Why “Race Suicide”? Cultural Factors in U.S. Fertility Decline, 1903–1908

Abstract

Study of a sample of 605 newspaper articles produced between 1903 and 1908 tracks Americans' explanations for fertility decline, demonstrating the perceived importance of economic and “cosmic” factors but arguing that these factors and others are best understood in the context of individual-level moral views. For contemporaries seeking to explain the trend toward smaller families, the most significant frames of analysis involved dichotomies concerning self and society, worldliness and transcendence, and near- and long-term sensibilities about time.

The impact of kin availability, parental religiosity, and nativity on fertility differentials in the late 19th-century United States

“…Rapid social change in the nineteenth century led to greater acceptance of the idea of smaller families, especially among native-born couples, who demonstrated greater willingness to adopt birth control methods than foreign born couples (Smith 1974; Degler 1980; Klepp 2009; Vinovskis 1976; King and Ruggles 1990; Smith 1994; MacNamara 2014). New contraceptive methods and advice manuals were initially promoted by religious “free-thinkers” such as Robert Dale Owen and Charles Knowlton, while opponents warned of “conjugal onanism,” suggesting that secularization may have been a necessary pre-condition to the practice of birth control (Brodie 1994: 59; Smith 1994).…”

“…Other factors may have played a role, however, including native and foreign-born differentials in SES, insecurities associated with minority group status, and immigrant selection factors (Goldscheider and Uhlenberg 1969; Kahn 1988, 1994; Forste and Tienda 1996). Continued marital fertility decline among native-born couples, persisting high fertility rates among “old” immigrant groups, and the arrival of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe with strong family systems and high fertility regimes widened fertility differentials in the early twentieth century (King and Ruggles 1990; Morgan, Watkins and Ewbank 1992; Gjerde and McCants 1995; Reher 1998; MacNamara 2014). …”

Ready, Willing, and Able? Impediments to the Onset of Marital Fertility Decline in the United States

“…Rapid social, religious, and political change following the American Revolution led to new ideas about sexuality, health, education, and the role of women in society and the family, allowing the idea of smaller families and the practice of contraception to become socially acceptable (Degler 1980; Klepp 2009; Smith 1974). Nineteenth century and early twentieth century observers identified the foreign-born population as the group most resistant to the new idea of small families and the practice of contraception, while members of the native-born white population were identified as the earliest adoptees (King and Ruggles 1990; MacNamara 2014; Smith 1994). Quantitative historians have found large fertility differences by nativity and among first- and second-generation immigrants, even after controlling for socioeconomic status and residential factors (Atack and Bateman 1987; Forster and Tucker 1972; Hareven and Vinovskis 1975; King and Ruggles 1990; Leet 1977; Morgan et al 1994; Vinovskis 1976, 1982).…”

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

“…Between the wars, scientists and their patrons participated in political debates about populations that focused both on their size and on what contemporaries referred to as their “quality”: the relative balance between wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, white and nonwhite, foreign‐born and native‐born (Lovett ; MacNamara ; Allen ; Schneider ; Soloway ). Advocates and opponents of the population projects of the time—birth control legalization, immigration restriction, and eugenics—debated the effects such programs would have on national populations, calling on the new and still largely inchoate field of “population science” for support (Hodgson ; Notestein and Osborn ).…”