Birth spacing as a family strategy: evidence from 19th century Leuven,Belgium

This article investigates the hypothesis that 19th-century working class families in Leuven, Belgium, were controlling their fertility by means of birth spacing for household economic reasons. Detailed life-course data were collected in order to construct, on one hand, a set of covariates that represent the influences of natural fertility on birth intervals and, on the other, a number of family variables that represent the hypothetical, household economic motivation to space births. The findings strongly suggest that birth intervals were not merely a function of natural fertility differences and that family strategic spacing behavior also played a role.     

The practice of birth control and historical fertility change: Introduction

This introduction discusses the contributions in the special issue. The articles present results concerning the practice of birth control, mainly at the family level. They represent different analytical approaches where both interviews, letters, surveys and micro-level data have been used. The European fertility decline has made a fundamental change to the societies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Birth control spreads rapidly. Research in this field requires both qualitative and quantitative studies, where both approaches contribute to different perspectives on the transition. The articles in the issue discuss several themes in relation to birth control, of which three are developed in the introduction. These are gender and fertility, gender and health and finally how to control fertility. The presented results demonstrate the importance of including gender in the analyses of the fertility decline. A gender perspective makes it natural to consider historical persons as agents. It is also necessary to acknowledge that we should not treat the married couple as a single unit. They may have conflicting interests, something that several of the articles illustrate. One aspect we would like to emphasize is how health problems can influence the will to have more children and this affects birth control. This is a theme that in different forms is taken up by several of the authors. Finally, families practiced birth control with several different methods that also changed throughout the married years, thus demonstrating a flexibility that is often overlooked in conventional methods for the analysis of fertility.     

The practice of birth control and historical fertility change: Introduction

This introduction discusses the contributions in the special issue. The articles present results concerning the practice of birth control, mainly at the family level. They represent different analytical approaches where both interviews, letters, surveys and micro-level data have been used. The European fertility decline has made a fundamental change to the societies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Birth control spreads rapidly. Research in this field requires both qualitative and quantitative studies, where both approaches contribute to different perspectives on the transition. The articles in the issue discuss several themes in relation to birth control, of which three are developed in the introduction. These are gender and fertility, gender and health and finally how to control fertility. The presented results demonstrate the importance of including gender in the analyses of the fertility decline. A gender perspective makes it natural to consider historical persons as agents. It is also necessary to acknowledge that we should not treat the married couple as a single unit. They may have conflicting interests, something that several of the articles illustrate. One aspect we would like to emphasize is how health problems can influence the will to have more children and this affects birth control. This is a theme that in different forms is taken up by several of the authors. Finally, families practiced birth control with several different methods that also changed throughout the married years, thus demonstrating a flexibility that is often overlooked in conventional methods for the analysis of fertility.     

A mixed effects model of birth spacing for pre-transition populations: Evidence of deliberate fertility control from nineteenth century Netherlands

It has often been argued that there are good theoretical and historical reasons to expect that deliberate birth spacing has played an important role in fertility patterns before the demographic transition. Yet, it has proved difficult to find hard empirical evidence. In this article, we propose a new model of the speed of parity progression that includes both fixed and random effects and that efficiently captures unobserved heterogeneity between couples in fecundability and postpartum amenorrhea. With this model, we demonstrate that pre-transition couples in the Netherlands indeed spaced their births during about the first ten years of marriage. In addition, we have found strong differentials in birth intervals by socio-economic position and religion. Finally, we also show how and why the model can be used with left-censored census data.     

Reproduction and family building strategies in early modern Japan: Evidence from two northeastern farming villages

Drawing data from the local population registers called “ninbetsu-aratame-cho," this study examines the patterns and covariates of reproduction and family building in two farming villages in northeastern Japan in 1716–1870. Marriages in these villages were very early and universal for both sexes, but reproduction within marriage was very low, due in part to curtailment of reproduction at relatively young ages, but also to long intervals between recorded births. Stopping and spacing of family building were achieved primarily by an extensive use of sex- and parity-specific infanticide, which enabled peasant couples to control the size and gender-sequence of their progeny. Women's positions within their household and in the village also influenced their family building processes. Peasant couples in these preindustrial Japanese farming villages were active planners of their reproductive life.     

