales in 1901 and then rose to only 74 percent by 1921.

Table 5.4 Index of proportions married (Im) for European countries, 1831-1970 Country

Year

L

Country

England and Wales

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.483 0.502 0.509 0.501 0.477 0.476 0.479 0.489 0.503 0.699

Belgium

1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1947 1961 1970

0.435 0.436 0.479 0.517 0.501 0.602 0.617 0.705 0.703

Denmark

Scotland

1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.422 0.432 0.438 0.420 0.425 0.428 0.433 0.441 0.656

1852 1860 1870 1880 1890 1901 1911 1921 1930 1960

0.436 0.469 0.447 0.456 0.468 0.471 0.486 0.488 0.505 0.660

Ireland

1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1926 1936 1961

0.405 0.370 0.336 0.324 0.339 0.362 0.369 0.513

Finland

^1880 1890 * 1900 J910 1960

0.509 0.489 0.506 0.517 0.558

1865 1875 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

Austria [within AustroHunganan Empire]

[current borders]

Year

Im

— —

0.499 0.501 0.482 0.459 0.400 0.404 0.456 0.567 0.602

Table 5.4 (continued) Country France

Year

1831 1836 1841 1846 1851 1856 1861

1866 1871 1876

1881 1886 1891 1896 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

Im

Country

0.514 0.514 0.516 0.520 0.526 0.530 0.531 0.530 0.529 0.533 0.538 0.541 0.540 0.541 0.543 0.591 0.534 0.613 0.646

Luxemburg

1900 1930 1960

0.461 0.561 0.670

Netherlands

1859 1869 1879 1889 1899 1909 1920 1930 1960

0.406 0.438 0.469 0.450 0.450 0.469 0.482 0.499 0.630

Norway

1875 1890 1900 1920 1930 1960

0.406 0.420 0.420 0.416 0.408 0.660

Portugal

1864 1878 1890 1900 1911 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

0.424 0.452 0.456 0.460 0.471 0.455 0.474 0.481 0.513 0.556

Spain

1887 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

0.575 0.559 0.545 0.504 0.504 0.422

1880 1900 1930 1950 1960

0.409 0.411 0.422 0.629 0.626

1885 1890 1900 v1910 [1939 boundaries] 1939 (East & West combmedj 1962

0.454 0.472 0.495 0.501 0.494 0.497 0.513 0.524 0.583 0.644

Greece

1900 1928 1951 1961

0.632 0.566 0.502 0.576

Italy

1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1936 1951 1961

0.560 0.568 0.549 0.549 0.549 0,534 0.495 0.513 0.519 0.538 0.578

Germany

[Contemporary

"1867 1871 1875 1880

boundaries]

Sweden

Year

—

0.553

NUPTIALITY Table 5.4 (continued)

Country

Year

L

Switzerland

1860 1870 1880 1888 1900 1910 1920 1930 1941 1950 1960

0.388 0.418 0.446 0.433 0.445 0.463 0.420 0.437 0.483 0.525 0.570

Albania

1955

0.728

Bulgaria

1905 1934 1956

0.737 0.750 0.776

Czechoslovakia

1930 1961

0.558 0.722

Γ1880 I 1890 1 1900 1,1910 f 1930 \1960

0.692 0.713 0.670 0.665 0.598 0.725

Hungary [within AustroHungarian Empire]

[current boundaries]

Country

Year

Poland

1960

0.696

1870 1897 1926 1940 1959 1970

0.696 0.696 0.628 0.649 0.581 0.656

1899 1930 1956

0.727 0.667 0.694

1900 1931 1960

0.808 0.682 0.684

European Russia [estimate only]

Rumania

Yugoslavia (Serbia only]

SOURCE: See Table 4.3

Im is strongly affected by the proportions who are married in the age

group twenty to twenty-four, since this is the age of maximum fertility in the Hutterite schedule. It is not surprising, therefore, that the trends and differences in Im are similar to those for the proportion married at ages twenty to twenty-four. As may be seen in Table 5.3 and Figure 5.3, however, changes in Im are both absolutely and relatively smaller than those for the proportion married in the age group twenty to twentyfour. This difference comes because Im, being influenced by all elements of nuptiality, is less heavily affected by current changes in the propensity of the young to marry. The greater stability of Im is clear in 1921 when the index scarcely changes, whereas the proportion married at twenty to twenty-four rises rather sharply, presumably in response to the dis­ turbance of marriage patterns during and following World War I. It is to be noted also that Irish nuptiality as measured by Im is lower compared with Scotland and England and Wales than it is when meas­ ured by the proportion married at ages twenty to twenty-four. The

NUPTIALITY difference is due to the fact that Im reflects the proportions of the nevermarried, and the widowed and divorced as well, and reflects therefore more of the components of later marriage in Ireland. Overall, the above trends in Im may provide some slight support for the argument put forward by Habakkuk (1971) that the nineteenth cen­ tury in England saw first a relaxation of "prudential restraint," followed by a later tendency toward deferred marriage as a means of fertility control. (However, cf. Table A3.1 of Wrigley and Schofield (1981), which shows an erratic decline in the Crude Marriage Rate (CMR) from 1801 to 1841.) The data for England and Wales do show an increase in Im and in proportions married twenty to twenty-four from 1851 to 1871, although these increases are relatively small, both on the order of 5 percent. The indices in Table 5.3 do not allow an assessment of the magnitude of increase in nuptiality during the first half of the nineteenth century. They do, however, allow an assessment of the magnitude of decline in nuptiality during the next sixty years. The decline in Im is small (about 6 percent from 1851 to 1911), and hence nuptiality changes could have made only a modest contribution to the 33 percent decline in overall fertility (see Table 4.2). But the decline in proportions married twenty to twenty-four during the same period was substantial, and is consistent with an increase in mean age of first marriage shown in Table 5.2 and Figure 5.2. A substantial deferment of marriage did take place in England and Wales, especially from 1881 to 1911. As will be seen, however, this deferment was concurrent with, and roughly proportional to, the decline in fertility within marriage. The proportion married twenty to twenty-four declined nearly 11 percent from 1881 to 1891, and nearly 27 percent by 1911. Concurrently, the index of marital fertility (Zi) declined nearly 9 percent from 1881 to 1891, and fully 26 percent by 1911. Hence the data provide no support for Habakkuk's hypothesis (1971, pp. 55-56) that from the 1870s onward births were limited first by de­ ferment of marriage and only later, after a decline in infant mortality at the turn of the century, by a resort to fertility control within marriage. Rather it appears that the overall contribution to fertility reduction of marriage deferment in the 1870s and 1880 was a small one, and that the timing of marriage deferment was roughly comparable with the decline in fertility within marriage.

NUPTIALITY VARIABILITY IN LEVELS OF NUPTIALITY

Thus far we have presented the national values of Im. But we also have calculated Ims for the counties of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland which are shown in Appendix Table 5A.1. The means and standard deviations of these county Ims give some idea of the scatter of the county values. They are presented in Table 5.5 for England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and a number of other European countries for comparison. In the case of England and Wales, it is to be noted that the mean of the county values of Im is somewhat lower than the national average (Table 5.3) and that this difference is even more marked in Scotland and Ireland. Obviously the reason is that the more heavily populated counties had higher marriage indices than the lightly popu­ lated ones. We may summarize the matter of variability by noting that for the county averages over the period 1871-1931(36), in terms of England and Wales as 100, the Scottish Im was 81 and the Irish, 72; whereas the average standard deviation of the Scottish averages was 241, and that of the Irish averages was only 123 in terms of England and Wales as 100. In other words, when compared with England and Wales the county Ims for Ireland were very low and rather homogeneous, while the county values for Scotland were fairly low and very heterogeneous. The story is not very different if we consider all seven countries dealt with in Table 5.5 and Figure 5.4. England's average county Im is a little high but its variability is fairly low. Ireland is low on both counts, but Scotland had next to the lowest average Im and next to the highest variability. REGIONAL NUPTIALITY PATTERNS

The average of county Ims and their standard deviations give us no clue to the geographic pattern in each of the three "nations." Although there are a few changes in these patterns between 1871 and 1931, they are not very substantial. We therefore have taken the average Ims from 1871 through 1931 for the 109 counties (when we combine Antrim and Down to avoid the complications of changing boundaries) of the British Isles, and ordered them from low to high. On the basis of this ordering the counties have been divided into five groups: nineteen in the first group, twenty-one in the fifth, with twenty-three in each of the three

.379

.383

.035

.037

.039

.040

.040

.040

.035

.029

.037

.022

.498

.504

.496

.471

.468

.473

.485

.507

.487

.486

.395

.396

.419

.403

.390

.398

.398

.398

.053

.055

.044

.049

.061

.061

.057

.059

.058

.057

.049

.034

.482

.394

Scotland mean s.d.

.350

.360 .350

.354

.329

.315

.329

.364

.399

.027

.021 .027

.021

.021

.019

.025

.035

.048

Ireland mean s.d.

.535

.535

.525

.525

.563

.554

.044

.044

.055

.039

.041

.044

.043

.040

.542 .532

.047

.505

Germany mean s.d.

.537

.540

.515

.497

.535

.551

.548

.545

.567

.560

.038

.036

.047

.045

.038

.039

.036

.037

.024

.018

Italy mean s.d.

.471

.467

.486

.468

.488

.465

.458

.459

.442

.058

.059

.046

.057

.057

.057

.058

.070

.069

Portugal mean s.d.

.484

.460

.588

.487

.506

.468

.428

.432

.400

.370

.046

.043

.055

.055

.052

.048

.037

.033

.032

.039

Belgium mean s.d.

from Table 3.5; (Italy) Livi Bacci, 1971, calculated from Tables 9 and 23

SOURCES: (Germany) Knodel, 1974, Table 2.19; (Portugal) Livi Bacci, 1977, calculated from Table 9; (Belgium) Lesthaeghe, 1977, calculated

1851 1856 1861 1864 1866 1871 1878 1880 1881 1890 1891 1900 1901 1910 1911 1920 1921 1925 1926 1930 1931 1933 1936 Average Average 18711931 (36)

Year

England and Wales mean s.d.

Table 5.5 Mean county Ims and their standard deviations, for selected countries and dates

NUPTIALITY

Belgium Germany

550

England 81 Wales

Portugal

450 Scotland Ireland

.350 2 standard deviations

250 _1 I L.

I

l

l

l

1851 61 71 81 91 Ol Il 21 31

ι ι ι ι ι ι ι ι 1851 61 71 81 91 Ol Il 21 31

Figure 5.4 Average of county /„,s and their standard deviations, for selected countries and dates

central groups. This arrangement of rough "quintals" was made to avoid placing two counties with identical average Ims in different groups. The results are mapped in Figure 5.5. Ireland appears in only the three lowest groups, and England and Wales in only the three highest groups, whereas the counties of Scotland are represented in each of the five groups, although by only one county in the highest group of average Ims. In Ireland the median class is represented by only four counties, three in the east and one on the west coast. In general the lowest Ims are in a belt from north to south through the center of the country, with the highest means for Ireland appearing in the southwest, around Dublin, in Belfast and its neighboring counties, and in the southwest. As we have noted, even these counties with Ireland's highest Ims fall in the median group for the British Isles. In Scotland, the western highlands look like Ireland, with very low Ims. The middle group includes Aberdeen and most of its adjoining counties and something of a belt across the Glasgow-Edinburgh axis, in which the counties with higher values are intermingled. In short, the industrial areas of Scotland look rather like England. Lower values appear again on the southern borders of the country.

NUPTIALITY

Im BY "QUINTAL" Quintal

2nd 3 rd 4 th 5 th

Number of Counties

23 23 23 21

304 346 376 450 496 -

345 Q 375 m 449 ^ 495 Hg 573 Bl

Figure 5.5 Average county Im by "quintals" for 1871 through 1931

In England and Wales, the lowest Ims are those of six counties falling in the median group, all of which border on counties in the fourth, or next to highest, group. Counties that have low Ims, in English terms, form two axes. One comprises much of the southeast up to Bedford and Oxfordshire. The other runs from the southwest up the western part of England to Cumberland. Meanwhile, those counties with the highest Ims include the major mining, heavy industrial, and manufacturing areas. They include Monmouth and South Wales, and run on the east coast up to the north, extending well into the country. We may sum up as follows: In modern terms there was a high proportion of spinsters in the British Isles, and the average age at marriage was rather high. Over our period, however, the Ims in the British Isles span the values occurring in the whole of Western Europe. The changes were not large in England and

NUPTIALITY Wales and Scotland, but the index dropped sharply in Ireland until after the war. In Ireland the Ims were very low and the county values were very homogeneous. In England they were quite high and fairly homo­ geneous, while in Scotland the average values were fairly low and very heterogeneous. In all parts of the British Isles the Ims tended to be highest in the more prosperous and industrial parts of the country. However, all parts of Ireland behaved like Ireland, and all parts of England and Wales behaved like England and Wales, whereas the marriage indices of the poorer parts of Scotland looked like those of Ireland, and those of the industrial belt of Scotland looked like the marriage indices of England and Wales.

[Ill]

1 London 2 Surrey 3 Kent 4 Sussex 5 Hampshire 6 Berkshire 7 Middlesex 8 Hertfordshire 9 Buckinghamshire 10 Oxfordshire 11 Northamptonshire 12 Huntingdonshire 13 Bedfordshire 14 Cambridgeshire 15 Essex 16 Suffolk 17 Norfolk 18 Wiltshire 19 Dorset 20 Devonshire 21 Cornwall 22 Somersetshire 23 Gloucestershire 24 Herefordshire 25 Shropshire 26 Staffordshire 27 Worcestershire 28 Warwickshire 29 Leicestershire 30 Rutlandshire 31 Lincolnshire 32 Nottinghamshire 33 Derbyshire 34 Cheshire 35 Lancashire 36 West Riding 37 East Riding 38 North Riding 39 Durham 40 Northumberland 41 Cumberland 42 Westmoreland 43 Monmouthshire 44 South Wales 45 North Wales England and Wales

County

.467 .449 .486 .462 .487 .475 .444 .495 .508 .483 .525 .544 .495 .514 .519 .500 .482 .479 .453 .443 .456 .438 .440 .444 .448 .556 .484 .514 .493 .464 .499 .488 .495 .476 .482 .514 .492 .458 .555 .471 .439 .415 .553 .458 .446 .483

1851

1861

.483 .466 .510 .449 .513 .482 .453 .490 .522 .493 .552 .533 .479 .512 .543 .518 .498 .499 .475 .461 .471 .455 .454 .483 .474 .589 .503 .536 .509 .478 .502 .511 .528 .486 .504 .531 .513 .487 .593 .496 .452 .433 .561 .492 .459 .502

1871 .486 .455 .514 .451 .512 .493 .466 .481 .518 .494 .548 .529 .472 .527 .543 .519 .501 .501 .477 .461 .452 .460 .466 .480 .484 .584 .493 .532 .523 .487 .514 .528 .551 .495 .513 .547 .529 .499 .624 .515 .465 .454 .569 .501 .475 .509

1881

.476 .424 .495 .439 .490 .494 .463 .479 .504 .478 .541 .509 .461 .509 .548 .517 .505 .503 .468 .444 .423 .458 .457 .459 .471 .562 .474 .523 .527 .466 .524 .545 .550 .483 .509 .528 .537 .521 .598 .505 .485 .427 .556 .503 .479 .501 .459 .399 .462 .394 .459 .460 .453 .453 .489 .445 .516 .484 .440 .485 .542 .487 .492 .487 .451 .431 .425 .440 .436 .425 .435 .531 .443 .499 .495 .430 .493 .515 .523 .455 .482 .496 .505 .489 .564 .490 .461 .403 .546 .504 .432 .477

1891 .453 .411 .465 .392 .460 .447 .469 .441 .484 .422 .511 .476 .437 .478 .539 .477 .477 .486 .448 .442 .435 .422 .441 .418 .439 .526 .452 .501 .487 .421 .494 .516 .513 .449 .473 .495 .495 .495 .553 .498 .443 .383 .553 .516 .437 .476

1901 .444 .433 .468 .393 .479 .452 .480 .444 .479 .426 .490 .498 .459 .483 .512 .474 .469 .488 .446 .449 .438 .425 .430 .419 .446 .524 .453 .514 .478 .450 .520 .528 .522 .456 .478 .506 .497 .489 .552 .502 .441 .381 .573 .531 .438 .479

1911

England and Wales, 1851 to 1931.

Appendix Table 5A.1

Proportionmarried (I ), by county: 1921 .459 .439 .492 .429 .506 .467 .469 .448 .479 .445 .489 .509 .484 .480 .495 .494 .483 .495 .473 .475 .463 .448 .459 .448 .468 .529 .486 .504 .485 .461 .540 .516 .538 .472 .479 .508 .503 .504 .557 .508 .472 .396 .583 .531 .439 .489

1931 .450 .472 .524 .454 .528 .485 .506 .486 .522 .486 .513 .543 .514 .514 .525 .507 .511 .533 .514 .506 .502 .478 .481 .473 .497 .528 .510 .512 .519 .503 .545 .530 .549 .485 .486 .520 .511 .521 .563 .507 .495 .436 .583 .542 .464 .503

Appendix Table 5A. 2 Proportion married (I m ), by county:

Scotland, 1861 to 1931.

