Abstract
This study relies on IPUMS samples of the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, aggregate census data, and the timing of state laws criminalizing abortion to construct regional estimates of marital fertility in the United States and estimate correlates of marital fertility. The results show a significant lag between the onset of marital fertility decline in the nation’s northeastern census divisions and its onset in western and southern census divisions. Empirical models indicate the presence of cultural, economic, and legal impediments to the diffusion of marital fertility control and illustrate the need for more inclusive models of fertility decline.
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Notes
The majority of the nation’s black population in 1850 and 1860 was enumerated on separate slave schedules in the census, which lacked the necessary information for own-child analysis and model estimation.
There are two reasons to prefer actual school attendance to the presence of a compulsory attendance law. First, compulsory school attendance laws were relatively rare in the studied period: only Massachusetts and Vermont had compulsory attendance laws prior to 1870. Second, studies of schooling in the nineteenth century United States (Goldin 1999; Landes and Solmon 1972) have concluded that compulsory attendance laws were the consequence of higher school attendance rather than the cause.
High and low values for each category were chosen to create approximately equally sized groups. Couples with $100–$1,500 in real estate were considered to possess moderate real estate wealth, while couples with more than $1,500 in real estate were considered to have high real wealth. Couples with $100–$500 in personal estate wealth were considered to possess moderate personal estate wealth, while couples with more than $500 in personal estate were considered to have high personal wealth. Average farm prices were centered on the mean value for each model.
County-level data on church seating capacities are not available for 1880. I relied instead on the average of the proportion of church seats held by the selected denominations in 1870 and the proportion of church members to all county church members in 1890.
There are several sources of potential measurement error. Many parents chose names to honor relatives or ancestors and others found religious inspiration in nonbiblical saints’ names or in “virtue” names, such as Hope and Grace. Altogether, however, virtue names Grace, Hope, Charity, and Love together made up less than 1 % of all valid girl names. A few popular names may have lost their religious connotations. The results, however, were robust to several tested alternative measures, including estimates constructed after excluding children named after parents or other individuals in the household and after excluding children with the common names John, Thomas, Mary, and Elizabeth. Nonvalid names—mostly initials, illegible names, and titles—were not considered in the calculated proportion. Both the child naming and church seating variables were centered on the model mean values in the regression models.
I relied on Lahey’s compilation of abortion statutes (Lahey 2014a) to determine the year a state abortion statute restricting the practice of abortion had been passed. The law was lagged one year to account for the interval between passage of a statute and observed births. An alternative measure, based on whether states had laws explicitly applicable to both the pre- and post-quickening periods, was constructed from information in Quay (1961) and tested in the models. Although the alternative measure typically had the expected positive coefficients, it proved to be statistically insignificant in all models. For the few cases in which a law was passed during the five-year observation interval, the variable was given a value between 0 and 1, representing the proportion of the interval in which the state had a law in place.
Because the regression models required the proportion of parents’ children given biblical names, couples in the model have at least one surviving child in the household with a valid name. As a result, the models are restricted to fecund couples and unable to detect the impact of a small percentage of couples who may have remained intentionally childless (Tolnay and Guest 1982). The models benefit, however, from removal of couples who were involuntarily sterile. Other universe restrictions were tested, including restricting the models to couples having at least one surviving child aged 5 years or older and models with no restriction on having surviving children. Models with these universe restrictions yielded similar results.
The signs on the coefficients for personal estate wealth in Model 7 also suggest an inverted U-shape relationship between wealth and fertility. However, the coefficients were not statistically different from 0 at the .05 level, and the signs on the coefficients are not consistent in Model 8 for the rural farm population. The lack of significance and consistency across models may reflect the lower levels of personal versus real estate wealth—on average, personal estate wealth of couples in Model 7 represented just over one-third of couples’ overall wealth—or may reflect disruptions to personal wealth stemming from the abolition of slavery in 1865. Research on child-woman ratios in the 1840 census by Carter et al. (2004) suggested that slave ownership reduced fertility among wealthier southerners. If slave ownership was negatively correlated with marital fertility in 1860, abolition of slavery may have disrupted the relationship between personal estate wealth and fertility in the pooled 1860–1870 model.
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Acknowledgments
Research was supported in part by funds provided to the Minnesota Population Center from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grants R24-HD041023 and from NICHD Grants K01-HD052617 and R01-HD082120. The author received valuable feedback from seminar participants at the Centre for Population Economics, Lund University; Centre for Population Studies, Umeå University; Center for Population Economics, University of Chicago; Economic History, Northwestern University; and Historical Demography, Max Plank Institute for Demographic Research; and from Martin Dribe, Johanna Lahey, and the anonymous reviewers.
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Hacker, J.D. Ready, Willing, and Able? Impediments to the Onset of Marital Fertility Decline in the United States. Demography 53, 1657–1692 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0513-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0513-7