Reproduction and family building strategies in early modern Japan: Evidence from two northeastern farming villages

Drawing data from the local population registers called “ninbetsu-aratame-cho," this study examines the patterns and covariates of reproduction and family building in two farming villages in northeastern Japan in 1716–1870. Marriages in these villages were very early and universal for both sexes, but reproduction within marriage was very low, due in part to curtailment of reproduction at relatively young ages, but also to long intervals between recorded births. Stopping and spacing of family building were achieved primarily by an extensive use of sex- and parity-specific infanticide, which enabled peasant couples to control the size and gender-sequence of their progeny. Women's positions within their household and in the village also influenced their family building processes. Peasant couples in these preindustrial Japanese farming villages were active planners of their reproductive life.     

Low fertility and concurrent birth control policy in China

China’s one-child policy, introduced in the late 1970s, has been in effect for over three decades. This article reviews China’s low fertility rate and the implementation of this stringent birth control policy in the context of low fertility. First, China’s fertility intention, behavior, and low fertility level trend are presented. Then, the official response to the low fertility level and the consequent misguided policy-making are investigated. Next, various obstacles to the abolishment of the strict birth control policy are discussed, including national leaders’ authority, related family planning regulations and laws, the inertia of this basic state policy under the auspices of the common good, the displacement of the family planning systems, and the necessity for social maintenance fees to keep grassroots governments in operation. After discussing the recent reform of this birth control policy in 2013 and the subsequent results, the incentives for a universal two-child policy are elucidated. These include the official acknowledgment of low fertility, the effect of birth control policy on fertility decline, the reactions of the general public, the attitudes of grassroots family planning cadres, the appeal from scholars, international experiences, the merging of population and family planning commissions, and national leaders’ attitudes. The paper concludes with an analysis of the cost of this birth control policy over the past decades.     

Marital fertility during the Korean demographic transition: child survival and birth spacing

In this paper, we examine marital fertility patterns during the demographic transition in Korea. The demographic transition was a fundamental transformation in human societies, and has been a key topic in demographic research. However, our understanding of the demographic transition in Korea is limited, largely due to a lack of adequate data. By using individual longitudinal data drawn from the population registers in a rural Korean village between 1920 and 1977, we attempt to contribute to this literature. We first discuss conceptual and data issues, and the historical context. We then test a key exposition of demographic transition theory: an improvement in child survival was a prerequisite for fertility decline. We find that: (1) an improvement in child survival was crucial for marital fertility changes across birth cohorts; (2) the relationship between child survival and marital fertility remained stable; (3) parity-specific fertility control emerged early and birth spacing became important later as ways of limiting marital fertility; and (4) the sex of the deceased offspring became important for marital fertility. The implications of these findings for the Korean demographic transition and future study topics are discussed.     

Paying the levy: Taxable wealth in Bridgetown,Barbados, 1680–1715

Differential fertility can be attributed to economic and cultural factors, but the family also plays an important role. Fertility behavior may be transmitted from parents to children through heritable dispositions or via socialization. Previous research has shown, however, that the expression of genetic effects depends on the interplay with the environment. In this article we take a long-term view and examine how the different mechanisms shifted over time and across social and local contexts on the basis of a large-scale database containing 100 thousand sibling pairs born between 1810 and 1870 in the Dutch province of Zeeland, a society undergoing demographic transition and industrialization. Corroborating earlier research, we find a significant increase in the expression of heritabilities and a fading of social influence for women born after the 1840s, who started their reproductive careers during the historical fertility decline in this region. Our study points out that the ‘social control’ of fertility was particularly reduced for women born in towns, women originating from the urban or rural laboring classes, and women from communities with a relatively liberal religious climate. Our findings are in line with research emphasizing the important role played by women in decision-making processes around childbearing, and could indicate the conditions that enhanced women's position in household bargaining during the historical fertility decline.     