County

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1921

1931

1 Shetland 2 Orkney 3 Caithness 4 Sutherland 5 Ross & Cromarty 6 Inverness 7 Nairn 8 Moray/Elgin 9 Banff 10 Aberdeen 11 Kincardine 12 Angus-Forfar 13 Perth 14 Fife 15 Kinross 16 Clackmannan 17 Stirling 18 Dunbarton 19 Argyll 20 Bute 21 Renfrew 22 Ayr 23 Lanark 24 Linlithgov/W.Loth 25 Edinburgh/Midloth 26 Haddington/E*Loth 27 BerwiCK 28 Peebles 29 Selkirk 30 Roxburgh 31 Dumfries 32 Kirkcudbright 33 Wigtown Scotland

.302 .357 .352 .295 .360 .328 .352 .385 .403 .393 .404 .393 .373 .428 .398 .467 .481 .441 .375 .309 .446 .484 .483 . 569 .394 .412 .376 .403 .428 .422 .387 .373 .370 .422

.306 .376 .356 .285 .350 .333 .350 .371 .398 .411 .424 .399 .374 .423 .391 .441 .492 .437 .365 .319 .460 .481 .501 .559 .422 .416 .376 .407 .416 .391 .371 .374 .346 .432

.279 .382 .356 .318 .339 .340 .339 .374 .406 .418 .423 .402 .371 .425 .358 .421 .511 .439 .363 .347 .452 .480 .505 .566 .425 .414 .368 .378 .427 .394 .372 .382 .373 .438

.292 .349 .351 .322 .332 .320 .328 .367 .392 .383 .401 .381 .342 .420 .364 .402 .477 .436 .335 .329 .430 .450 .490 .563 .397 .393 .343 .335 .358 .350 .356 .362 .356 .420

.308 .348 .355 .337 .342 .333 .342 .373 .413 .405 .441 .378 .345 .436 .438 .385 .489 .438 .320 .317 .424 .450 .484 .576 .394 .398 .347 .322 .318 .314 .363 .362 .348 .425

.326 .361 .364 .319 .321 .327 .325 .373 .423 .411 .451 .385 .357 .482 .413 .382 .498 .457 .327 .329 .424 .433 .471 .573 .391 .438 .373 .337 .331 .333 .377 .363 .380 .428

.298 .392 .369 .339 .334 .341 .368 .404 .446 .419 .413 .393 .366 .490 .407 .430 .466 .456 .357 .393 .441 .451 .461 .529 .400 .434 .415 .367 .359 .366 .417 .381 .389 .433

.321 .409 .412 .353 .329 .370 .368 .428 .459 .440 .454 .417 .395 .489 .410 .448 .476 .440 .358 .385 .433 .449 .461 .515 .411 .453 .443 .393 .401 .386 .439 .432 .434 .441

Appendix Table 5A. 3 Proportion married (I f f l ), by county: County 1 Carlow 2 Dublin 3 Kildare 4 Kilkenny 5 Offaly/Kings 6 Longford 7 Louth 8 Meath 9 Laoighis/Queens 10 Westmeath 11 Wexford 12 Wicklow 13 Clare 14 Cork 15 Kerry 16 Limerick 17 Tipperary 18 Waterford 19+23 Antrim + Down 20 Armagh 21 Cavan 22 Donegal 24 Fermanagh 25 Londonderry 25 Monaghan 27 Tyrone 27 Galway 29 Leitrim 30 Mayo 31 Roscommon 32 Sligo Ireland

Ireland, 1871 to 1936.

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1926

1936

.371 .388 .396 .340 .372 .395 .368 .348 .364 .368 .343 .366 .460 .465 . 529 .423 .394 .402 .383 .386 . 406 .37 5 .365 .353 .377 .346 .487 .436 .485 .442 .435 .405

.347 .388 .376 .334 .358 .364 .357 .334 .333 .348 .334 .345 .385 .386 .435 .365 .345 .364 .366 .349 .375 .352 .328 .339 .324 .322 .429 .395 .430 .384 .388 .370

.314 .362 .348 .308 .335 .327 .334 .311 .308 .321 .307 .321 .332 .333 .360 .312 .306 .319 .404 .329 .324 .313 .306 .319 .301 .286 .369 .365 .367 .332 .337 .336

.316 .341 .356 .295 .308 .318 .314 .299 .301 .309 .306 .332 .313 .305 .338 .301 .289 .308 .362 .328 .318 .306 .313 .293 .303 .292 .337 .327 .341 .311 .298 .324

.323 .349 .402 .322 .316 .329 .327 .324 .323 .328 .322 .347 .309 .323 .330 .314 .307 .330 .386 .349 .320 .310 .336 .325 .323 .325 .323 .321 .333 .314 .300 .339

.357 .364 .396 .352 .364 .369 .373 .356 .364 .372 .348 .376 .330 .325 .326 .357 .345 .335 .407 .372 .358 .320 .362 .368 .339 .363 .337 .341 .329 .346 .324 .362

.379 .352 .419 .353 .365 .362 .354 .366 .370 .365 .362 .373 .341 .326 .319 .352 .361 .358 .425 .412 .359 .315 .371 .394 .346 .383 .338 .344 .324 .340 .331 .369

CHAPTER 6: Marital and Extramarital Fertility MARITAL FERTILITY

Level and Trends in the Index of Marital Fertility (Ig), 18511931(36). Near the middle of the nineteenth century, the level of Ig was lowest in England and Wales at .675 and highest in Scotland at .742. Ireland (in 1871) was intermediate at .708. By European standards (Table 6.1) the figures for England and Wales and for Ireland were moderate, and those for Scotland toward the high end of the distribution, though still exceeded by countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, and probably Germany and Belgium. The trends of Ig in England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are shown in Table 6.2 and Figure 6.1. There is a small apparent increase in Ig in both England and Wales and Scotland to peak levels in 1871.1 From there, marital fertility declines slightly by 1881 and then sharply and continuously up to 1931, declining fully 57 percent in England and Wales and 46 percent in Scotland, as measured from their respective 1871 highs. In stark contrast, the Igs for Ireland are most remarkably stable through 1911, varying within a range of less than four-tenths of 1 percent (from .706 to .709); subsequently, there is a moderate decline: by 1936, Ig was only 19 percent below its level in 1871. In 1871 Scotland and Ireland /A,s were respectively 10 and 3 percent higher than in England and Wales, but by 1931(36), they were respec­ tively 38 percent and 95 percent higher than in England and Wales. By the end of the study period, the Igs in England and Wales have reached relatively low levels by European standards, but Scotland con­ tinues to be on the high side. Ireland, with its tardy decline in Ig, is experiencing in 1936 the highest level of Ig of all Western European countries for which comparable data are available. 1As indicated in our discussion of under-registration of births (Chapter 3, above), this apparent small increase is consistent with fairly constant marital fertility in real terms.

Table 6.1 Index of marital fertility (I g ) for European countries, 1831-1970 Country

Year

I,

Country

Year

England and Wales

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.675 0.670 0.686 0.674 0.621 0.553 0.467 0.375 0.292 0.289

Denmark

1852 1860 1870 1880 1890 1901 1911 1921 1930 1960

Scotland

1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.742 0.752 0.733 0.696 0.632 0.565 0.480 0.404 0.341

Finland

1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1926 1936 1961

0.708 0.706 0.709 0.707 0.708 0.610 0.570 0.548

1865 1875 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

0.698 0.689 0.685 0.647 0.548 0.455 0.387 0.433 0.343

Γ1880 J 1890 j 1900 L1910 {I960

0.677 0.683 0.670 0.588 0.330

1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1947 1961 1970

0.749 0.669 0.534 0.444 0.370 0.282 0.304 0.289 0.247

1831 1836 1841 1846 1851 1856 1861 1866 1871 1876 1881 1886 1891 1896 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.537 0.518 0.515 0.498 0.478 0.478 0.478 0.481 0.494 0.471 0.460 0.435 0.410 0.396 0.383 0.315 0.321 0.273 0.323

Ireland

Austria

[within AustroHungarian Empire] [current borders] Belgium

France

0.671 0.645 0.656 0.686 0.658 0.604 0.522 0.429 0.327 0.279 — —

Table 6.1 (continued) Country

Year

Germany

'1867 1871 1875 [Contemporary 1880 boundaries] ^ 1885 1890 1900 „1910 [1939 boundaries] 1939 [East & West combined] 1962

Country

Year

Is

0.760 0.760 0.791 0.735 0.726 0.706 0.694 0.542 0.284 0.293

Portugal

1864 1878 1890 1900 1911 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

0.682 0.664 0.689 0.681 0.636 0.609 0.544 0.453 0.440 0.414

Spain

1887 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

0.650 0.653 0.623 0.586 0.540 0.464 0.419 0.403

Sweden

1880 1900 1930 1950 1960

0.700 0.652 0.303 0.269 0.241

Switzerland

1860 1870 1880 1888 1900 1910 1920 1930 1941 1950 1960

0.724 0.692 0.677 0.649 0.618 0.513 0.429 0.352 0.352 0.358 0.350

Albania

1955

0.700

Bulgaria

1905 1934 1956

0.694 0.379 0.236

Czechoslovakia

1930 1961

0.327 0.254

I8

Greece

1900 1928 1951 1961

0.688 0.535 0.399 0.327

Italy

1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1936 1951 1961

0.677 0.646 0.648 0.640 0.633 0.616 0.585 0.471 0.434 0.344 0.338

Luxemburg

1900 1930 1960

0.704 0.319 0.260

Netherlands

1859 1869 1879 1889 1899 1909 1920 1930 1960

0.816 0.845 0.831 0.808 0.752 0.652 0.554 0.446 0.394

1875 1890 1900 1920 1930 1960

0.752 0.735 0.701 0.548 0.382 0.322

Norway

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY Table 6.1 (continued) Country

Year

Hungary

Is

Country

1880 1890 1900 1910 1930 1960

0.589 0.580 0.572 0.529 0.357 0.207

European Russia

Poland

1960

0.335

Yugoslavia

Rumania

1899 1930 1956

0.645 0.489 0.346

[within AustroHungarian Empire]

[current boundaries]

Year

I.

1870 1897 1926 1940 1959 1970

0.755 0.755 0.665 0.430 0.356 0.233

1900 1931 1960

0.649 0.509 0.322

[estimate only]

[Serbia only]

SOURCE: See Table 4.3 Date of Decline With the hindsight that is the privilege of historical researchers, it may be said on the basis of Table 6.2 and Figure 6.1 that marital fertility in England and Wales and in Scotland turned slightly downward in the 1870s and sharply downward in the 1880s, never again to rise to previous levels. The downturn in Ig appears to have occurred at the same time in both England and Wales and Scotland despite their substantially different starting levels. For the purpose of intra- and inter-national comparisons, however, it is preferable to employ a more precisely defined measure of the date at which the decline of marital fertility may be said to have become "substantial" and, save for doubts about Ireland, we would add "irreTable 6.2 Index of marital fertility (/g): England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, 1851-1931(36) 1851

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1921"

19311

.675

.670 .742

.686 .752 .708

.674 .733 .706

.621 .696 .709

.553 .632 .707

.467 .565 .708

.375 .480 .610

.292 .404 .570

100 100 100

98 97 100

91 93 100

81 84 100

68 75 100

55 64 86

43 54 81

Index scores (England and Wales = 100) Scotland — Ill 110 Ireland 103 — —

109 105

112 114

114 128

121 152

128 163

138 195

England and Wales Scotland Ireland

— —

Index scores (1871 = 100) England and Wales 98 — Scotland Ireland —

"1926 and 1936 in Ireland

—

98 99 —

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

0.8 r

Ireland

Scotland

England & Wales

1851

1871

1891

1911

1931

Figure 6.1 Index of marital fertility (Ie), for England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, 1851-1931(6)

versible." Two such criteria have been employed by others in the Eu­ ropean Fertility Study, and will be used here to assure comparability: The first is the date at which Ig declines 10 percent below an initial "plateau" level; the second is the date at which marital fertility declines

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

below .600.2 The 10 percent criterion is of course an arbitrary choice (we might have chosen 5 percent or 15 percent), but is of sufficient magnitude to suggest that a substantial degree of fertility control is being adopted. The .600 criteria is again arbitrary, but is selected because at this level it is quite certain that substantial proportions of the population have adopted relatively efficient means of fertility control.3 By the 10 percent criterion, the decade 1891-1900 is the date of the onset of "substantial and irreversible" decline in marital fertility in both England and Wales and Scotland. Assuming a linear decline,4 the single year during which the 10 percent criterion is met is 1891 for England and Wales and 1894 for Scotland. In contrast, a 10 percent decline in Ig does not occur in Ireland until 1921. By the .600 criterion, however, the dates of the marital fertility de­ clines for England and Wales and Scotland are quite far apart, obviously because of the substantially higher levels of Scottish marital fertility in the predecline "plateau." The decade of 1891-1900 sees the .600 cri­ terion met in England and Wales, but it is not until the following decade, 1901-1910, that Scottish marital fertility declines below .600. Again assuming linearity, the single-year estimates of the .600 criterion are 1894 for England and Wales and 1905 for Scotland. Of course, because the level of Ig in Ireland is generally much higher than those of England and Wales and Scotland, the date at which the .600 criterion is met is even more divergent than in the case of the 10 percent criterion. The .600 level of Ig is not reached in Ireland until 1928, assuming linearity of decline between 1926 and 1936 (an especially dubious assumption in the case of Ireland). Hence one can say with some assurance that by the middle 1890s fertility within marriage was being efficiently controlled by a substantial portion of the population of England and Wales; for Scotland the date would be the same by the 10 percent criterion, but a decade later by the .600 criterion; while in Ireland the comparable date would be con­ siderably later than the end of World War I, and perhaps as late as the 1930s. 2Altemate criteria of 25 percent and an I level of .500 were tried experimentally. No g changes in interpretation resulted. 3When the criterion is a 25 percent decline, the dates are of course later but the ordering is the same: England and Wales, 1906; Scotland, 1911; and Ireland, after 1936. 4The demographic dislocations caused by World War I mean that this linear assumption must be viewed with skepticism after 1911.

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY Width at each level of Ig indicates percent, according fo the scale below, of counties /provinces at that level. The scale is centered at each date

10% M

oL

1851

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1921

1931

Figure 6.2a Percentage of counties with specified IgS for Great Britain and Ireland, 1851— 1931

Variability in Levels of Marital Fertility (Ig) The standard deviations as a measure of variability, used earlier for other indices, are shown for marital fertility (Ig) in Table 6.3. The stand­ ard deviation of Ig in England and Wales is erratic between 1851 and 1891, followed by moderate increases. In Scotland, the level of vari­ ability increases earlier and more strongly, increasing by more than two­ fold5 between 1861 and 1921, followed by a sharp decline to 1931. For Ireland, there is also a strong increase in the standard deviation of Ig from 1891 to 1911, followed by a moderate decline. For all years in the study period except 1931, the level of relative variability is highest for Scotland. Comparable estimates of the degree of variation in Ig for Germany, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy also are presented in Table 6.3. Unlike the comparisons of the other indicators presented earlier, in the case of Ig England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland all appear very homoge­ neous when compared with the Continental countries, although the latter two are still more heterogeneous than the first. Figure 6.2 presents the fertility declines of the British Isles, England 5The 1921 figure for Scotland seems suspiciously high, and may result from a large data error in one or more counties, e.g., Bute. Dr. T. H. Hollingsworth has been kind enough to point out to me that the 1921 Census date coincided with a holiday weekend, with consequent unknown effects upon the accuracy of enumeration by place.

Table 6.3 Variability in marital fertility (I g ), British Isles and selected other countries Country & Date N England & Wales 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 Scotland 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 Irelandb 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1926 1936 1961 Germany 1871 1880 1890 1900 1910 1925 1933

45 Il t/ Il t/ If

» Il

33 H It Il Il Il Il Il

31 Il Il If Il If tl It

71 Il " Il "

66 "

Central tendency s.d. X

Indexa 1871 = 100 s.d. X

.681 .686 .695 .691 .635 .562 .463 .372 .285

.031 .027 .031 .030 .031 .039 .043 .035 .044

98 99 100 99 91 81 67 54 41

100 87 100 97 100 126 139 113 142

.750 .755 .739 .706 .631 .547 .453 .396

.025 .042 .040 .058 .053 .060 .080 .049

99 100 98 94 84 72 60 52

60 100 95 138 126 143 190 117

.714 .714 .709 .710 .740 .656 .614 .612

.032 .036 .034 .041 .072 .055 .052 .051

100 100 99 99 104 92 86 86

100 113 106 128 225 172 163 159

.759 .732 .705 .674 .562 .370 .293

.087 .085 .092 .114 .127 .097 .077

100 96 93 89 74 49 39

100 97 106 131 145 111 88

Country & Date Portugal (1871) 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 Belgium 1846 1856 1866 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1947 1961 Italy 1862-66 1870-72 1880-82 1890-92 1900-02 1910-12 1921-26 1930-32 1935-37 1950-52 1960-62

N

21 " " "

22 " " Il

9 Il Il Il tl Il tl Il Il Il Il

14 16 " Il " Il

18 " " Il "

Central tendency χ s.d.

Index8 1871 = 100 s.d. X

.757 .698 .696 .656 .644 .598 .482 .457 .430

.026 .060 .066 .058 .084 .117 .130 .136 .147

100 92 92 87 85 79 64 60 57

100 231 254 223 323 450 500 523 565

.766 .805 .820 .767 .696 .628 .498 .422 .330 .335 .305

.029 .068 .083 .128 .150 .174 .176 .142 .119 .079 .052

96 100 102 96 87 78 62 53 41 42 38

29 69 84 129 152 176 178 143 120 80 53

.673 .644 .638 .628 .620 .615 .600 .488 .451 .351 .343

.034 .031 .041 .042 .051 .069 .120 .117 .118 .122 .105

105 100 99 98 96 95 93 76 70 55 53

110 100 132 135 165 223 387 377 381 394 339

SOURCES: (Germany) Knodel, 1974, Table 2.19; (Portugal) Livi Bacci, 1971, calculated from Tables 15 & 23; (Belgium) Lesthaeghe, 1977, calculated from Table 4.3; (Italy) Livi Bacci, 1977, calculated from Table 2.6 aThe 1871 base is interpolated when necessary and in the case of Portugal extrapolated from a straight line fitted to 1890-1930. bValues for 1871 and 1881 adjusted for mismatching of registration and census "counties" with Antrim and Down (including Belfast) combined. For the years 1926 and 1936, a three-year average of births centered on the census year was used.

