Tasmania in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Women as Agents in Fertility Decision‐making: Australia, 1870–1910

“…A large gulf between high economic aspirations and the reality of poor outcomes is theorized as being a major stimulus to the control of fertility (Casterline 2001;Abbasi-Shavazi et al 2009) and this was almost certainly the case in Australia in this period. Moyle (2015) describes many other changes in the daily lives of people that are relevant to our argument. From the 1870s, the telegraph enabled the publication in the Australian press of reports in British newspapers within days of their original publication.…”

“…While elites who were aged 25 years and older in 1881, including both Australian‐born and British‐born persons, may have practiced family planning during the 1870s (Moyle ), these groups were relatively small and their behavior would have had only a small effect in the aggregate. The fertility transition in Australia, as shown in Figure , took off in earnest from the cohort born in 1857–61 and was sustained by subsequent birth cohorts.…”

“…The fertility transition in Australia, as shown in Figure , took off in earnest from the cohort born in 1857–61 and was sustained by subsequent birth cohorts. Prior to this cohort, among the cohorts of women who married at young ages during the years of sex imbalance (McDonald ), completed fertility was exceptionally high (Ruzicka and Caldwell ; Moyle ). The modal number of children fell from eight for the 1847–51 birth cohort to five for the 1857–61 cohort and to three for the 1872–76 cohort.…”

“…This was also a time when many new occupations emerged that provided opportunities for the new, educated Australian‐born generation. There was rapid growth in white‐collar occupations such as accountants, bank clerks, insurance clerks, school teachers, and railway porters (Moyle ). The proportion of jobs that were rural declined.…”

“…The idea of women being agents in fertility decision‐making is also implicit in contemporary gender equity theory (McDonald ). For Australia, the argument that women were central agents in the historical fertility transition has been made by Cook (), Anderson and Mackinnon (), and Moyle (). We build on these and other earlier works by placing the argument within Giddens's () theory of structuration.…”