Reproductive behaviour in the Lutheran urban family from historical Poland (the Parish of St. Peter from Poznań, the second half of the nineteenth century)

Fertility and reproductive behaviour in the nineteenth-century Lutheran family from the city of Poznań was characterized. Use was made of the St. Peter parish (Peterkirche) registers from 1840s to 1870s, upon which reconstructions of the individual histories of 463 families were based. Fertility was assessed on the basis of the length of between-birth intervals according to their order and age of women. Next, the age-specific fertility rates of women f_x and Coale Index of marital fertility I_g were calculated. From a seasonal rhythm of both marital and illegitimate births, and reconstructed on the basis of these, the annual rhythm of marital and prenuptial conceptions were characterized. In the Lutheran Parish of St. Peter from the city of Poznań illegitimate births and prenuptial conceptions accounted for almost 10% and over 5% of all births, respectively. Lack of seasonality for marital births was noted here. Illegitimate births, by contrast, were characterized by a statistically significant annual rhythm: their maximum was noted in April, which was a result of conceptions during summer. The average woman with completed reproduction cycle gave birth to the first and to the last child at the ages of 29 and 40 years, respectively. She therefore used 32% of her whole reproductive period. Late age of birth of the first child was associated with late age of marriage of women (on average 28 years). An average woman with completed reproduction gave birth to 4.8 children. The average length of the protogenesic interval was 18 months. The highest fertility occurred in women aged between 20 to 29 years. The value of the I_g index was 0.67, and proved a lack of birth control rather than conscious birth regulation. Generally, Lutheran women from Poznań were characterized by fairly high reproductive potential.     

Policies and practices of fertility control under the state socialism

The socialist state run modernization produced low fertility throughout Eastern Europe. Fertility rates started falling soon after the end of the Second World War quickly reaching below replacement levels in many areas. This article examines the state responses to the falling fertility as well as birth control practices that individuals relied on in order to maintain small families. After outlining some common features of population policies under the state socialism, the article focuses on family planning policies in Yugoslavia. It is argued that liberal population policy and uninterrupted liberal abortion legislation in Yugoslavia, resulted, among other reasons, from the communist leadership's commitment to national and gender equality, respectively. It is further argued that gender hierarchy within the marriage and family remained almost untouched by the socialist project of women's emancipation and that these hierarchical gender relations shaped birth control practices in specific ways.     

‘Two children to make ends meet’: the ideal family size,parental responsibilities and costs of children on two sides of the Iron Curtain during the post-war fertility decline

One of the major corollaries of the post-war fertility boom and decline is that two-child families became common across Europe after the 1970s. Despite the general agreement on the convergence of fertility trends, there is still little understanding of how this change took place in a comparative perspective of Western and Eastern Europe, which at that time were characterised by Cold War tensions of different ideological regimes. This study addresses this aspect by focusing on individual decisions around childbearing, child-rearing and family size. Based on 104 oral histories from Switzerland and Ukraine, this study illuminates that the urban setting provided parents with a similar set of constraints and opportunities, which eventually resulted in strikingly similar perceptions of the costs of childrearing on two sides of the Iron Curtain. Individuals’ motives to postpone first birth in Switzerland and second birth in Ukraine rested on a similar aspiration to invest in the well-being of children by ensuring material security for the family. This aim was increasingly achieved through female labour-force participation and adoption of modern contraception – the pill in Switzerland and abortion in Ukraine. While the timing of returning to the labour market and the share of women working after entering parenthood might have varied across the two contexts, a good mother became increasingly defined in both contexts in terms of providing emotionally and financially for her children. Although the introduction of modern birth control methods allowed couples to plan family size more carefully, it also made Swiss and Ukrainian women increasingly carry the major costs and actual burden of birth control. Altogether, this study challenges the common assumption around the persistence of strikingly different demographic realities in post-war Western and Eastern Europe by uncovering the mechanisms behind the stabilisation of family size around the two-child family ideal.     

The stem family and labour markets: Reflections on households and firms in Japan's economic development

This paper examines a view that the traditional stem family system was one of the preconditions for Japan's modern economic development, focusing on labour markets and skill formation practices. The paper begins with a brief look at the Japanese stem family household formation rules. Then, exploration is made, first, on the self-employed, the largest sector of the early modern economy; second, the merchant house and its employment patterns as an origin of present day large corporations' employment system and skill formation and human capital management practices; and third, workshop industries, which formed middle and lower layers of the manufacturing sector in the period of industrialisation. Finally, women's marriage behaviour is examined in relation to labour markets, especially changes in real wages. All this is an attempt to go some way towards a better understanding of the ways in which the family economy and corporate firms worked in economic development, rather than to suggest an alternative hypothesis on the relationship between family and household factors and subsequent economic development.     