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

Figure 6.2b Percentage of counties with specified Iss for Great Britain, 1851-1931

and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, and Russia in a graphic form which characterizes the pace and diversity of the process. The width of the area drawn in black represents the proportionate concentration of counties in each range of Ig in each time period. Each county or province is weighted equally (unlike the national averages, which give greatest weight to the most heavily populated counties). Examining first the figure for Great Britain and Ireland as a whole (Fig. 6.2a) or Great Britain excluding Ireland (Fig. 6.2b), we see a pattern of change comparable to that in other European countries such as Russia, Italy, or Germany, viz. a substantial increase in dispersion of British county-level Igs beginning with the initiation of the fertility decline in the 1870s and 1880s, accelerating in the 1890s, and continuing until 1931, by which time the dispersion has become very great indeed. The picture, then, is of heterogeneity of fertility decline in the counties of the British Isles comparable to that of other European countries. However, examination of the comparable figure for England and Wales taken separately suggests a quite different picture (Fig. 6.2c). The county Igs for England and Wales are tightly clustered from 1851 through 1891, and during the sharp decline in marital fertility which then ensues, the dispersion shows only moderate increase. Remarkably, more than 90 percent of English and Welsh counties are within the narrow range of .150 on the Ig scale for all census years, and in many years this figure is 100 percent. For Scotland taken on its own (Fig. 6.2d), the picture is quite different

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY 09 08 -

07 06 -

>g 0 5 04 03 -

02 • 0-

0I

1871

Figure 6.2c Percentage of counties with specified Igs for England and Wales, 1851(N = 45)

08

0.6

0.4 20%

ι—ι

0.2

50%

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1921

1931

Figure 6.2d Percentage of counties with specified Iss for Scotland, 1861-1931 (N = 33)

from that for England and Wales. Dispersion of county Igs is often greater than in England and Wales even before the onset of fertility decline. Beginning with 1891, dispersion increases substantially, and remains quite high up to 1931. Finally, Ireland's dispersion (Fig. 6.2e) is only a little larger than that of England and Wales, although the timetrend is very different. The pace of fertility decline is also evident from these figures. It is worth noting, for example, that by 1911 only 2 percent of the counties in England and Wales and only 15 percent of those in Scotland were

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

0.8

0.6

0.4 50% 20%

I—I

0.2

10%

0

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1926

1936

Figure 6.2e Percentage of counties with specified I g s for Ireland, 1871-1936 (N = 31*)

08

0.6

04

20%

0.2

Ol

10 %

1831

1846

1861

1876

1891

1901

Figure 6.2f Marital fertility (I g ) of France: Distribution by department, 1831-1901

experiencing marital fertility rates as high as the lowest counties only twenty years earlier. In only two decades, then, virtually the entirety of Great Britain experienced a fundamental shift in marital fertility behavior. In Ireland, by sharpest contrast, 90 percent of the counties had marital fertility rates in 1911 that were higher than that of the lowest county in 1891. The data for France are particularly interesting among those for other European countries. The French provinces show a pattern of relatively high dispersion from very early indeed in the nineteenth century. Figure

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

IO 0.6

Υ

0.6

0.4 20% 10%

0.2

1869-73

1883-87

1898-02

1908-12

1923-27

1931-35

Figure 6.2g Marital fertility of Germany : Distribution by administrative area, 1869-1935

0.8

0.6

0.4 0.2

0L

1861

1871

1881

1931

1951

Figure 6.2h Marital fertility (I g ) of Italy: Distribution of province, 1861-1961

6.2f shows that by 1831 a substantial number of French provinces had already experienced substantial declines in marital fertility, while others lagged well behind. Presumably this is attributable to the early onset of French fertility decline, which apparently began during the second half of the eighteenth century (Van de Walle, 1974). Even twenty years after the French provinces were showing such relatively high dispersion, the data for England and Wales were remarkably homogeneous—another

1961

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY 0.9 08

07 06

05 0.4

10%

03

20%

0.2

0I

1897

926

1940

1959 1970

Figure 6.2i Marital fertility (I g ) of total population: Distribution of provinces of European Russia by level, 1897-1970

indication of the lateness of the English fertility decline as compared to that of France. Overall, then, the pattern of marital fertility decline in England and Wales is one of remarkable and continuing homogeneity, both as com­ pared to Scotland and to other European countries. In Scotland, het­ erogeneity was substantially greater and increased. And for Great Britain and Ireland as a whole, dispersion was large and increased over time. It is clear that the last pattern is the product of the greater dispersion in Scotland, coupled with the generally higher levels of Ig in Scotland and particularly in Ireland as compared with England and Wales in all years. The spread of county-level Igs for the British Isles is similar to that for other European countries. England and Wales, however, stands out clearly in the homogeneity of its marital fertility decline. Superficial inspection of data for Great Britain or for England and Wales on their own would give a misleading impression of the nature of the British experience; it is only when England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland can be examined both separately and together that the patterns described above become evident.

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

Regional Patterns of Marital Fertility The above indicies of marital fertility for the three countries of the British Isles disguise notable county-level variations in fertility. Ig calculations for the 109 counties constituting the British Isles6 are pre­ sented in tabular form in Table 6.4 and in cartographic form in Fig­ ure 6.3. In 1851, the first decade for which data are available (but for England and Wales only), Ig is relatively uniform across the counties of England and Wales, mostly within the .650-.699 range. Exceptions on the high side are Cornwall (at .761), North and South Wales, the Midland coun­ ties of Worcestershire and Staffordshire, Middlesex, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Durham and Westmorland (all in the .700-.749 range). (The high figure for Cornwall may well result from a data error, in view of the patterning of Cornwall's neighbors in 1851 and later years.) Exceptions on the low side are London, Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and the East Riding of Yorkshire (all in the .600-.649 range). The regional pattern for England and Wales in 1861 is similar, al­ though some specific counties show changes relative to others. For 1861, fertility data become available for Scotland, and here the pattern of Ig is both substantially higher and considerably less uniform than in Eng­ land and Wales. Over half of the thirty-three counties of Scotland show Ig levels above .750, higher than that of any county in England and Wales. These high Ig counties in Scotland are geographically concen­ trated in the Highlands and down the western coast to the border coun­ ties, with some few high Ig counties appearing on the eastern coast. The remaining counties of Scotland show lower fertility, but still considerably higher than that of most counties in England and Wales. By 1871, it is possible to examine geographical patterns of Ig in all of the British Isles (see Fig. 6.3). One rather surprising tentative conclusion results immediately from inspection of the 1871 data—that the Ig indices for Ireland are no greater than those for large parts of England and Wales, and that Scotland shows the highest Ig levels in the British Isles. 6As noted in Chapter 3, and explained more fully in the Appendix, the county-level data on fertility in Ireland for 1871 and 1881 had to be adjusted because of the mismatching of registration and census "counties." Moreover, because of complicated boundary changes, Antrim and Down, including Belfast, were combined, reducing the number of "counties" in the British Isles from 110 to 109.

00

to

1 London 2 Surrey 3 Kent 4 Sussex 5 Hampshire 6 Berkshire 7 Middlesex 8 Hertfordshire 9 Buckinghamshire 10 Oxfordshire 11 Northamntonshire 12 Huntingdonshire 13 Bedfordshire 14 Cambridgeshire 15 Essex 16 Suffolk 17 Norfolk 18 Wiltshire 19 Dorset 20 Devonshire 21 Cornwall 22 Somersetshire 23 Gloucestershire 24 Herefordshire 25 Shropshire 26 Staffordshire 27 Worcestershire 28 Warwickshire 29 Leicestershire 30 Rutlandshire 31 Lincolnshire 32 Nottinghamshire 33 Derbyshire 34 Cheshire 35 Lancashire 36 West Riding 37 East Riding 38 North Riding 39 Durham 40 Northumberland 41 Cumberland 42 Westmoreland 43 Monmouthshire 44 South Wales 45 North Wales England and Wales

County

Table 6.4a

.603 .693 .680 .675 .647 .675 .707 .667 .668 .674 .662 .660 .673 .652 .6/9 .648 .624 .679 .685 .669 .761 .685 .650 .668 .690 .727 .723 .683 .679 .688 .681 .665 .667 .654 .697 .701 .625 .700 .731 .695 .695 .722 .665 .743 .725 .675

1851

.603 .682 .683 .681 .639 .687 .720 .695 .692 .703 .672 .700 .673 .689 .694 .666 .632 .694 .687 .664 .733 .690 .668 .692 .703 .713 .684 .660 .684 .714 .695 .659 .654 .673 .665 .681 .655 .700 .757 .707 .708 .723 .686 .715 .711 .670

1861 .619 .668 .678 .681 .635 .689 .738 .750 .699 .711 .696 .681 .680 .674 .736 .681 .645 .703 .638 .664 .690 .694 .668 .673 .715 .746 .698 .686 .711 .695 .691 .678 .693 .684 .699 .684 .660 .726 .761 .729 .740 .696 .714 .750 .715 .686

1871 .611 .676 .684 .658 .645 .690 .738 .719 .719 .710 .695 .676 .684 .678 .761 .683 .657 .704 .675 .663 .690 .692 .666 .677 .694 .738 .687 .682 .700 .733 .674 .678 .685 .674 .673 .650 .646 .715 .735 .718 .721 .707 .732 .726 .670 .674

1881

Adjusted marital fertility (Ig)1 by county:

.559 .608 .621 .584 .588 .627 .650 .663 .652 .651 .632 .618 .622 .616 .698 .652 .613 .632 .617 .596 .628 .637 .617 .660 .672 .693 .641 .613 .640 .638 .621 .625 .629 .623 .620 .583 .609 .636 .683 .662 .663 .633 .693 .690 .668 .621

1891 .498 .523 .528 .502 .511 .542 .561 .564 .566 .573 .524 .581 .541 .546 .583 .580 .563 .549 .542 .504 .528 .582 .516 .598 .653 .617 .555 .564 .544 .582 .551 .573 .561 .549 .549 .534 .534 .534 .641 .607 .604 .539 .664 .636 .583 .553

1901 .460 .399 .438 .393 .428 .421 .436 .455 .462 .448 .400 .502 .430 .423 .474 .480 .464 .458 .437 .408 .431 .418 .470 .492 .485 .516 .399 .522 .437 .458 .460 .427 .532 .463 .460 .438 .477 .520 .565 .519 .518 .438 .548 .539 .493 .467

1911

England and Wales, 1851 to 1931. 1921 .374 .326 .338 .297 .347 .349 .340 .342 .344 .368 .338 .379 .341 .358 .368 .382 .368 .372 .349 .329 .344 .342 .373 .414 .423 .431 .381 .37 5 .353 .382 .372 .370 .387 .352 .369 .362 .383 .411 .466 .434 .439 .344 .430 .428 .389 .375

.291 .280 .297 .273 .335 .343 .362 .332 .344 .302 .320 .232 .329 .292

.288

.282

.251 .279 .175 .145 .292 .249 .268 .270 .296 .192 .309 .267 .288 .275 .239 .302 .293 .292 .269 .277 .276 .296 .340 .334 .331 .305 .288 .273 .313 .231

1931

Table 6.4b d mari t a l f e r t i l i t y ( I g ) . by county:

Scotland, 1861 t o 1931.

County

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1921

1931

1 Shetland 2 Orkney 3 Caithness 4 Sutherland 5 Ross & Cromarty 6 Inverness 7 Nairn 8 Moray/Elgin 9 Banff 10 Aberdeen 11 Kincardine 12 Angus-Forfar 13 Perth 14 Fife 15 Kinross 16 Clackmannan 17 S t i r l i n g 18 Dunbarton 19 Argyll 20 Bute 21 Renfrew 22 Ayr 23 Lanark 24 Linlithgow/W.Loth 25 Edinburgh/Midloth 26 Haddington/E. Loth 27 Berwick 28 Peebles 29 Selkirk 30 Roxburgh 31 Dumfries 32 Kirkcudbright 33 Wigtown Scotland

.767 .712 .793 .772 . 768 .750 .770 .776 .774 .744 .746 .720 . 707 .749 .701 .738 .780 .765 .763 .735 .760 .766 .734 .786 .706 .777 .762 .750 .736 .713 .755 .759 .726 .742

.724 .703 .807 .782 .760 .769 .769 .754 .755 .749 .749 .727 .710 .767 .711 .772 .812 .840 .763 .692 .753 .821 .751 .846 .690 .740 .765 .716 .657 .801 .746 .750 .774 .752

.782 .676 .792 .796 .783 .773 .770 .758 .763 .748 .765 .697 .692 .743 .711 .790 .759 .774 .752 .682 .730 .778 .741 .794 .678 .732 .715 .699 .655 .687 .712 .698 .746 .733

.750 .660 .769 .788 .787 .746 .629 .759 .766 .742 .760 .650 .684 .694 .712 .609 .740 .706 .779 .619 .738 .741 .680 .828 .647 .697 .682 .642 .615 .611 .677 .690 .714 .696

.649 .595 .748 .690 .724 .659 .599 .644 .673 .654 .634 .592 .592 .609 .577 .605 .673 .669 .686 .555 .680 .666 .635 .726 .567 .619 .562 .557 .559 .549 .602 .594 .667 .632

.563 .532 .653 .631 .667 .608 .550 .567 .591 .549 .556 .523 .496 .532 .533 .533 .587 .591 .567 .433 .573 .589 .598 .634 .498 .540 .464 .444 .419 .452 .525 .504 .554 .565

.466 .485 .557 .505 .573 .523 .487 .484 .512 .470 .485 .454 .404 .429 .461 .449 .495 .478 .337 .138 .499 .438 .527 .551 .437 .442 .399 .337 .356 .391 .469 .447 .472 .480

.393 .395 .465 .453 .504 .459 .462 .414 .441 .405 .378 .388 .356 .366 .382 .363 .404 .410 .389 .285 .428 .397 .428 .436 .359 .392 .327 .317 .297 .335 .371 .445 .408 .404

Table 6.4c •d mar i t a l f e r t i l i t y ( I g ) , by county: County 1 Carlow 2 Dublin 3 Kildare 4 Kilkenny 5 Offaly/Rings 6 Longford 7 Louth 8 Meath 9 Laoighis/Queens 10 Westmeath 11 Wexford 12 Wicklow 13 Clare 14 Cork 1 5 Kerry 16 Limerick 17 Tipperary 18 Waterfora 19+23 Antrim + Down 20 Armagh 21 Cavan 22 Donegal 24 Fermanagh 25 Londonderry 25 Monaghan 27 Tyrone 27 Galway 29 Leitrim 30 Mayo 31 Roscommon 32 Sligo Ireland

1871 .721 .597 .672 .739 .701 .717 .705 .699 .703 .727 .737 .710 .732 .710 .782 .726 .744 .704 .726 .706 .738 .681 .681 .718 .688 .728 .694 . 729 .732 .755 .742 .708

1881 .722 .633 .704 .745 .694 .680 .695 .728 .761 .786 .726 .711 .768 .738 .797 .747 .750 .726 .717 .673 .677 .701 .689 .691 .683 .682 .698 .714 .696 .711 .687 .706

Ireland, 1871 t o 1936.

1891

1901

1911

1926

1936

.703 .658 .690 .727 .705 .690 .680 .675 .721 .710 .711 .679 .764 .744 .816 .750 .721 .723 .693 .687 .682 .719 .673 .702 .649 .700 .736 .699 .742 .728 .687 .709

.684 .657 .717 .750 .682 .693 .661 .710 .715 .670 .702 .650 .751 .742 .806 .755 .742 .697 .650 .696 .671 .751 .675 .737 .670 .690 .790 .713 .750 .697 .747 .707

.702 .643 .660 .754 .726 .758 .706 .696 .733 .693 .715 .628 .790 .710 .854 .797 .750 .695 .602 .663 .762 .853 .725 .706 .723 .709 .863 .813 .878 .789 .852 .708

.629 .603 .623 .680 .640 .678 .628 .638 .640 .648 .649 . 582 .685 .608 .768 .706 .667 .652 . 512 .591 .675 .729 .611 .632 .648 .631 .779 .691 .732 .707 .669 .610

.583 .596 .636 .628 .616 .616 .613 .611 .615 .625 .613 .552 .648 .590 .654 .663 .633 .636 .433 .514 .636 .659 .578 .601 .610 .598 .747 .629 .676 .603 .609 .570

ou>

Figure 6.3 Ig by county, maps for British Isles, 1871-1931 (6)

[131]

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

Such an interpretation must be tempered with the caveat that the com­ pleteness of registration in Ireland in 1871 is suspect, while the data for both England and Wales and Scotland are thought to be relatively com­ plete by this time. Adjustment of Irish data for under-registration by reverse-projection of census data is rendered impossible by the unknown (but undoubtedly high) levels of migration characterizing that country in the nineteenth century. In England and Wales in 1871, there is an emerging pattern of higher fertility in the counties immediately north of London, in the Midlands, in the north (especially Durham) and in both North and South Wales. Lower Ig scores remain characteristic of London itself, Hampshire, and Norfolk, with the addition of Dorset. In Scotland, Ig levels in excess of .700 are the norm, with six of the thirty-three counties showing levels in excess of .800. All but one of the thirty-two counties of Ireland exceed Ig levels of .600, and most show levels in excess of .700. For 1881, the previous patterns continue with some notable changes. The relatively high fertility of the English counties north of London continues, some of the Midland counties remain relatively high, and the South Wales and the north of England continue to be higher than the rest of the counties. Lower fertility continues in London and in Hamp­ shire, and appears anew in the West and East Ridings of Yorkshire. In Scotland the geographical pattern continues as before, but there is the appearance of a decline in Ig in the counties bordering England. In Ireland the path is generally downward. Ig went down at least a little in all the counties of Ulster in the north save Donegal and Fermanagh, where it rose. In the western province of Connaught, Ii went down in all counties save Galway. In Munster, in the south, all of the Iss went up. In Leinster's twelve counties, in the east, Ig went up in 8, but down in 4 (Kings, Longford, Louth, and Wexford). Judged by the average county Igs, the highest marital fertility continued to characterize Munster (.754) but the lowest was Ulster (.689) instead of Leinster (.715) which in 1891 was also higher than Connaught (.701). Of course the county averages for provinces give no weight to the size of their populations. By 1891 there is a major transformation of fertility behavior in much of England, Scotland, and Wales, though the preceding patterns of relative fertility continue. Virtually every county in England and Wales shows a decline in Ig from 1881 to 1891, but fertility remains relatively

