Birth, Fortune, and Discrepant Fertility in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

Twentieth-century American men and women were often unable to live up to or down to their own fertility ideals. In a national random sample of 11,126 ever-married men and women over the age of 44, “discrepant fertility”—the difference between ideal fertility and completed fertility—was common. This article seeks to identify the causes of such discrepancies, and findings suggest that the most important exogenous factor is “birth cohort.” Those born prior to or after the Great Depression were prone to exhibit negative discrepant fertility, having had fewer children than they thought ideal, while those born during the Depression—the parents of the baby boom—were characterized by significant positive discrepant fertility, having had more children than they thought ideal. It is argued that these cohort effects are closely related to social and economic conditions that prevailed as twentieth-century Americans came of age and assessed their professional and familial prospects.

Les origines du baby-boom en Suisse au prisme des parcours féminins

“…Or, d'après l'auteur, les mésententes au sein d'un couple étant source de défaillances contraceptives, cela a pu conduire à une augmentation parallèle des grossesses involontaires durant le baby-boom. Ce mécanisme s'ajouterait ainsi à l'explication plus classique (et notamment avancée par Ariès) selon laquelle la prospérité économique rendant moins grave la survenance d'une naissance non planifiée, les couples auraient eu tendance à être plus « négligents » durant ces périodes (Emeka, 2006;Leridon, 1985;Philippe Ariès, 1980). Bean (1983) reconnait toutefois que son apport, comme d'autres recherches, n'éclaire qu'une partie du baby-boom, qu'il perçoit comme causé par une multitude de facteurs.…”

The mid-twentieth century fertility boom from a global perspective

“…Although there is a great deal of variation in this fertility shift, both in terms of timing and intensity, the fact is that for some decades the declining trend of fertility was reversed or at least halted momentarily. Until now the baby boom has been studied mainly in advanced societies (Byerly & Rubin, 1985;Chesnais, 1992;Emeka, 2006;Macunovich, 2002;Owram, 1996;Romaniuk, 1984;Russell, 2006;Sardon, 2006;van Bavel & Reher, 2013;Sandström, 2014). Aiming at broadening our understanding of this phenomenon, the main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of extending the analysis of baby boom to a set of developing countries in order to ascertain whether or not we can properly speak of a fertility boom among these less developed nations.…”

Measuring and explaining the baby boom in the developed world in the mid-twentieth century

“…Much of the research into the causes of the baby boom has sought to provide an explanation based on economic factors, particularly in the case of the United States (Russell 2006;Emeka 2006;Murphy, Simon, and Tamura 2008;Tamura, Simon, and Murphy 2016;Jones and Schoonbroodt 2016). These studies give different justifications for this conundrum: Easterlin's hypotheses (1961Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1965Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1966Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1975Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1987, the relentless rise in real wages (Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke 2005), women's role in the workplace (Doepke, Hazan, and Maoz 2015;Macunovich 1996), the differences in salary between men and women (De Cooman, Ermisch, and Joshi 1987;Doepke, Hazan, and Maoz 2015), the differences in the maternal mortality (Albanesi and Olivetti 2014), and the falling price for space (Tamura and Simon 2017;Simon and Tamura 2009).…”

“…In the 1960s, many demographers thought that fertility rates would go on rising, hand in hand with economic development (Van Bavel 2010), but the figures peaked, and then a downward trend set in that was to last for 20 years. Even though the baby boom was a phenomenon with huge, long-lasting social impact, and despite the vast number of studies on this topic Emeka 2006;Caldwell 2006;Macunovich 2002;Sardon 2006;Sandström 2014;Van Bavel and Reher 2013;Reher 2015;Reher and Requena 2015), its causes are still not well understood (Albanesi and Olivetti 2014). The early research on this topic tried to account for it as a logical recovery following the end of WWII.…”