Family systems in central Russia in the 1830s and 1890s

Czap, Moon, and Mironov have suggested that two regional models for the rural family existed side by side in 19th-century Russia. This article approaches the question by examining the rural family as a statistically describable system occurring in a given economic and institutional context. The material applies to 8 local communities representing central Russia in the 1830s and 11 in the 1890s, the majority being the same communities in both cases. The aim is to determine from the household arrangements, economies, and institutional frameworks of these communities the kind of context in which a certain family system occurred. By relating these conclusions to data on the economic circumstances and social structures of the different parts of central Russia, two regional family systems are identified. Czap's “Eastern European family type” predominated in this area in the 1830s. Because the reforms and reorientation of economic activities in the 1860s brought about changes in household arrangements, however, a pattern characteristic of communities with a substantial degree of social stratification became the norm for most of the area.     

我国农村土地家庭承包经营权的权利主体探究

家庭承包是农村土地承包经营中非常重要的一种方式,家庭承包经营权的权利主体是集体经济组织成员还是农户直接影响到了该权利的利益归属以及存续过程中的权利变更。结合我国农村历史发展状况和现行法律的立法目的,应该明确家庭承包经营权的实质权利主体应为集体经济组织成员,该权利具有成员权的属性,是农村集体经济组织成员人人平等享有的权利,农户只是家庭承包中的形式主体。     

Families and mountains in the Balkans: Christian and Muslim household structures in the Rhodopes, 19th–20th century

This article investigates household structures and household formation patterns among Orthodox Christians and Muslim Bulgarians in the Rhodope Mountains between 1875 and 1935. The analysis, which is based on the computerized evaluation of household listings as well as on ethnographic sources, reveals obvious differences in the structures of Orthodox and Muslim households. Muslim households were more likely to be complex, whereas among the Orthodox population, nuclear families prevailed. But, despite the different cultural backgrounds and economic activities of the two communities, the underlying structure of their household formations shared also some common features. Christian and Muslim households did not differ with respect to size. The complex households of the Muslims were just a phase in the developmental cycle and rarely included more than two simple families. Among both Christians and Muslims, the village community was more important than descent groups. The Rhodopes therefore do not fit into the pattern of the zadruga (the large, complex family household in the western Balkans). A division appears to have existed between family forms and social network patterns for the eastern and western Balkans. Clearly, generalizations about family structures are difficult because of the great variability of family patterns within the Balkans.     

Family systems in central Russia in the 1830s and 1890s

Czap, Moon, and Mironov have suggested that two regional models for the rural family existed side by side in 19th-century Russia. This article approaches the question by examining the rural family as a statistically describable system occurring in a given economic and institutional context. The material applies to 8 local communities representing central Russia in the 1830s and 11 in the 1890s, the majority being the same communities in both cases. The aim is to determine from the household arrangements, economies, and institutional frameworks of these communities the kind of context in which a certain family system occurred. By relating these conclusions to data on the economic circumstances and social structures of the different parts of central Russia, two regional family systems are identified. Czap's “Eastern European family type” predominated in this area in the 1830s. Because the reforms and reorientation of economic activities in the 1860s brought about changes in household arrangements, however, a pattern characteristic of communities with a substantial degree of social stratification became the norm for most of the area.     

Family relationships in comic postcards 1900–1930

This paper discusses how comic postcards circulating in Europe and North America between 1900 and 1930 featured various aspects of family life. A range of situations were considered amusing involving babies, children, parents, mothers-in-law, servants and the elderly. The four situations that were pictured most frequently were flirtations, fertility, the struggle between husband and wife for dominance in the household, and courtship. The presence of widely shared attitudes to family life within the western world is suggested by the fact that the same sort of humour featured in cards sent and received in different European countries and in North America. On the other hand, the text on the back of the cards indicates that some writers had ignored or misunderstood the humour represented on the front of the card, whereas others had chosen their cards with care.     

Family relationships in comic postcards 1900–1930

This paper discusses how comic postcards circulating in Europe and North America between 1900 and 1930 featured various aspects of family life. A range of situations were considered amusing involving babies, children, parents, mothers-in-law, servants and the elderly. The four situations that were pictured most frequently were flirtations, fertility, the struggle between husband and wife for dominance in the household, and courtship. The presence of widely shared attitudes to family life within the western world is suggested by the fact that the same sort of humour featured in cards sent and received in different European countries and in North America. On the other hand, the text on the back of the cards indicates that some writers had ignored or misunderstood the humour represented on the front of the card, whereas others had chosen their cards with care.