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

high in the counties immediately north of London, in Staffordshire, in the north of England, and in North and South Wales. Ig continues relatively low in London, in Hampshire and in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and for the first time is also relatively low in Sussex and Devon. In Scotland the relatively high fertility concentrations continue in the Highlands, along the western coast, and in Linlithgow, though most of even these counties show evidence of decline in Ig. In Ireland, relatively high marital fertility is concentrated in the west, and especially in three counties in the south. Relatively low fertility appears in various counties elsewhere, especially counties on the east coast near Belfast and Dublin, and a swath of counties stretching to the west coast, in­ cluding Counties Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh, Leitrim, and Sligo. The patterns of relative fertility levels in England and Wales and in Scotland continue in 1901 with, however, a spread of very low fertility to all the southeast counties south of London. Virtually all counties show a decline in Ig, with pockets of relatively high fertility continuing in the counties north of London, in the Midlands, in Wales, in the north of England, and especially in the Highlands and western coast of Scot­ land. In Ireland a different trend is apparent by 1901. There is no general decline in Ig, and indeed the index appears to increase in some counties (possibly due to improving completeness of registration). The geograph­ ical clusterings of high and low fertility are similar to those of the pre­ ceding decade. By 1911 marital fertility below .500 had spread to almost all counties of England and Wales. The principal exceptions are in South Wales, Monmouthshire, west Midlands, and the north of England. Low Ig scores also characterize some counties of Scotland, especially from Edinburgh south to the border with England. Relatively high marital fertility con­ tinues in the Highlands, and in the area around Glasgow, though even here Ig levels have declined from above .750 in 1861 to levels in the broad range of .550 to .699. Finally, by 1931, the index of marital fertility has declined below .400 in every county of England and Wales. The same is the case in many of the Scottish counties, particularly those bordering England and those in the Lowlands north of the Central Valley, while higher levels persist in the Highlands and around Glasgow. However, such low levels of

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY marital fertility do not appear in even one of the thirty-two counties of Ireland. Indeed, as late as 1936 one can find a county marital fertility level over .700 in Ireland (in County Galway). Date of the Fall of Ig below 1871 Level by 10 Percent It is of special interest in this analysis of the course of British marital fertility to estimate the approximate date by which the decline in marital fertility in each county may be said to have become substantial and, with the exception of Ireland, irreversible. The two criteria defining such a decline have been discussed earlier in this chapter. Calculations for both the 10 percent criterion and for the .600 criterion are based upon the assumption of a linear decline in fertility within the decades between census years. The census year 1871 has been used as a base. This is appropriate for England and Wales in view of the dubious in­ crease in marital fertility which even the adjusted indices show for the decades from 1851 to 1871 (see discussion in Chapter 3). For purposes of comparability, the same year is used for Scotland and, applying the adjusted county data already discussed, for Ireland. Estimates for the year in which the 10 percent criterion was satisfied are given for each county in the chronological order of occurrence in Table 6.5. As may be seen, six counties in England and Wales experi­ enced a 10 percent decline in Ig before 1890. Together these comprised about 28 percent of the 1891 population. Counties comprising over 60 percent of the 1891 population had experienced 10 percent decline by 1891, and by 1900 counties with over 98 percent of the population had done so. Only two counties—Shropshire and Monmouthshire—with less than 2 percent of the 1891 population, did not experience a 10 percent decline until after the turn of the century. In Scotland, five counties experienced 10 percent declines before 1890, though collectively these comprised less than 6 percent of the 1891 population. It must also be remembered that the absolute level of Ig in all of these cases was higher than in the early-decline counties of England and Wales. Counties comprising about 53 percent of the 1891 population reached the 10 percent criterion in 1891, with the entry of the large population of Lanark into this category, and by the turn of the century counties with fully 87 percent of the 1891 population had seen 10 percent declines in marital fertility. The six counties comprising the remaining 13 percent of the population were Banff (1900), Shetland (1900), Argyll

Table 6.5a Year of 10 percent decline of I g from level of 1871, England and Wales

L i η e 36 04 38 08 35 07 28 41 39 20 31 18 29 01 11 21 42 33 02 06 34 40 03 13 14 12 10 27 23 37 05 30 22 09 44 26 32 45 15 16 19 17 24 25 23

County West Riding Sussex North Riding Hertford Lancashire Middlesex Warwick Cumberland Durham Devon Lincoln Wiltshire Leicester London Northampton Cornwall Westmorland Derby Surrey Berkshire Cheshire Northumberland Kent Bedford Cambridge Huntingdon Oxford Worcester Gloucester East Riding Hampshire Rutland Somerset Buckingham South Wales Stafford Nottingham North Wales Essex Suffolk Dorset Norfolk Hereford Shropshire Monmouth England and Wales

I g level for 10% decline ( x 100)

Year

Cumulative % of 1891 population

2,455 551 358 216 3,960 558 803 267 1,024 636 467 254 379 4,228 308 319 66 435 576 267 704 506 807 165 196 50 190 423 601 400 666 22 456 163 1,050 1,109 505 449 761 354 191 460 114 256 276

615.6 612.9 653.4 675.0 629.1 664.2 617.4 666.0 684.9 597.6 621.9 632.7 639.9 557.1 626.4 621.0 626.4 623.7 601.2 620.1 615.6 656.1 610.2 612.0 606.6 612.9 639.9 628.2 601.2 594.0 571.5 625.5 624.6 629.1 675.0 671.4 610.0 643.5 662.4 612.9 574.2 580.5 605.7 643.5 642.6

1886 1887 1888 1888 1889 1889 1890 1890 1890 1890 1890 1890 1891 1891 1891 1891 1891 1891 1891 1891 1892 1892 1892 1892 1892 1892 1892 1892 1892 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1894 1896 1896 1897 1899 1901 1902

8.5 10.4 11.6 12.3 26.0 27.9 30.7 31.6 35.1 37.3 38.9 39.8 41.1 55.7 56.8 57.9 58.1 59.6 61.6 62.5 64.9 66.7 69.5 70.0 70.7 70.9 71.5 73.0 75.1 76.4 78.7 78.8 80.4 80.9 84.6 88.4 90.1 91.7 94.3 95.5 96.2 97.8 98.2 99.1 100.0

29,003

617.4

1891

Population in thousands (1891)

Table 6.5b Year of 10 percent decline of Ie from level of 1871, Scotland L i η e 30 18 16 07 27 12 20 28 22 14 31 23 17 32 25 33 26 02 29 13 15 06 24 11 08 10 04 09 01 19 21 03 05

County

Population in thousands (1891)

I, level for 10% decline ( x 100)

Year

Cumulative % of 1891 population

Roxburgh Dumbarton Clackmannan Nairn Berwick Forfar Bute Peebles Ayr Fife Dumfries Lanark Stirling Kirkcudbright Edinburgh Wigtown Haddington Orkney Selkirk Perth Kinross Inverness Linlithgow Kinkardine Elgin Aberdeen Sutherland Banff Shetland Argyll Renfrew Caithness Ross & Cromarty

54 98 33 9 32 278 18 15 226 190 74 1,106 118 40 434 36 37 30 28 122 7 90 53 35 43 284 22 62 29 74 231 37 79

720.9 756.0 694.8 692.1 688.5 654.3 622.8 644.4 738.9 690.3 671.4 675.9 730.8 675.0 621.0 696.6 666.0 632.7 591.3 639.0 639.9 692.1 761.4 674.1 678.6 674.1 703.8 679.5 651.6 686.7 677.7 726.7 684.0

1878 1883 1886 1886 1889 1890 1890 1890 1891 1891 1891 1891 1892 1892 1894 1894 1894 1895 1895 1895 1896 1897 1897 1897 1897 1898 1899 1900 1900 1900 1901 1903 1908

1.33 3.76 4.59 4.81 5.62 12.52 12.97 13.34 18.96 23.69 25.54 53.01 55.94 55.93 67.72 68.62 69.54 70.30 70.99 74.02 74.19 76.43 77.74 78.62 79.70 86.76 87.30 88.83 89.55 91.39 97.12 98.04 100.00

Scotland

4,026

676.8

1894

Table 6.5c Year of 10 percent decline of Ig from level of 1871, Ireland L i η e

County

Population in thousands (1891)

L level for 10% decline (x 100)

19 & Antrim & 23 Down 751 653.4 12 Wicklow 639.0 61 20 Armagh 125 635.4 27 Tyrone 150 655.2 14 Cork 405 639.0 11 Wexford 104 663.3 25 Londonderry 144 646.2 07 Louth 66 634.5 17 Tipperary 160 669.6 24 Fermanagh 612.9 65 32 Sligo 84 667.8 31 Roscommon 102 679.5 21 Caven 97 664.2 04 Kilkenny 79 665.1 08 Meath 67 629.1 15 Kerry 165 703.8 29 Leitrim 69 656.1 13 Clare 112 658.8 L 1961 exceeded .9 / 1871 01 Carlow 38 648.9 10 Westmeath 654.3 62 Queens 09 57 632.7 05 Kings 60 630.9 06 Longford 47 645.3 26 Monaghan 75 619.2 L declined after 1936 16 Limerick 146 653.4 18 Waterford 87 633.6 22 Donegal 174 612.9 30 Mayo 203 658.8 No decline in I, (1936 & 1960 exceeded .9 Ig 1871) 02 Dublin 447 537.3 03 Kildare 63 604.8 28 Galway 192 624.6 Ireland

4,457

637.2

Year

Cumulative % of 1891 population

1900 1906 1916 1921 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1925 1926 1928 1928 1928 1929 1931 1931 1933

16.84 18.20 21.01 24.39 33.47 35.80 39.04 40.52 44.10 45.57 47.45 49.73 51.92 53.69 55.20 58.91 60.46 62.98

1921 1923 1928 1929 1931 1933

63.83 65.21 66.49 67.84 68.88 70.56 73.83 75.79 79.68 84.23 94.26 95.69 100.00

1921

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

(1900), Renfrew (1901), Caithness (1903), and Ross and Cromarty (1908). With the exception of Renfrew, all of these late-declining counties are located in the northern extremities of Scotland. Finally, in the case of Ireland both the date and nature of the fertility declines differ sharply from those of England and Wales and Scotland. In the combined counties of Antrim and Down, with a population that is heavily Protestant and the largest in Ireland, Ig had declined by 10 percent by the turn of the century, but that is the only case. Only four other counties, comprising in all (with Antrim and Down) about onethird of the population, showed a 10 percent decline before 1922. More­ over, the nature as well as the timing of the Irish trends differ from those of Scotland or England and Wales. In the case of six counties, mainly in central Ireland with over 7 percent of the population, Ig de­ clined by 10 percent before 1936, but by 1961 (for which the values shown in the Appendix were found by Pantelides and Coale) it had risen again above .9 of Ig for 1871. Apparently fertility is not "irrever­ sible" in Ireland. Elsewhere in Europe and the USSR the 10 percent decline had indeed proved to be irreversible. Moreover there were four counties containing about 14 percent of the population in which the 10 pecent decline came after 1936, and three more with some 16 percent of the total population in which there was no substantial decline in the sense that both the values for 1936 and 1961 exceeded .9 of the Ig for 1871. If we consider all the counties of the British Isles together, it is notable that by the criterion of a 10 percent drop from 1871 before 1890, five counties of Scotland containing about 6 percent of the population were "early decliners." Six counties of England fell into that group including the North and West Ridings and Lancashire to the north; Hertford and Middlesex, near London; and Sussex in the south. Moreover, all of the counties in the British Isles that did not experience the 10 percent decline in Ig until after 1910 are in Ireland. Date of the Fall of I6 below .600 According to the .600 criterion, marital fertility sustained a substantial and irreversible decline a few years later in England and Wales than was indicated by the 10 percent criterion, but considerably later in the counties of Scotland and Ireland. The dates of decline to .600 for each county are given in Table 6.6. The first county to register an Ig level of

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

.600 was London in 1883. In England it was followed five years later by Sussex, Hampshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Together these four counties comprised over 27 percent of the population.7 By 1893 counties with about 60 percent of the population had reached an Ig of .600 or less, and only eight counties with 16 percent of the population failed to reach a .600 level before the turn of the century. The tight clustering of fertility decline in England and Wales is further illustrated by the fact that almost three-quarters of the counties passed the .600 level in the decade 1888-1897 (Table 6.6a). In the case of Scotland, no counties reached an Ig of .600 by 1890, and only eight of the thirty-three counties comprising less than 22 percent of the 1891 population did so before the turn of the century. The first counties to reach this level of marital fertility were concentrated in the region between England and Edinburgh. Most of the remaining Scottish counties reached the .600 level during the first decade of the twentieth century, with over 50 percent of the population included in this category by 1908. The marital fertility of four Scottish counties (Sutherland, Linlithgow, Caithness, and Ross and Cromarty) did not decline to .600 until after 1912, but these comprised only about 4 percent of the 1891 population. Three of these four, it may be noted, constitute the north­ ernmost counties of the Scottish mainland. The greater overall diversity in Scotland than in England and Wales is shown by the fact that less than 60 percent of the Scottish counties reached the .600 level in the decade 1900-1909 (Table 6.5b). However, it should be reiterated that the level of heterogeneity of fertility decline even in Scotland was gen­ erally lower than in Continental countries. Finally, in the distinctive case of Ireland, where there seems to be no such thing as an irreversible decline of marital fertility, no county showed a level of marital fertility of .600 until 1911, when the combined northern Irish counties of Antrim and Down experienced such a level. Indeed, the pace of the decline in Irish marital fertility was such that only three further counties (Wicklow, Armagh, and Fermanagh) achieved such a 7The appearance in Table 6.6 of London as the harbinger of decline in marital fertility illustrates the importance of the criterion chosen to define "substantial and irreversible decline." London was characterized by a relatively low level of Ig from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and hence was the first country to reach the .600 level, but far from the first to show a 10 percent decline. When it did achieve a 10 percent decline from its 1871 level, of course it was an absolute level very substantially lower than those of the many counties which preceded it in showing a 10 percent decline (see Table 6.5).

Table 6.6a Year in which Ig first declined to .600, England and Wales L i η e 01 36 04 05 20 02 37 23 03 19 14 17 28 13 21 35 11 31 34 06 42 38 18 29 33 27 32 12 07 09 08 10 22 30 16 45 15 24 41 40 26 25 44 39 43

County London West Riding Sussex Hampshire Devon Surrey East Riding Gloucester Kent Dorset Cambridge Norfolk Warwick Bedford Cornwall Lancashire Northampton Lincoln Cheshire Berkshire Westmorland North Riding Wiltshire Leicester Derby Worcester Nottingham Huntingdon Middlesex Buckingham Hertford Oxford Somerset Rutland Suffolk North Wales Essex Hereford Cumberland Northumbria Stafford Shropshire South Wales Durham Monmouth England & Wales

Year

Cumulative % of 1891 population

4,228 2,455 551 666 636 576 400 601 807 191 196 460 803 165 319 3,960 308 467 704 267 66 358 254 379 435 423 505 50 558 163 216 190 456 22 354 449 761 114 267 506 1,109 256 1,050 1,024 276

1883 1888 1888 1888 1890 1891 1892 1892 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1893 1894 1894 1894 1894 1894 1894 1895 1895 1895 1895 1895 1896 1897 1897 1897 1897 1897 1898 1899 1899 1900 1901 1901 1902 1904 1904 1906 1906

14.58 23.04 24.94 27.24 29.43 31.42 32.80 34.87 37.65 38.31 38.99 40.57 43.34 43.91 45.01 58.66 59.73 61.34 63.77 64.69 64.92 66.15 67.03 68.33 69.83 71.29 73.03 73.20 75.13 75.69 76.44 77.09 78.66 78.74 79.96 81.51 84.13 84.53 85.45 87.19 91.02 91.90 95.52 99.05 100.00

29,003

1894

Population in thousands (1891)

Table 6.6b Year in which Ig first declined to .600, Scotland L i η e

County

Year

Cumulative % of 1891 population

30 29 20 28 25 27 15 12 13 02 32 07 31 16 14 26 11 10 01 08 33 19 21 17 22 18 09 23 06 04 24 03 05

Roxburgh Selkirk Bute Peebles Edinburgh Berwick Kinross Forfar Perth Orkney Kirkcudbright Nairn Dumfries Clackmannan Fife Haddington Kincardine Aberdeen Shetland Elgin Wigtown Argyll Renfrew Stirling Ayr Dumbarton Banff Lanark Inverness Sutherland Linlithgow Caithness Ross & Cromarty

54 28 18 15 434 32 7 278 122 30 40 9 74 33 190 37 35 284 29 43 36 74 231 118 226 98 62 1,106 90 22 53 37 79

1892 1893 1893 1895 1896 1897 1899 1899 1900 1900 1900 1900 1901 1901 1902 1903 1905 1906 1906 1906 1906 1908 1908 1909 1909 1909 1909 1910 1911 1913 1915 1917 1918

1.33 2.02 2.47 2.84 13.63 14.43 14.60 21.50 24.53 25.29 26.28 26.51 28.35 29.18 33.90 34.83 35.71 42.77 43.48 44.56 45.46 47.30 53.03 55.96 61.59 64.02 65.56 93.03 95.27 95.81 97.12 98.04 100.00

Scotland

4,026

1905

Population in thousands (1891)

Table 6.6c Year in which I g first declined to .600, Ireland

i η e

County

Population in thousands (1891)

Year

Cumulative of 1891 populatior

19

& 23 Antrim & Down 1911 751 12 Wicklow 1925 61 20 1924 Armagh 125 24 Fermanagh 1929 65 02 Dublin 1930 447 14 Cork 1930 405 01 Carlow 1932 38 (1936 I. less, but 1961 more than .600) 27 Tyrone 1935 150 (1936 L exceeds, but 1961 / less than .600) 22 Donegal after 1936 174 31 Roscommon after 1936 102 (No decline: L 1936 & 1961 over .600, counties in order of I e 1936) 25 Londonderry 144 32 Sligo 84 Monaghan 26 75 08 Meath 67 07 Louth 66 11 Wexford 104 09 Queens 57 Kings 05 60 06 Longford 47 10 Westmeath 62 04 Kilkenny 79 29 Leithrim 69 17 Tipperary 160 03 Kildare 63 18 Waterford 87 21 Cavan 97 13 Clare 112 15 Kerry 165 16 Limerick 146 30 Mayo 203 Galway 28 192 Ireland

4,457

1928

16.84 18.20 21.01 22.48 32.51 41.60 42.44 45.82 49.72 52.00 55.24 57.12 58.79 60.31 61.78 64.11 65.40 66.75 67.79 69.17 70.94 72.50 76.08 77.50 79.46 81.64 84.16 87.87 91.14 95.69 100.00

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

level before the 1930s. Together with Antrim and Down, these counties comprised about 22 percent of the 1901 Irish population. Interestingly, four of these five (all but Wicklow) are now part of Northern Ireland, formed from those areas that had long experienced the greatest British influence in Ireland. Twenty-three of Ireland's thirty-two counties con­ taining 50 percent of the population had not reached the .600 level by 1936, and the Appendix shows that twenty-one of them had Igs above .600 in 1961. Moreover, one county, Tyrone, that had dropped below .600 by 1935, had an index of more than .600 in 1961. When all the counties of the British Isles are considered together, the counties of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland can be seen to be clearly differentiated from one another by the .600 criterion. Virtually all of the counties achieving this criterion in the 1880s and early 1890s are in England. The remaining English counties, along with many Scot­ tish counties and the two divisions of Wales reach the .600 level in the late 1890s and during the first decade of the 1900s. Finally, the counties reaching the .600 level after 1910 are mainly Irish, along with a few of the Scottish counties of the northern Highlands. EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY IN THE BRITISH ISLES

Levels and Trends in Index of Extramarital Fertility (Ih), 18511931(36) All discussions of extramarital fertility in the British Isles must be preceded by the caveat that the deficiencies of registration for fertility outside of marriage are likely to be considerably greater than for marital fertility. There is unfortunately no technique by which the degree of these data deficiencies can be estimated. The discussion that follows refers to registered extramarital fertility, adjusted for under-registration only to the degree that overall registration was shown to be deficient in Chapter 3. Extramarital fertility in the British Isles was moderate in the nine­ teenth century as compared to other European countries, and the rates of such fertility registered in Ireland were exceptionally low by any standard. Aggregated indices are given in Table 6.7. The Ih levels for England and Wales during the first part of the study period are in the range of .041 to .046. That this is relatively low by European standards

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY Table 6.7 Index of extramarital fertility (Ih) for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, 1851-1931(36) 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921(26) 1931(36) England and Wales Scotland Ireland

.045 —

.046 .056

.011

.026 .042 .010

.021 .033 .009

.019 .031 .010

.018 .028 .012

.014 .024 .013

—

—

83 87 78

63 70 71

51 55 64

46 52 71

44 47 86

34 40 93

Index scores (England and Wales = 100) — Scotland 124 146 153 Ireland 34 32 — —

162 38

157 43

163 53

156 67

171 93

Index scores (1871 = 100) England and Wales 105 — Scotland Ireland —

110 93 —

.041 .060 .014 100 100 100

.034 .052

may be seen in Table 6.8. The levels of Ih for Scotland are considerably higher than in England and Wales for all time periods, but by no means high by Continental standards. Ih in England and Wales and in Scotland declines continuously and substantially from the earlier to the later decades of the study period, reaching levels in 1931 that are respectively 34 percent and 40 percent of the 1871 levels. The level and trend of extramarital fertility in Ireland are again quite different from those of England and Wales and of Scotland. The earliest estimate of Ih for Ireland, that for 1871, is only .014—only 34 percent of the comparable index for England and Wales, and by far the lowest in available European data for that time period (Table 6.8). As in both England and Wales and Scotland, the index of extramarital fertility in Ireland shows a substantial decline from 1871, but the Irish index appears to increase substantially (in percentage terms) from 1911 to 1936, while the others continue their declines. This means that the 1936 index for Ireland is fully 93 percent of that for England and Wales in 1931. The likelihood of substantial but unknown degrees of under-registration of extramarital fertility means that variations and changes in the Ih indices cannot be taken wholly at face value. Nonetheless, the data in Table 6.9 suggest an important decline in the levels of variability in extramarital fertility in both England and Wales and Scotland, and a similar reduction in the mean level. Variability tends to be considerably higher in Scotland than in England and Wales. In Ireland, there are no notable trends in the variability of extramarital

Table 6.8 Index of Extramarital Fertility (Ih) in European countries, 1831-1970

Country

Year

Ih

Country

Year

Ih

England and Wales

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.045 0.046 0.041 0.034 0.026 0.021 0.019

Denmark

1852 1860 1870

0.066 0.068 0.067 0.064 0.061 0.059 0.062 0.051 0.039 0.045

1861 1871 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.056 0.060 0.052 0.042 0.033 0.031 0.028 0.024 0.031

1871

0.014

1881

0.011

1891 1901 1911 1926 1936 1961

0.010

^1880

0.118

1890 1900 J910 1960

0.113

1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1947 1961 1970

0.048 0.050 0.033 0.032 0.026

Scotland

1881

Ireland

Austria [within AustroHungarian Empire] [current borders]

Belgium

1880

1890 1901 1911 1921 1930 1960

0.018

0.014 0.041

0.009 0.010 0.012

0.013 0.011

0.106

0.085 0.060

0.018

0.016 0.015 0.017

Finland

France

1865 1875 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1831 1836 1841

1846 1851 1856 1861 1866

1871 1876 1881

1886 1891 1896 1901 1911 1921 1931 1961

0.054 0.048 0.044 0.043 0.034 0.027 0.025 0.031

0.022 0.044 0.044 0.043 0.041 0.041 0.043 0.045 0.045 0.044 0.041 0.043 0.046 0.045 0.045 0.044 0.043 0.039 0.037 0.037

Table 6.8 (continued) Country

I*

Country

Year

I„

*1867 1871 1875 1880 1885 1890 1900 „1910 1939 1962

0.079 0.071 0.073 0.072 0.073 0.070 0.066 0.059 0.033 0.039

Portugal

1864 1878 1890 1900 1911 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

0.079 0.079 0.075 0.073 0.083 0.075

Greece

1900 1928 1951 1961

0.015 0.009 0.005 0.006

Spain

Italy

1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1936 1951 1961

0.044 0.050 0.063 0.055 0.048 0.037 0.029 0.027 0.022 0.014 0.011

1887 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

0.041 0.041 0.036 0.038 0.038 0.021

1880

0.054 0.058 0.043 0.048 0.052

1900 1930 1960

0.023 0.019 0.017

1859 1869 1879 1889 1899 1909 1920 1930 1960

0.023 0.024 0.023 0.022 0.016 0.012 0.011 0.008 0.009

1875 1890 1900 1920 1930 1960

0.049 0.042 0.040 0.029 0.020 0.024

Germany

[Contemporary boundanes]

[1939 boundaries] [East & West combined]

Luxemburg

Netherlands

Norway

Year

Sweden

1900 1930 1950 1960

1860

0.088 0.076 0.059 0.057

0.012

1900 1910 1920 1930 1941 1950 1960

0.032 0.028 0.027 0.024 0.023 0.021 0.013 0.012 0.012 0.015 0.019

Albania

1955

0.010

Bulgaria

1905 1934 1956

0.009 0.030 0.057

Czechoslovakia

1930 1961

0.050 0.032

Switzerland

1870

1880 1888

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY Table 6.8 (continued) Country Hungary

Year

I»

("1880

0.111

] 1900 \1910 1930 1960

0.137 0.118 0.107 0.053 0.032

Poland

1960

0.035

Rumania

1899 1930 1956

0.216

[within AustroHungarian Empire]

[current boundaries]

I 1890

0.111

Country

Year

Ii

1870 1897 1926 1940 1959 1970

0.048 0.078 0.028 0.034 0.004

1900 1931 1960

0.031 0.061 0.066

European Russia [estimate only]

Yugoslavia [Serbia only]

—

SOURCE: See Table 4.3

fertility—the "high" counties are very low by the standards of Great Britain, and the "low" counties approach zero I h . The German data presented for comparative purposes show a sub­ stantial decline in the standard deviation of German Ih, as there is in England and Wales and in Scotland with means that are a bit lower than those of Gemany. In Portugal, however, variability in Ih as measured by the standard deviation appears to increase substantially until at least the 1930s. In contrast, the levels of the means of I h for Belgium are generally moderate and comparable to those for England and Wales. However, the level of variability as measured by the standard deviation is higher than that of England and Wales, and comparable in magnitude to that of Scotland. Meanwhile the mean levels for Italy are comparable to those experienced later in Portugal, with a similar pattern of increase followed by decrease in standard deviation. Regional Variation in Extramarital Fertility County-level indices of illegitimate fertility are presented in Table 6.10. In all of these cases the real situation may be heavily distorted by differences and changes in completeness of registration. The Ih estimates have been adjusted according to the adjustment factors calculated in Chapter 3, i.e., for the estimated overall level of under-registration of all births. But illegitimate births are likely to have been under-registered by considerably greater yet variable margins than were all births, and there is no apparent method by which such under-registration may be estimated.

Table 6.9 Variability in extramarital fertility (I h ), British Isles and selected other countries

Country & Date N England and Wales 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 Scotland 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 Irelandb 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1926 1936 1961 Germany 1871 1880 1890 1900 1910 1925 1935

45

Central tendency X s.d.

Indexa 1871 = 100 s.d. X

.049 .051 .046 .038 .029 .023 .021 .020 .014

.010 .012 .012 .009 .007 .006 .005 .005 .004

107 111 100 83 63 50 46 43 30

83 100 100 75 58 50 42 42 33

33 .054 It .057 tl .051 It .042 tl .033 It .032 Il .029 ff .028

.022 .022 .021 .018 .014 .013 .012 .013

95 100 89 74 58 56 51 49

100 100 95 82 64 59 55 59

it tt tt n it tl It tt

31 .012 Il .009 Il .009 It .008 Il .009 It .012 tt .014 It .012

.006 .005 .004 .004 .004 .005 .005 .004

100 75 75 67 75 100 117 100

100 83 67 67 67 83 83 67

71 .067 " .066 " .064 " .062 " .056 66 .040 " .033

.028 .030 .029 .026 .023 .018 .016

100 99 96 93 84 60 49

100 107 104 93 82 64 57

Country & Date Portugal (1871) 1890 1900 1911 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 Belgium 1846 1856 1866 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1947 1961 Italy 1862-66 1870-72 1880-82 1890-92 1900-02 1910-12 1921-26 1930-32 1935-37 1950-52 1960-62

N

21 " " "

22 It H "

9 tt It tt t tl tt tl It tt tl

14 16 " " " "

18 " " " W

Central tendency s.d. X

Index" 1871 = 100 X s.d.

(.062) .068 .064 .066 .063 .075 .069 .057 .052

(.021) .030 .032 .039 .036 .049 .044 .036 .034

110 103 106 102 121 111 92 84

143 152 186 171 233 210 171 162

.033 .035 .037 .042 .043 .037 .027 .024 .016 .015 .015

.016 .016 .016 .021 .019 .015 .010 .007 .006 .007 .008

85 90 95 108 110 95 69 62 41 38 38

89 89 89 117 106 83 56 39 33 39 44

.044 .056 .074 .064 .054 .039 .029 .028 .023 .014

.013 .024 .039 .034 .031 .023 .015 .010 .008 .005 .004

79 100 132 114 96 70 52 50 41 25 20

54 100 163 142 129 96 63 42 33 21 17

.011

SOURCES: (Germany) Knodel, 1974, Table 2.19; (Portugal) Livi Bacci, 1971, calculated from Table 22; (Belgium) Lesthaeghe, 1977, calculated from Table 4.6; (Italy) Livi Bacci, 1977, calculated from Table 2.10 aThe 1871 base is interpolated when necessary and in the case of Portugal extrapolated from a straight line fitted to 1890-1930. bValues for 1871 and 1881 adjusted for mismatching of registration and census "counties" with Antrim and Down (including Belfast) combined. For the years 1926 and 1936 a threeyear average of births centered on the census year was used.

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

There is a marked pattern of persistence over time in the county levels of extramarital fertility. The recorded levels of Ih are typically highest in the English north and Midlands and in the southwestern and eastern peninsular regions of Scotland, and lowest in most of Ireland. Relatively low levels of Ih are calculated for London, which is worth noting in view of the metropolis's reputation as a haven of "immorality" and for preg­ nant unmarried women from elsewhere (see Chapter 3). Over time there is a widespread decline in Ih throughout the British Isles. This decline, like that in Ig, is uniform as to timing across virtually the entirety of Great Britain. By 1901 the few remaining pockets of relatively high Ih persist in the south and east of Scotland, especially the counties of Wigtown, Elgin, Banff, and Aberdeen. From 1901 to 1931(36) the decline in Ih continues in England and Scotland, but there are ap­ parent increases in parts of Ireland, possibly due to improving com­ pleteness of registration. SUMMARY

The patterns of decline in county-level Ig may be summarized as fol­ lows: In England and Wales: generally concurrent declines from relatively uniform starting levels, with low marital fertility essentially universal by 1931. In Scotland: relatively concurrent declines, but from very diverse start­ ing levels generally higher than those in England and Wales, and with lagging high fertility levels persisting into the 1930s in some outlying counties, particularly in the Highlands. In Ireland: no real sign of marital fertility decline until 1911, a rela­ tively diverse experience of decline across counties, apparent reversi­ bility of some declines, and a number of counties as late as 1936 still experiencing marital fertility levels comparable to those of England and Wales and Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century. It may be surprising to some that the earliest available levels of marital fertility in Ireland were not substantially greater than those for England and Wales, and that the highest levels of Ig were those of Scotland. By European standards, Ig levels in mid-nineteenth-century England and Wales and Ireland were moderate, and the comparable figures for Scot­ land were relatively high. By the 1930s, Ig levels were relatively low in

MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL FERTILITY

England and Wales, persistently rather high in Scotland, and very high in relative terms in Ireland, due to her tardy decline in marital fertility. Determination of the date of a substantial and irreversible decline in Ig depends upon the criterion chosen. By the 10 percent criterion, such a decline was experienced in England and Wales by 1891, in Scotland by 1894. There is no comparable story for Ireland. In some counties Ig declined after 1936, and in others the Igs were higher than 90 percent of the 1871 level in both 1936 and 1961. In still other counties for which it went below the .9 level, it rose above that level again. By the .600 criterion, the comparable date estimates are later—1894 for England and Wales, 1905 for Scotland, and again a mixed picture for Ireland. During the decline in Ig, the levels of between-county heterogeneity showed a general pattern of increase, followed by declines by 1931(36) in Scotland and Ireland but not in England and Wales. The estimation of extramarital fertility is subject to the vagaries of possibly severe under-registration for which retrospective adjustment is not possible. As estimated here, extramarital fertility levels in England and Wales and in Scotland were moderate by European standards, and in Ireland were exceptionally low (under-registration may be an espe­ cially severe problem in Ireland, however). In England and Wales and in Scotland, extramarital fertility shows a continuous and substantial decline over the study period, a fact of some importance in interpreting the factors contributing to the decline in marital fertility (see Chapters 7 and 8 below). The Irish data show an apparent increase from previous very low levels of extramarital fertility between 1911 and 1936. There are important declines in the levels of heterogeneity of Ih in England and Wales and in Scotland over the study period. Typically the highest recorded county levels are in the English north and Midlands, and the lowest are in Ireland.

1 London 2 Surrey 3 Kent 4 Sussex 5 Hampshire 6 Berkshire 7 Middlesex 8 Hertfordshire 9 Buckinghamshire 10 Oxfordshire 11 Northamptonshire 12 Huntingdonshire 13 Bedfordshire 14 Cambridgeshire 15 Essex 16 Suffolk 17 Norfolk 18 Wiltshire 19 Dorset 20 Devonshire 21 Cornwall 22 Somersetshire 23 Gloucestershire 24 Herefordshire 25 Shropshire 26 Staffordshire 27 Worcestershire 28 Warwickshire 29 Leicestershire 30 Rutlandshire 31 Lincolnshire 32 Nottinghamshire 33 Derbyshire 34 Cheshire 35 Lancashire 36 West Riding 37 East Riding 38 North Riding 39 Durham 40 Northumberland 41 Cumberland 42 Westmoreland 43 Monmouthshire 44 South Wales 45 North Wales England and Wales

County

Table 6.IOa

.022 .037 .041 .043 .040 .051 .030 .052 .052 .052 .049 .042 .053 .052 .051 .059 .068 .047 .041 .031 .034 .037 .033 .061 .060 .063 .049 .043 .057 .037 .053 .063 .056 .055 .050 .054 .046 .056 .057 .050 .065 .051 .043 .048 .050 .045

1851

.025 .028 .041 .039 .039 .048 .027 .049 .053 .053 .053 .049 .052 .056 .052 .062 .074 .051 .042 .034 .042 .036 .032 .063 .067 .065 .047 .045 .061 .051 .063 .070 .060 .052 .048 .056 .055 .067 .062 .058 .076 .061 .048 .048 .053 .046

1861 .025 .023 .036 .032 .034 .042 .025 .045 .044 .047 .048 .046 .050 .050 .042 .053 .067 .042 .036 .034 .039 .032 .031 .052 .068 .061 .041 .038 .051 .042 .056 .060 .055 .043 .041 .050 .055 .065 .061 .054 .072 .055 .043 .045 .053 .041

1871 1891 .018 .017 .022 .021 .021 .026 .017 .029 .030 .027 .028 .033 .030 .031 .025 .037 .043 .027 .024 .020 .027 .019 .020 .038 .042 .037 .023 .024 .029 .024 .036 .039 .033 .025 .025 .028 .036 .038 .035 .031 .045 .031 .029 .027 .035 .026

1881 .016 .015 .019 .018 .018 .021 .015 .019 .023 .024 .023 .027 .022 .026 .019 .031 .035 .022 .018 .016 .021 .016 .015 .031 .034 .028 .017 .019 .021 .020 .031 .032 .026 .019 .019 .025 .025 .025 .028 .025 .032 .022 .025 .022 .029 .021

1901 .016 .013 .018 .016 .017 .019 .013 .015 .019 .021 .019 .029 .020 .022 .015 .028 .030 .020 .017 .016 .018 .012 .015 .026 .027 .024 .014 .018 .017 .021 .032 .026 .025 .016 .017 .021 .028 .027 .027 .024 .027 .019 .021 .021 .027 .019

1911

England and Wales, 1851 to 1931.

.022 .021 .030 .028 .028 .035 .023 .038 .041 .038 .039 .037 .043 .041 .034 .045 .056 .037 .031 .026 .034 .027 .027 .045 .055 .048 .032 .031 .040 .033 .045 .051 .043 .034 .033 .039 .045 .049 .046 .043 .057 .041 .041 .035 .045 .034

Adjusted extra-marital fertility (Ij1)j by county: 1921 .015 .015 .019 .018 .021 .020 .013 .015 .017 .020 .017 .029 .020 .023 .014 .026 .027 .022 .020 .016 .017 .014 .015 .028 .027 .020 .016 .015 .016 .024 .030 .025 .021 .015 .016 .020 .025 .025 .026 .022 .025 .016 .021 .018 .024 .018

1931 .012 .010 .014 .008 .008 .016 .010 .010 .012 .014 .010 .020 .013 .017 .010 .014 .019 .015 .015 .014 .015 .011 .011 .022 .022 .012 .013 .011 .013 .016 .018 .017 .014 .011 .013 .013 .020 .021 .019 .014 .023 .016 .016 .011 .019 .014

Table 6.10b Adjusted extra-marital fertility (Ij1), by county: County

Scotland, 1861 to 1931.

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1921

1931

1 Shetland .014 2 Orkney .019 3 Caithness .036 4 Sutherland .015 5 Ross & Cromarty .018 6 Inverness .031 7 Nairn .040 8 Moray/Elgin .071 9 Banff .098 10 Aberdeen .089 11 Kincardine .083 12 Angus-Forfar .062 13 Perth .050 14 Fife .047 15 Kinross .058 16 Clackmannan .067 17 Stirling .067 18 Dunbarton .047 19 Argyll .033 20 Bute .024 21 Renfrew .047 22 Ayr .069 23 Lanark .057 24 Linlithgow/W.Loth .084 25 Edinburgh/Midloth .043 26 Haddington/E. Loth .052 27 Berwick .051 28 Peebles .056 29 Selkirk .064 30 Roxburgh .065 31 Dumfries .080 32 Kirkcudbright .072 33 Wigtown .074 Scotland .056

.015 .025 .050 .022 .020 .035 .042 .079 .099 .091 .091 .061 .050 .048 .053 .059 .069 .045 .037 .030 .047 .073 .067 .099 .047 .053 .056 .052 .048 .066 .080 .083 .083 .060

.016 .028 .053 .027 .020 .034 .047 .082 .102 .085 .080 .052 .042 .040 .045 .046 .056 .033 .035 .026 .038 .059 .054 .085 .041 .044 .048 .038 .043 .054 .073 .074 .084 .052

.014 .025 .055 .024 .020 .030 .038 .073 .084 .069 .073 .042 .036 .031 .035 .024 .044 .027 .033 .020 .030 .047 .043 .072 .034 .036 .042 .029 .029 .038 .057 .062 .076 .042

.013 .020 .051 .020 .018 .026 .033 .056 .070 .057 .054 .033 .026 .024 .028 .019 .032 .019 .027 .016 .022 .034 .034 .050 .026 .029 .032 .024 .020 .025 .044 .042 .057 .033

.015 .020 .048 .020 .019 .026 .034 .056 .066 .056 .050 .030 .025 .026 .034 .022 .031 .022 .028 .016 .020 .032 .033 .041 .024 .030 .028 .019 .018 .024 .041 .037 .057 .031

.014 .025 .042 .022 .019 .025 .035 .053 .058 .047 .040 .028 .024 .026 .029 .022 .029 .020 .021 .008 .020 .026 .029 .034 .023 .025 .028 .019 .017 .023 .041 .038 .054 .028

.017 .020 .047 .027 .021 .027 .035 .048 .059 .041 .037 .024 .023 .023 .027 .018 .024 .017 .027 .015 .017 .023 .024 .025 .017 .023 .023 .015 .014 .019 .037 .046 .064 .024

Table 6.10c extra-marital fertility (Ij1). by county:

Ireland, 1871 to 1936.

County

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1926

1936

1 Carlow 2 Dublin 3 Kildare 4 Kilkenny 5 Offaly/Kings 6 Longford 7 Louth 8 Heath 9 Laoighis/Queens 10 Westmeath 11 Wexford 12 Wicklow 13 Clare 14 Cork 15 Kerry 16 Limerick 17 Tipperary 18 Waterford 19+23 Antrim + Dowr 20 Armagh 21 Cavan 22 Donegal 24 Fermanagh 25 Londonderry 25 Monaghan 27 Tyrone 27 Galway 29 Leitrim 30 Mayo 31 Roscommon 32 Sligo Ireland

.018 .008 .013 .014 .009 .006 .009 .009 .010 .010 .015 .014 .012 .011 .011 .014 .012 .020 .027 .023 .008 .006 .019 .018 .012 .017 .008 .004 .005 .005 .005 .014

.013 .008 .010 .011 .007 .006 .007 .007 .008 .008 .012 .010 .007 .006 .007 .011 .009 .017 .022 .017 .006 .005 .015 .016 .008 .013 .005 .003 .003 .003 .004 .011

.013 .009 .011 .010 .006 .005 .007 .008 .007 .006 .011 .009 .006 .006 .007 .011 .010 .013 .021 .016 .006 .005 .015 .015 .008 .012 .004 .003 .002 .003 .002 .010

.011 .010 .010 .009 .005 .005 .007 .007 .006 .005 .011 .008 .006 .006 .006 .010 .009 .014 .015 .014 .005 .005 .012 .013 .006 .011 .003 .002 .002 .002 .002 .009

.011 .012 .013 .010 .008 .006 .008 .006 .006 .006 .014 .009 .006 .007 .006 .012 .010 .014 .017 .014 .006 .006 .011 .017 .006 .013 .004 .002 .002 .002 .003 .010

.018 .011 .020 .016 .010 .007 .011 .012 .013 .010 .018 .016 .010 .008 .008 .011 .013 .012 .016 .016 .010 .014 .016 .017 .008 .016 .006 .004 .003 .006 .005 .012

.019 .009 .021 .020 .013 .013 .012 .018 .018 .016 .018 .018 .011 .009 .009 .014 .015 .013 .015 .017 .017 .013 .017 .019 .013 .018 .008 .006 .005 .006 .008 .013

CHAPTER 7: Alternative "Explanatory" Models of

Marital Fertility Decline Data as such do not explain. The extensive empirical data collected, calculated, and presented in the preceding chapters provide documen­ tation of the phenomena that are to be explained by reference to ad­ ditional evidence in the context of theory. And yet it must be recognized that it is a brave (or foolish) social scientist who seeks to provide com­ prehensive explanation of a complex social, economic, cultural, and possibly biological phenomenon such as the decline in marital fertility in the British Isles. In the first place, we do not have a very clear idea of the nature of the factors that might be expected to influence fertility in the period under study. Nor do we have any real understanding of the relationships among these factors. This lack of "theoretical" un­ derstanding of the nature of the process under study makes it difficult to construct plausible models to help account for the phenomenon. Second, the available data are notably deficient for explaining such a complex social transformation. The variables themselves are limited to quite crude measures of the types of information that we would want to explore, and as there can of course be no retrospective data collection, we are forced to rely upon these available, though inadequate, data resources. Third, we may have little confidence that the impact of all "explan­ atory" variables is constant throughout the period under study. This may lead to differing interpretations of the importance of variables based upon time-series analysis on the one hand, and cross-sectional analysis on the other. Finally, the data are often presented only at a highly aggregated level of analysis, specifically the level of geographical and administrative unit called the county. This means that the findings here may not be employed to characterize the behavior of individual actors, but rather only that of social aggregates (see discussion of the limitations of ecological-level data in Chapter 1). EXCLUSION OF IRELAND AND SEPARATE ANALYSES OF ENGLAND AND WALES AND SCOTLAND

The present analyses will be limited to England and Wales and Scot­ land, excluding Ireland. The reasons for the exclusion of Ireland are

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

several. First, the data available for Ireland are quite different from those available for England and Wales, and of more dubious quality. Secondly, during the study period of 1851 to 1931(36), Irish marital fertility was remarkably constant until after 1911, and available data for the period 1911 to 1936 are limited and subject to distortion due to the impacts of World War I and the political turmoil within Ireland. Finally, the partition of Ireland into the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland makes a uniform analysis of the phenomena in all counties of Ireland especially difficult. Data on both fertility and socioeconomic variables from 1920 on are collected by separate Registrars General, according to different criteria and procedures, and presented in differing formats. This makes the analysis of these data a major undertaking in itself, which will have to be left for subsequent research efforts. In addition to the exclusion of Ireland from the analyses to be pre­ sented here, it has also proved advisable to deal separately with England and Wales on the one hand,1 and Scotland on the other. I believe this is necessary on the basis of both theoretical and empirical evidence. On the theoretical side, it is clear that Scotland, and especially Highland Scotland, was culturally distinct from most of England. Scotland before the Act of Union in 1707 was a fully developed European state, with king, parliament, and established church. The Lowland Scots were Prot­ estant and spoke English, yet their church was not the Church of Eng­ land, but a quite different Presbyterian structure. They were highly literate (more so than the English), and placed a high value upon ed­ ucation. The Highland Scots were even more distinct from the English than were the Lowlanders—many were Gaelic speakers and some Roman Catholics, and their social organization was Celtic in form, with vestiges of partible inheritance similar to that in Celtic Ireland. Substantial cul­ tural differences between England and Scotland were present in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and indeed continue to this day, with the recent appearance of Scottish nationalism but one sign of the perceived cultural distinctiveness of the Scots. There are, in addition, strictly empirical grounds for separate analyses of Scotland and England and Wales. First, as in Ireland, census and 1Ideally, it would be possible to separate Wales from England for the same reasons. Unfortunately, the available fertility and socioeconomic data for Wales are often not presented at the county level, but instead at the level of "North Wales" and "South Wales." Data on two geopolitical units are hardly sufficient for serious analysis.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

vital statistics data on Scotland were (and are) collected separately from those of England and Wales, with similar problems of comparability therefore arising. Second, the markedly different patterns of regional variation in the indices of overall fertility, marital fertility, and nuptiality in England and Wales as compared with Scotland should give us pause in combining the two in a single analysis. As shown in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, the typical pattern was that of a high degree of regional homo­ geneity in England and Wales, but great heterogeneity in Scotland. The potential confounding effects of such phenomena may be illustrated by calculation of simple correlations between the various fertility indices for England and Wales and Scotland together as compared to the two geopolitical units separately. These correlation coefficients are given in Table 7.1. The pattern of three of these relationships between 1851 and 1931 may be summarized as follows:

Relation­ ship I1 x Im

Ig χ Ik

Ih x Im

Great Britain

England/Wales alone

Negative r (significant) declining to negative r (nonsignificant) and then rising to negative r (significant) Positive r (nonsignifi­ cant) increasing to pos­ itive r (significant)

Negative r (nonsignifi­ cant) increasing to pos­ itive r (significant)

Generally positive r (nonsignificant), fluc­ tuating

Positive r (nonsignifi­ cant) increasing to pos­ itive r (significant)

Positive r (significant) declining to negative r (significant)

Positive r (nonsignifi­ cant) increasing to pos­ itive τ (significant) then declining but still positive

Positive r (nonsignifi­ cant) increasing errati­ cally to positive r (significant) Positive r (significant) declining to positive r (nonsignificant)

Scotland alone

The relationships between Ig and Ih are similar for England/Wales and Scotland taken together or separately. But those for Ig and Im and for Ih and Im show divergent patterns for England/Wales and Scotland taken together and then separately, in some cases generating highly significant correlations with different signs. The fact that such substantial transformations of the pattern of simple zero-order correlations can occur by the aggregation of England and

ALTERNATIVE MODELS Table 7.1 Simple correlations between I g , I h , I m for Great Britain, England and Wales, and Scotland: 1851-1931 Great Britain Im

Year

h

h 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931

—

4

.117 .418*** .326** .534*** .520*** .551*** .606*** .699***

—

-.549*** -.316** - .322** - .279* -.161 -.159 - .240* -.601***

England and Wales Im h .070 .202 .365* .215 .389** .538*** .546*** .514*** .708***

-.133 -.002 .282 .265 .374* .408** .558*** .542*** .054

Scotland h

L

—

—

.010 .297 .115 .365* .319 .292 .455** .433*

.097 .341 .050 .227 .349* .307 .162 -.075

1851 1861

—

.278*

—

.267 .299

—

—

—

.590***

1871

—

.081

—

.364*

—

.527***

1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931

—

—

—

-.011 — — — — —

-.099 -.064 -.105 -.164 - .380***

— — — — —

.454** .352* .294* ,356* .343* .129

— — — — — —

.403* .337 .329 .320 .251 .213

* p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001

Wales and Scotland further warrants the separate analysis of the two country groupings at the multivariate level. CHOICE OF INDEPENDENT VARIABLES

The selection of the independent variables that will be used to "ex­ plain" the levels and trends of a complex socioeconomic variable such as marital fertility is always somewhat arbitrary. As in any such en­ deavor, one must be guided by the best available theoretical propositions regarding the nature of factors likely to affect the dependent variable. In addition, any variables that are known to be empirically related to the dependent variable should be included. On these bases, the following independent variables have been employed in the analyses that follow:

ALTERNATIVE MODELS 1. Educational Variables

Education is an important element of transition theory. It is seen as both an element of the "rational point of view" required to engender motivation for restraint of fertility within marriage,2 and as a possibly important factor in facilitating knowledge and access to effective means of fertility control. Unfortunately there are no direct data on the British population's educational attainment for the period under study. We do have crude data on the level of illiteracy, specifically the proportion of males3 mar­ rying who signed by mark. This measure relates to those men entering into the state in which they are "at risk" of marital fertility, usually in the most highly fertile age groups. There is an obvious, but imperfect, relationship between the proportion of males who signed the marriage register by mark and the extent of education available to young males. The correlation of this proportion should be stronger with the proportion receiving a minimal level of education than with, say, mean school grade completed.4 Therefore the present analysis is limited to examining the relationship of fertility behavior to an indicator of minimal education; the results cannot tell us very much about the influence of intensity or degree of education, unless a correlation can be established between average school grade completed and the proportion signing by mark. 2. Urbanization

Like education, urbanization has a central role in transition theory. As compared with rural, agrarian life, urban life is seen to reduce the economic value and to raise the real costs of children, and generally to weaken the influence of the extended family network through which pro-natalist norms operate. Ideally, separate fertility indices would be 2Dr. Brian Harrison has been kind enough to point out that the dominance of British education by religious institutions and the upper classes throughout the nineteenth century may have minimized the contribution of education to the "rationality" of the working classes. He notes that social control was an important motivation for the establishment of the educational system, and that the syllabus tended to be strongly moralistic and probably never mentioned birth control as such. 3Data on females, defined in the same manner, were also collected and incorporated in analyses. However, these two measures were highly intercorrelated, and the male measure was consistently more closely related to marital fertility than was the female. 4But see also the discussion of this measure in Chapter 2.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

calculated for urban and rural areas of registration counties, as is possible in other countries of Europe. Unfortunately, in both England and Wales and Scotland separate information on births is only rarely given for urban and rural areas. In addition, there are numerous changes in urban and rural district boundaries throughout the study period. The ecological measure of urbanization employed here is defined as the proportion of a county's population living in urban areas of 20,000 or more people. 3. Occupational Structure Another important element of transition theory is that a shift away from agricultural and toward industrial occupations, along with urban­ ization (two trends that tend to go together), have the effects of both reducing the economic value for parents of large families and reducing the pressure of extended families for high fertility. Figures on five broad divisions of occupational structure have been used as general indicators of the degree of industrialization and "modernization," viz., proportions of the population in agricultural, manufacturing, civil service, middle class (i.e., professional and commercial), and female domestic occupa­ tions. A related but more focused indicator of occupational structure as it might affect fertility is the proportion of females working in the nontraditional sectors of the economy, i.e., proportions in the nondomestic nonagricultural labor force. (Ideally it would be preferable to examine this indicator for married and unmarried women separately, but the necessary data are not available.) 4. Measures of General Economic Conditions In analyses of a broad social transformation such as the decline in marital fertility, it is obviously of interest to have some indication of the variable levels of economic well-being across Great Britain. Ac­ ceptable measures of well-being are not easy to find, given the paucity of data collected on this general subject during the nineteenth century. For the analyses which follow, we have used estimates of per capita income in each county (Hechter, 1975, pp. 161-63) and of the general level of employment. The former measure obviously fails to take account of differences in income distribution and of relative costs of living, while the latter is subject to the many vagaries of employment data which

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

continue to plague analysts up to the present day. Nonetheless these measures represent the best obtainable indicators of a potentially im­ portant factor in fertility decline. 5. Infant Mortality Another important idea of the demographic transition is that as the mortality of infancy and childhood declines, people begin to recognize that a lower level of fertility is required than was the case earlier in order to achieve a given number of surviving children. Transition the­ orists posit human behavior as "rational," such that fertility levels will therefore be adjusted downward in response to a perceived decline in childhood mortality. The mortality variable employed here is infant mortality, defined as the number of deaths to children under age one per thousand live births.5 6. Ethnic and Cultural Measures One of the important empirical findings of recent research regarding the fertility decline in European countries is that the conditions sur­ rounding fertility declines may differ substantially from cultural region to cultural region. Leasure (1963), for example, found that a fertility map of Spain was very similar in configuration to a linguistic map of Spain. His analysis of variance showed that over 90 percent of the total variance in marital fertility was between the standard linguistic regions of Spain, and less than 10 percent within. Knodel (1973) has found similar patterns in his analysis of the levels and trends of marital fertility in Germany. As noted above, it is in part for this reason that separate analyses were undertaken for England and Wales and for Scotland. The ethnic and cultural measures employed here included: Index of Ethnic Diversity (Hechter, 1973); proportion Celtic speakers; proportion born in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, or France; and proportion born in county of enumeration. 7. Measures of Religious Affiliation Direct measures of religious affiliation in Britain are limited to the data obtained in the 1851 Census of Religion (for an analysis of these 5Indices of child mortality were also employed experimentally, but showed no evidence of departure from the relationships shown by infant mortality.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

data, see Gay, 1971). These data are marred by substantial methodo­ logical limitations, and equally importantly for our purposes, they are confined to the year 1851, long before any changes in marital fertility could be observed. The substantial changes in British society which occurred between 1851 and the 1870s and 1880s when marital fertility began its decline preclude the use of the 1851 religious data, even if they were beyond doubt as to quality and accuracy. Indirect indicators of religious affiliation for later years are available in the registers of marriage, which indicate the type of ceremony performed (see Hechter, 1975, pp. 169ff.). From these data, four measures of religious affiliation have been developed: Established Church (Church of England in Eng­ land; Church of Wales in Wales; Church of Scotland in Scotland); Non­ conformist (including Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, Unitarian, etc.); Roman Catholic; and "religiosity" (measured as the proportion of total marriages performed under religious auspices). There are a number of limitations to these indicators (see Hechter, 1975, pp. 17071), but they remain the only available measures of religious adherence, a variable of obvious potential significance to the use of the "artificial" means of fertility regulation which must have been employed for effec­ tive control of marital fertility. 8. Proportions in Coal-Mining This variable is included not because of any strong theoretical reason for special attention to miners, but rather because of empirical evidence that miners often have unusual fertility (Glass, 1938; Wrigley, 1961; Haines, 1976 and 1977; Friedlander, 1973). In nineteenth-century Brit­ ain, as elsewhere, it is clear that the life experiences of coal miners differed substantially from other occupational groups. Coal miners were engaged in an occupation closely linked to the Industrial Revolution, yet generally lived in remote rural villages; in a sense they may be considered to be "rural, industrial workers." They also had relatively high earnings early in life, and were subject to substantially greater risks of injury than those in agricultural and manufacturing occupations. Fi­ nally, the opportunity for female employment in mining towns was very restricted in most cases. Such considerations might have been sufficient warrant on their own for the inclusion of this variable. But in addition, there is considerable evidence that coal miners experienced especially

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

high levels of overall fertility. For example, the 1911 Fertility Census of England and Wales showed the highest fertility levels in the industrial group called "miners," and this pattern applied to marriages of early and late dates. The excess fertility in the 1870s and 1880s was on the order of 17 to 25 percent (Registrar General of England and Wales, Census of 1911, 1917 and 1923, p. xcii). Whatever may be the problems in determining trends from the 1911 Fertility Census (see Chapter 2), such a consistency of departure from average levels of fertility suggests the plausibility of a real difference. Glass (1938) has also reported that proportions in mining occupations is an especially good predictor of the level of overall fertility within different areas in England. While higher overall fertility of miners might result from nuptiality differences rather than from differences in marital fertility, such evidence suggests the a priori grounds for inclusion of this variable in our analyses.6 ALTERNATIVE "EXPLANATORY" MODELS OF DECLINE IN Ig

Using the multiple regression approach, it is possible to compare the adequacy of alternative "explanatory" models of the decline in British marital fertility. "Explanatory" is in quotation marks because multiple regression analyses cannot be considered to be strictly explanatory, but rather efforts to attribute statistical variance to associated variables. Five such alternative models have been employed here.7 Model I restricts itself solely to the social and economic variables central to transition theory—urbanization, education, occupational structure, infant mortality, and so on. Given the nature and limitations of the data available, the following variables have been included in this set: 6For a literary account of high fertility among French miners, see Emile Zola, Ger­ minate. 1 A note is in order about the particular regression procedure employed, which was the stepwise multiple linear regression routine in Statistical Program for the Social Sciences (SPSS). This route applies a stepwise procedure involving forward selection, without deletion of previously incorporated variables which become insignificant. The absence of a deletion subroutine is a serious potential limitation of this procedure, since it is not uncommon to end up with a final regression equation that includes oneor more insignificant independent variables. In some cases this problem required deletion of such variables "by hand," with the regression equation then being reestimated, a time-consuming and in­ efficient procedure.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Abbreviations Model I: "Transition" Sign by mark Proportions illiterate Urban Proportions urban Agri. Proportions in agricultural occupations Manufacturing Proportions in manufacturing occupations Civ. serv. Proportions in civil service occupations Proportions in middle-class occupations M.C. Proportion females in nondomestic Fem. NDNA nonagricultural employment Proportions females in domestic employment Fem. domestic P.C. income Per capita income Employment Employment Inf. mort. Infant mortality

Model II is based on Model I, but with the addition of the proportion of coal miners. As noted above, this variable is not based on propositions of transition theory, but rather upon empirical finds of high fertility among aggregates with substantial numbers of coal miners. It is therefore a transition theory model modified by empirical findings drawn from other research. Model III, which is mutually exclusive of the first two models described above, includes none of the socioeconomic variables central to transition theory, but is based instead upon a strictly cultural explanation of fertility decline. As such, the variables employed include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Model III: "Cultural" Index of ethnic diversity Proportion Roman Catholic Proportion Established Church Proportion Nonconformist Proportion Celtic speakers Religiosity Proportion voting Conservative, 1892 Proportion voting Liberal, 1892 Proportion voting Labour, 18928

Abbreviations Ethnic div. R.C . Estab. Church Nonconform. Prop. Celtic Relig. Conservative Liberal Labour

8It should be noted that "Labour" here refers to the Independent Labour Party, not to the Labour Party of today, which was founded in 1906. The Independent Labour Party garnered only a few percent of the overall vote, though it was stronger in the north of England and in Scotland. Since much of the working class was not enfranchised in 1892, votes for the Independent Labour Party are difficult to interpret. See Dowse (1966) and Pelling (1954).

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Proportion voting for Nationalist parties, 1892 Proportion born in England Proportion born in Wales Proportion born in Scotland Proportion born in Ireland Proportion born in France Proportion born in country of enumeration

Nationalist E. born W. born Sc. born I. born Fr. born Geomob.

Model IV is based upon Model III, but as with Model II the proportion occupied as coal miners has been added on the basis of strictly empirical findings of the possible importance of this variable. Finally, Model V takes into account the variables suggested both by transition theory and by a strictly cultural interpretation of fertility de­ cline, and also takes into account the possible effects of proportions in coal-mining. It represents a synthesis of the socioeconomic and cultural interpretations of the decline in marital fertility, along with empiricist inclusion of the coal-miner variable. In the discussion that follows, the explanatory sufficiency of each of these alternative models will be discussed, especially in terms of the proportion of the variance in marital fertility decline which is explained by each. Through this systematic consideration of alternative ap­ proaches, I shall be seeking an assessment of the adequacy of transition theory in comparison to alternative models of fertility decline.

MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSES FOR DATE 600 In Table 7.2 results are presented of multiple linear regression analyses for the dependent variable "date at which Ig reached a level of .600" ("DATE 600"). As indicated in the discussion in Chapter 6, this indi­ cator is a measure of the date at which fertility control within marriage has clearly spread to substantial proportions of the population. Fur­ thermore, it can be shown empirically that once this level of Ig has been reached in England and Wales and in Scotland, the decline is irreversible and Ig never again exceeds .600. The date at which Ig reaches .600 combines a "level" dimension with a "time" dimension, and is therefore preferable to static measures such as the level of Ig in 1901 or any other year of choice. The five alternative regression models have been applied separately for England and Wales, Scotland and for the two together (i.e., Great Britain). All analyses are linear in form; experimental log-linear analyses

.58252

.539

.561

.792

III. Cultural

IV. Cultural plus miners

V. "Transition" plus cultural plus miners

.82144

.61365

.74355

.72559

Unadjusted R2

.724

.697

Adjusted «2

II. "Transition" plus miners

England and Wales I. "Transition"

Model Sign by mark Fem. NDNA Manufacturing Urban Miners Fem. NDNA Sign by mark Ethnic div. Fr. born R.C. I. born Miners Fr. born Ethnic div. I. born Sc. born Miners Fem. NDNA Sign by mark Fr. born R.C. Conservative

Variable name 31.12798 -56.06685 19.35678 -6.45824 .82921 -51.47131 31.15217 32.68329 -341.10524 90.47641 -249.91082 0.59148 -287.58979 29.13979 -171.00892 110.95300 .74575 -51.32299 25.96899 -206.43016 34.64516 5.33575

b

Table 7.2: Results of regressions on date of Ig decline to 0.600, for five alternative models

0.31983 -0.52523 0.60534 -0.30156 0.51760 -0.48218 0.32008 0.50973 -0.43814 0.57955 -0.51296 0.36921 -0.36940 0.45447 -0.35101 0.26668 0.46550 0.48079 0.26683 0.26515 0.22192 0.16734

β 11.44 26.02 30.23 5.93 36.25 34.23 13.53 13.77 14.60 9.26 7.84 7.26 10.31 9.22 5.06 4.14 18.53 44.95 10.22 10.23 4.70 4.42

F .56270 -.51741 .28074 - .34460 .60656 -.51741 .56270 .50127 - .35276 .35272 .06232 .60656 - .35276 .50127 .06232 .20046 .60656 -.51741 .56270 - .35276 .35272 -.18907

r

1893.96309

1893.83278

1894.30948

1896.09012

1889.13928

Constant

.356

.356

.730

III. Cultural

IV. Cultural plus miners

V. "Transition" plus cultural plus miners

.78097

.41676

.41676

.72406

.673

II. "Transition" plus miners

Unadjusted R1

.67692

Adjusted K2

.631

Scotland I. "Transition"

Model

Table 7.2 (continued)

Sign by mark P.C. income Fem. NDNA Urban Sign by mark P.C. income Fem. NDNA Urban Miners Prop. Celtic I. born E. born Prop. Celtic I. born E. born Sign by mark P.C. income I. born Fem. domestic Miners Manufacturing

Variable Name 51.35198 - .82450 -34.82661 10.49744 45.10555 -0.87819 -37.79694 10.74658 .58828 13.27694 94.79851 -89.17225 13.27694 94.79851 -89.17225 46.77139 -0.67046 100.64420 34.25525 0.96665 15.83070

b 0.40612 -0.55579 -0.38145 0.32668 0.35672 -0.58912 -0.41399 0.33444 0.22410 0.43542 0.44573 -0.26922 0.43542 0.44573 -0.26922 0.36990 -0.44977 0.47321 0.20490 0.36824 -0.49782

β 12.48 20.04 9.76 6.03 10.40 24.98 12.75 7.13 4.61 7.80 9.25 3.08 7.80 9.25 3.08 13.02 17.98 13.70 3.83 8.01 11.05

F .60997 - .53990 - .38687 - .05646 .60997 -.53990 - .38687 - .05646 .21034 .43044 .29778 - .35886 .43044 .29778 .35886 .60997 - .53990 .29778 .01935 .21034 -.18115

r

1910.82882

1902.69789

1902.69789

1915.65595

1915.41328

Constant

0\ 0\

......

.56948

.545

.751

IV . Cultural plus miners

V. "Transition" plus cultural plus miners

.77732

.51098

.491

III. Cultural

.51987

.48073

Unadjusted R2

.493

.451

Adjusted R2

II. "Transition" plus miners

Great Britain I. "Transition"

Model

Table 7.2 (continued)

P .C. income Fern. NONA Employment Fern. domestic P. C. income Fern. NO NA Employment Miners Prop. Celtic E . born 1. born Prop . Celtic Estab. Church Mi ners Relig. E . born Sign by mark Fern. NONA w . born Miners P.C. income I . born Manufacturing

Variable Name - .42150 -58.93173 -34.18260 -58.21486 - .44299 -47 .33074 -34.62014 .79199 10.80702 - 7.43163 74.80471 7.38993 -16.01958 .89196 24 .05112 -10.79810 38.65368 -27.67184 -12 .24536 0.92378 -0 .21147 67.94273 -11 .14104

b

-0 .33348 - 0.48887 -0.35599 -0.26954 -0.35049 -0 .39264 -0.36054 0.31195 0.27455 - 0.48861 0.23787 0.18774 -0.43207 0.35133 0.28413 -0.70995 0.37180 -0.22955 -0.27969 0.36387 -0.16731 0.21605 -0.28582

f3 14.03 25 .93 16.45 7.31 17.57 22.66 18.47 13.70 8.94 27.27 7.49 3.26 12.91 15.13 7.08 56.16 16.04 9.75 13.65 13.17 5.92 8.52 5.99

F

.43827 .38728 .35691 .06751 .43827 .38728 .35691 .27416 .43472 -.64823 .31486 .43472 - .68615 .27416 .33465 - .64823 -.05880 - .38728 .09806 .27416 - .43827 .31486 - .12730

-

r

1911.15803

1885 .67425

1901.31129

1926.73989

1935.55867

Constant

ALTERNATIVE MODELS were also undertaken in case nonlinear effects were operating, but these exploratory calculations indicated no signs of departure from the linear form in these data. Table 7.2 gives, for each analysis, the unadjusted R2, adjusted R21 the names of the variables having a significant simul­ taneous relationship with the dependent variable (significance measured by the F test), their b and beta coefficients, and the simple linear cor­ relation of each of these variables with the dependent variable.9 Basic statistics on these significant independent variables may be found in Table 7B. Analysis of available data according to Model I, that is the model restricted to independent variables of a socioeconomic nature, indicates that for England and Wales about 70 percent of the variance in DATE 600 can be explained by socioeconomic or "transition" variables. The significant variables are those relating to education (male illiteracy), the occupational structure (proportion females in nondomestic nonagricultural occupations, and proportion population in manufacturing occu­ pations), and urbanization (proportion urban). The directions of the effects are indicated by the b coefficients; all are in the direction expected from transition theory, with the exception of proportion in manufac­ turing occupations, where the direction is the reverse of that expected. The simple correlations indicate that no reversals of direction of asso­ ciation took place upon consideration of multiple simultaneous variables. For Scotland, about 63 percent of the variance is explained by the 9For these data, since each variable has a well-defined and interpretable scale, it was felt that the b coefficients would be more intelligible than would be the betas. Here we follow Duncan (1975, p. 51), who states: ". . . it would probably be salutary if research workers relinquished the habit of expressing variables in standard form. The main reason for this recommendation is that standardization tends to obscure the distinction between the structural coefficients of the model and the several variances in a certain population." See also Macdonald, 1977a, pp. 81-104. The R2 data are adjusted for the number of independent variables in the final equation according to the formula:

Where R2 is unadjusted R2, η is the number of cases, and V is the number of predictor variables in the equation. See Macdonald, 1977b, p. 23.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS variables included under Model I. The significant variables are the same as those for England and Wales, with the exception of a significant negative impact of per capita income and no significant impact of pro­ portion in manufacturing. All the significant Scottish variables in Model I operate in the expected direction. When England and Wales and Scotland are combined into Great Britain for purposes of analysis, a very much smaller proportion of the variance in DATE 600 is explained by Model I variables—only about 45 percent. Illiteracy is not present as a significant variable in this analy­ sis, which is dominated by occupational (females in domestic employ­ ment, females in nondomestic nonagricultural employment, and overall proportion employed) and income variables. All effects are in the di­ rections expected according to transition theory. Turning to Model II, we see that there are modest increases in the proportion of variance explained as compared with Model I. In Eng­ land and Wales, the proportion in coal-mining seems to substitute for the effects of proportion in manufacturing and proportion urban in Model I, but in the Scotland and Great Britain analyses, the effects of proportion in coal-mining are additive to the significant variables in Model I. With Model III we shift to variables solely of a cultural nature, and mutually exclusive of those in Models I and II. The proportion of var­ iance explained by Model III variables is substantially lower than for those in Models I and II in both England and Wales and in Scotland. The only significant cultural variable in common in the two analyses is proportion born in Ireland, but the direction of the effect upon DATE 600 is negative in England and Wales but positive in Scotland. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the proportion born in France is a quite significant variable in the England and Wales regression equation: the higher the proportion born in France, the earlier the date Ig reached .600. (How­ ever, it should be noted that the proportion born in France was every­ where low, and unlikely to have itself affected fertility. Since Frenchborn residents were concentrated in the southeast, this variable may be operating as a proxy for other characteristics of this region.) In Model IV, the proportion in coal-mining is added to the list of cultural variables. It proves to be a significant positive regression variable for England and Wales and for Great Britain, but not for Scotland. And for both England and Wales and Great Britain, Model IV does not

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

explain very much more of the variance in the dependent variable than does Model III (56 percent versus 54 percent in England and Wales, and 54 percent versus 49 percent in Great Britain). Finally we come to the synthetic model, in which transition and cul­ tural variables are combined along with proportion in coal-mining. This model is clearly the most adequate of the five alternatives for all three of the national units. On the order of three-quarters of the variance in DATE 600 is "explained" by Model V in England and Wales, Scotland, and Great Britain. While it is generally true that the number of signif­ icant variables in Model V regression equations is greater than the number in alternative models, the estimate of the proportion of total variance explained has been corrected for this effect. In Model V, it is worth noting that only two significant independent variables are common to the England and Wales and Scotland data— proportion coal miners and male illiteracy. These two variables are also significant in the Great Britain data aggregate. The rest of the significant variables in the England and Wales and Scotland analyses appear to be idiosyncratic to the national grouping, e.g., proportion females in nondomestic, nonagricultural employment is significant in England and Wales but not in Scotland, while proportion female domestics is significant in Scotland but not in England and Wales, proportion French-bom is sig­ nificant in England and Wales but not in Scotland, while the opposite is true of proportion born in Ireland. Such results highlight the problems of aggregated data from Great Britain, coming as they do from popu­ lations differing not only in culture, language, religion, and history, but also in the responsibility for and structure of data collection (we exclude Wales here, given the restriction of Welsh fertility data to only two broad macrocounty units). Despite these differences, the Model V analyses for both England and Wales and for Scotland include significant effects of both traditional socioeconomic variables drawn from transition theory and cultural var­ iables. The same may be said for the comparable analysis of the aggre­ gated data for Great Britain as a whole. ANALYSIS OF RESIDUALS OF MODEL REGRESSION EQUATIONS

Our analyses of the data for England and Wales and for Scotland according to five alternative "explanatory" models for the date of decline

ALTERNATIVE MODELS of Ig to .600 has yielded ten regression equations. From these equations we may derive the residual variation in DATE 600 for each county. Examination of these residuals may further our understanding of the sufficiency of the alternative equations, and of the difference between England and Wales and Scotland in the structure of their marital fertility declines. The calculated residuals are presented in Table 7.3. Initial examination of the England/Wales residuals derived from the England/Wales equations and the Scotland residuals derived from the Scotland equations confirm the superiority of Model V in both cases. This is especially true in Scotland, where Models I through IV produce large positive residuals in a number of counties (especially Caithness, Sutherland, Ross and Cromarty, and Inverness) that largely disappear in the Model V regression. In England and Wales, the counties that are poorly "predicted" by Model V (defined arbitrarily as residuals greater than 3.0 in absolute terms) are few in number: Essex, Shropshire and Leicester with positive residuals, and Cambridge and Yorkshire with negative residuals. In Scotland the number of such "outliers" is greater: Caithness, Ab­ erdeen, and Kinross with positive residuals; and Orkney, Nairn, Bute, Haddington, and Roxburgh with negative residuals. Quite different information is obtained by examining the residuals of counties in England and Wales as "predicted" by the five Scottish equa­ tions, and vice versa. It is to be expected, of course, that residuals in both cases will be larger than those calculated from the equations derived from their own data (by definition, the latter should be optimal equa­ tions). But systematic patterns of residuals are indicative of structural differences between the independent and dependent variables in the two national groupings. The counties of England and Wales show such systematic residual patterns quite clearly in the residuals calculated from the Scottish equa­ tions. In particular, the Scottish cultural equations (Models III and IV) yield consistently positive large residuals for English/Welsh counties. We may interpret this as implying that had the cultural process affecting the decline in marital fertility in England and Wales been those defined by our best Scottish equation, the date of marital fertility decline in England and Wales would have been very much earlier than was in fact the case. A compatible and even greater systematic deviation appears in one of the comparable residual sets in the Scottish data, viz. those

II

-5.422 -1.497 1.127 -1.976 -2.971 1.753 1.357 0.620 1.766 2.158 0.667 -2.488 1.195 -8.261 4.019 1.587 -3.427 -0.931 -0.935 -1.815 -2.237 1.861 -1.028 1.769 4.298 0.506

I

-3.642 -1.253 0.961 -0.795 -1.508 0.822 -0.026 -0.958 -1.125 2.324 -2.753 -1.130 1.633 -1.921 2.942 2.676 -2.659 -3.749 -1.920 -1.047 -5.280 1.845 0.281 2.930 5.763 -0.266

County

London Surrey Kent Sussex Hampshire Berkshire Middlesex Herfordshire Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire Northamptonshire Huntingdonshire Bedfordshire Cambridgeshire Essex Suffolk Norfolk Wiltshire Dorset Devonshire Cornwall Somersetshire Gloucestershire Herefordshire Shropshire Staffordshire

-3.619 -2.075 0.830 -3.843 -2.324 -2.195 3.503 0.478 1.132 4.209 -2.868 0.691 0.536 -2.541 6.830 2.132 -2.541 -2.195 2.389 -4.349 3.293 1.383 -3.003 2.056 3.632 6.168

III -3.439 -1.129 0.833 -3.838 -3.101 -0.743 3.543 1.961 1.274 2.833 -1.474 1.167 -0.880 -2.234 6.874 3.584 -1.163 -0.812 1.227 -3.702 2.541 -0.016 -4.946 2.306 4.073 4.913

IV

England & Wales Equations

-1.242 -1.840 1.503 -1.499 -2.053 1.041 1.900 0.227 1.348 2.177 0.653 -2.058 1.984 -3.073 5.453 -0.846 -2.969 -0.990 -0.244 -2.295 -0.326 2.248 -0.926 1.711 3.029 0.948

V -5.524 7.914 11.671 -10.856 -12.021 -1.415 9.339 5.514 5.359 1.159 -3.024 6.918 2.004 1.807 0.454 6.054 -0.381 1.080 0.285 -8.165 0.210 9.828 -6.923 10.648 11.170 9.138

I 62.228 73.851 75.851 70.851 69.011 78.691 77.959 81.691 82.583 80.743 78.583 81.474 77.635 78.583 81.851 83.583 78.583 78.691 76.743 72.851 76.743 81.691 73.959 77.501 84.232 85.743

III

IV 62.228 73.851 75.851 70.851 69.011 78.691 77.959 81.691 82.583 80.743 78.583 81.474 77.635 78.583 81.851 83.583 78.583 78.691 76.743 72.851 76.743 81.691 73.959 77.501 84.232 85.743

Scotland Equations

-4.303 9.062 12.723 -10.592 -12.015 -1.487 10.151 4.991 5.042 1.000 -3.133 6.620 1.435 1.415 0.024 5.367 -0.979 0.786 -0.034 -8.176 -0.289 7.968 -8.683 9.359 8.529 4.419

II

V -4.754 -0.381 2.346 -17.073 -18.485 -10.547 7.889 -10.755 -6.070 -7.974 -7.791 -12.172 -16.798 -14.297 -6.967 -14.225 -13.983 -9.854 -13.147 -15.001 -14.795 -6.940 -14.853 -8.291 -5.132 -9.883

Table 7.3 Regression residuals for the counties of England and Wales and Scotland, calculated from five alternative models in Table 7.2

14.414

17.229

31.316 9.968 23.304 18.636 18.489 18.473 4.357 12.373 18.244

Shetland Orkney Caithness Sutherland Ross & Cromarty Inverness Nairn Moray/Elgin Banff Aberdeen Kincardine

I

-1.173 0.783 4.515 4.259 -1.221 0.117 -2.184 -0.271 2.538 -5.257 1.512 2.053 3.289 -0.142 -1.365 2.390 -1.991

Worcestershire Warwickshire Leicestershire Rutlandshire Lincolnshire Nottinghamshire Derbyshire Cheshire Lancashire Yorkshire (all) Durham Northumberland Cumberland Westmoreland Monmouthshire South Wales North Wales

County

Table 7.3 (continued)

II

11.691 5.691 21.691 18.691 23.037 6.989 2.976

4.727 6.472 9.805 8.730

6.695

13.201 16.224 15.848 12.709

-1.195 -3.737 0.400 1.786 -1.868 -1.195 0.400 -2.816 -3.662 -4.979 8.398 1.728 -0.994 1.823 -1.160 0.770 -1.408

III

26.709 8.218 21.670 14.681 16.094 14.147

0.560 1.485 4.769 3.033 -1.304 -1.728 -2.853 0.497 2.276 -5.461 0.849 0.528 2.938 1.716 -2.019 0.438 -2.406 -98.786 -104.786 -88.786 -92.306 -86.326 -93.259 -104.786 -94.935 -94.441 -97.567 -98.206

-1.071 -1.643 -0.151 3.041 -0.510 -4.255 -2.215 -1.296 0.751 -5.980 7.807 -1.082 -1.024 -0.598 -2.186 1.870 -1.111

IV

26.170 7.716 21.912 15.635 17.386 11.329 5.362 12.104 13.809 15.759 9.540

0.131 -0.575 4.852 -0.001 -0.502 -1.598 -2.786 -1.280 0.383 -3.741 0.810 0.689 -0.262 0.937 -1.882 2.693 -1.725

V

5.105 -7.300 11.364 9.656 22.597 16.513 -1.026 2.527 2.465 1.159 3.379

5.933 -7.070 11.358 8.715 21.192 16.018 -0.797 2.757 2.812 1.604 3.940

3.302 -2.698 14.763 19.994 25.620 18.222 1.684 5.749 8.351 4.327 4.977

68.549 71.851 83.388 78.445 76.605 75.903 22.124 18.851 12.939

-6.582 5.558 1.790 4.281 0.747 14.212 10.395 7.545

71.388

-4.549

-2.095 -9.428 -0.441 -2.467 1.226 1.072 7.282 4.591 4.140

-2.955 0.250

80.583 76.743 79.635 83.474 79.583 79.691 78 743

HI

-0.296 -3.618 -2.482 4.073 -0.884 -6.381 1.768

II

1.413 -2.210 -0.560 3.940 -0.819 -1.761 5.496

I

3.302 -2.698 14.763 19.994 25.620 18.222 1.684 5.749 8.351 4.327 4.977

80.583 76.743 79.635 83.474 79.583 79.691 78.743 71.388 68.549 71.851 83.388 78.445 76.605 75.903 22.124 18.851 12.939

IV

0.966

-2.221 -5.140 7.113 1.797 1.602 -1.414 -4.916 2.972 2.335 5.757

-11.682 -9.209 -8.572 -8.685 -8.413 -12.544 -4.772 -13.859 -11.043 -15.572 -6.823 -4.266 -6.572 - 7.089 -13.241 -8.792 -14.501

V

I

16.331 11.617 10.064 7.635 6.441 9.631 9.790 13.142 -1.690 16.044 12.591 15.238 9.698 6.081 7.629 5.456 2.523 2.449 0.766 9.313 6.882 12.509

County

Angus-Forfar Perth Fife Kinross Clackmannan Stirling Dunbarton Argyll Bute Renfew Ayr Lanark Linlithgow/W. Loth Edinburgh/Midloth Haddington/E. Loth Berwick Peebles Selkirk Roxburgh Dumfries Kirkcudbright Wigtown

Table 7.3 (continued)

17.037 10.984 9.240 7.213 9.461 11.101 14.732 11.631 0.206 19.012 11.700 14.878 13.516 4.321 4.577 1.541 7.246 9.648 3.562 8.560 7.620 11.599

II -5.051 5.360 9.503 4.691 1.110 11.681 34.308 10.936 -5.833 17.378 16.604 17.457 26.984 -2.375 5.681 -3.770 -2.929 -7.216 -2.792 2.227 3.399 14.688

III -101.828 -99.444 -99.797 -107.560 -105.766 -91.992 -52.953 -93.639 -112.027 -71.058 -87,367 -73.706 -75.706 -101.262 -96.982 -102.754 -110.091 -109.499 -105.891 -99.258 -96.731 -90.204

IV 13.453 10.045 11.510 9.673 9.801 9.067 21.540 10.325 -2.645 12.834 8.533 9.638 10.966 2.011 2.414 4.228 4.583 7.751 2.835 7.446 6.153 10.530

V 1.423 1.828 3.598 3.773 8.255 10.419 14.498 11.714 -6.199 13.555 10.079 14.813 15.094 0.520 4.977 1.255 2.818 -2.409 -0.674 3.361 3.579 8.308

I 2.146 2.480 0.378 2.916 5.203 6.687 12.466 11.225 -6.172 13.244 6.200 11.685 10.401 -0.216 2.513 2.166 3.552 -1.430 0.107 3.032 4.206 8.541

II -2.862 -1.350 0.270 -3.668 0.977 5.507 0.029 12.946 -6.777 -2.944 3.478 0.763 6.502 -4.950 0.532 2.328 -7.698 -6.131 -7.244 1.813 -0.135 3.133

III -2.862 -1.350 0.270 -3.668 0.977 5.507 0.029 12.946 -6.777 -2.944 3.478 0.763 6.502 -4.950 0.532 2.328 -7.698 -6.131 -7.244 1.813 -0.135 3.133

IV

2.452 0.322 -1.706 3.696 -0.929 1.985 -2.692 -0.070 -8.923 1.890 -0.542 -0.010 2.675 0.776 -3.784 0.159 0.665 0.329 -4.864 0.062 0.011 -0.353

V

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

calculated according to the EnglishAVelsh Model IV equation (the Model III residuals are neither uniformly positive nor negative). Unfortunately, it is difficult to know how to interpret these latter results, given the inclusion of variables such as proportion born in Scotland in the England/ Wales equations but not in the Scottish. (The social import of being Scottish in Scotland is presumably quite different from that of being Scottish in England or Wales.) The socioeconomic models are more easily interpretable than are the cultural models, since the meaning of illiteracy or employment as a coal miner must mean more nearly the same thing across the English-Scottish border than do such cultural indicators as proportions Scottish or speak­ ing Gaelic. There is no consistent pattern in the residuals of English/ Welsh counties derived from Scottish equations I and II. However, the Scottish residuals calculated from English/Welsh equations I and II are uniformly positive (with one exception). This means that the fertility decline in Scottish counties was typically even later than would have been predicted by their levels of social and economic "development" structured according to the pattern of relationship in England and Wales. These departures range in Model I (for example) from -1.69 years (Bute) as high as 31.3 years (Shetland), with a mean of 12.1 years and a standard deviation of 6.3. Even in Model V, incorporating both so­ cioeconomic and cultural variables simultaneously, the range of residuals is from - 2.6 years to 26.2 years, again in Bute and Shetland respectively. The means and standard deviation are both somewhat lower (m = 10.9 years, s.d. = 5.1). Results such as these tend to confirm the existence of structural dif­ ferences between the factors affecting marital fertility decline in England and Wales on the one hand and in Scotland on the other, and highlight the possible pitfalls awaiting interpretations based either solely upon data from England and Wales alone, or alternatively from Great Britain as an aggregate. The clarity of the national divide at the Scottish border is further confirmed by consideration of the geographical distribution of residuals calculated from the best equations for England and Wales and Scotland (Model V in both cases). If the British population were homogeneous as to the social processes affecting the decline of marital fertility, one would expect the counties of Scotland to be fit reasonably well by the

ALTERNATIVE MODELS equation generated from English/Welsh data, and vice versa. Individual counties outside of the subset from which an equation was estimated would be expected to depart perhaps more substantially than most of the counties included in the estimation process, but these departures should not be large and systematic. Yet the residuals calculated from Model V equations for England and Wales and for Scotland present rather dramatic confirmation of the discontinuities structured around the border. Instead of a gradually increasing level of residuals, the pattern of residuals reproduces the political border with considerable clarity. Since the Scottish Highland counties, which we may expect on a priori grounds to be most different from the rest, are included in the Scottish but not in the English/Welsh equation, the geographical pattern of the latter's residuals is most easily interpretable. These residuals produce the political border between England and Scotland exactly, with the largest residuals concentrated in the Highland regions of Scot­ land, which are both furthest from the English border, and (arguably) quite distinct culturally from the Lowland Scottish counties. Another indication of the plausibility of these departures is the pattern of greater difference between the English border counties and the Scottish counties in the southwest peninsular region (e.g., Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Wigtown), where England and Scotland are separated by a wide expanse of water, than in the eastern border counties such as Roxburgh and Berwick, which are connected by land and presumably subject to con­ siderably greater communication, trade, and hence cultural influence from south of the border. MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSES FOR THE DATE OF 10 PERCENT DECLINE IN Ig Similar multiple regression analyses have been prepared using as a dependent variable the date at which Ig declined by 10 percent from an initial plateau level. As indicated in Chapter 6, this criterion is indicative of the adoption of a substantial degree of fertility control among the population. As compared to the DATE 600 criterion, the 10 percent decline criterion is less affected by the starting level of Ig; however, a county with very high initial levels of Ig could experience a 10 percent decline without the practice of fertility control by most of its inhabitants.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

As indicated earlier, these two alternative criteria measure different things, but both indicate the approximate date at which marital fertility may be said to have declined "substantially and irreversibly." As in the preceding analyses, the five alternative linear regression models have been applied separately for England and Wales, Scotland, and Great Britain (see Table 7.4). In general, the results of these regression analyses are roughly con­ sistent with those described for DATE 600, although there are a few notable differences, some of which may be attributable to the vagaries of the stepwise reression procedure.10 One important and quite plausible difference is the absence of proportions in mining occupations as a consistent significant independent variable in explaining the date of 10 percent decline in marital fertility. In none of the Model V analyses does "Miners" enter into the final equation. It will be recalled that this same variable was of ubiquitous significance in explaining the date at which Ig reached .600. Such a departure is consistent with the different meanings of the two dependent variables. As indicated earlier, DATE 600 is affected more by the starting level of Ig than is the date of 10 percent decline. Given knowledge from other sources of the relatively high fertility of coal miners, the present findings are consistent with an interpretation that the proportions of coal miners in a county is more closely associated with the overall level of Ig at any given time than it is with the rate of decline in Ig from a given starting level. Another important and comprehensible difference is the generally significant effect of proportion urban ("Urban") in the final equations for the 10 percent criterion, while the same independent variable is not of consistent significance in the .600 equations. The logical interpretation of this difference is the mirror image of the "Miners" case: that the proportion urban in a county is more closely associated with the rate of 10For example, the adjusted R2 for Model II in Scotland is less than for Model I, despite the fact that all the Model I independent variables are part of Model II. The entrance of miners as a significant variable in Model II necessitates the deletion of other previously significant variables, and results eventually in somewhat lower adjusted R2. The same point may be made when comparing Model V with Models III and IV for England and Wales, and for Model V compared to Model II for Great Britain. Such results can only highlight the caution that must be exercised in interpreting the results of stepwise multiple regression procedures. The "decision" as to which independent variable should enter next into the regression equation is sometimes a "hairline" one, and yet may make a substantial difference to the form of the eventual final question.