Child naming,religion, and the decline of marital fertility in nineteenth-century america

Demographic historians have long suspected that cultural factors played an important role in the early decline of fertility in nineteenth-century America. Using the recently released 1850 and 1880 IPUMS samples, this article investigates correlates of marital fertility among native-born white women of native parentage, focusing on the relationship between religion and fertility. Two proxies of religious sentiment are found to be significantly correlated with marital fertility. First, county-level census data indicate that the presence of Congregationalists and Universalists was associated with lower marital fertility, while the presence of Lutherans was associated with higher marital fertility. Second, the proportion of own children with biblical names—believed to be a proxy of parental religiosity—is found to be positively associated with marital fertility. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that traditional religious beliefs were an impediment to the adoption of family limitation strategies.     

Religion,masculinity and fertility decline

This paper provides the sketch of a new mechanism explaining the delay of Catholic fertility, namely the changing norms of masculinity and fatherhood, through a comparative study of the first fertility transition in Switzerland (1880–1930).

Comparative analysis of religious discourse attests to striking differences in norms of respectable masculinity. In the Protestant canton, men were especially targeted and strongly incited to change their sexual behaviour and limit their offspring in order to comply with a new model of the good husband and father. The religious teachings had an impact due to the social position of the persons enouncing the norms, to the efficient diffusion reaching the majority of men, and to the effective sanctioning, as the example of pastoral enquiries demonstrates. In the Catholic canton by contrast, men were not specifically addressed; the religious discourse supported the husband's rights to frequent sexual intercourse and encouraged him to trust Providence to bring up many children, thus sustaining high levels of fertility. The political repression of public discourse on sexuality defeated every attempt of contesting the husband's marital rights and the Catholic doctrine of procreation. Sexual taboos were particularly severe for women and their total ignorance of sexual matters weakened their bargaining power in fertility decisions.

In the last part of the paper, using quantitative methods, we tried to demonstrate that these norms and mechanisms did indeed influence men's behaviour in the Protestant sample. For this purpose, we measured comparatively the results of some indicators introduced to capture the impact of the norms of respectable masculinity, regarding men's responsibility in contraception and men's ability to maintain dependent children. We hope thus to strengthen the position of a growing number of scholars who state that historical demographers cannot avoid incorporating gender into their explanations of historical trends of fertility and who foster the bridging of qualitative and quantitative methods.     

The decline of civil jury trial in nineteenth-century England

The nineteenth century saw the beginning of the decline of jury trial as the main dispositive mechanism in civil cases in the Superior Courts. The Common Law Procedure Act 1854 gave civil litigants the choice of jury trial, and during the remainder of the century the proportion of litigants choosing jury trial steadily declined. However, the seeds of this decline were sown in the two decades prior to 1854, during which time three factors combined to undermine the institution of the civil jury: recognition among lawyers of the integrity of the bench, the efforts made by lawyers to professionalize the practise of law, and the successful introduction in 1846 of juryless trials in the County Courts.     

Domestic revolution and cultural formation in nineteenth-century ontario,canada

Postwar consensus theory ensured that a middle-class cultural order was fated in North America. Its abandonment encouraged alternative perspectives, including close historical studies of the rise of the urban middle class family through the mid-nineteenth century. These studies located the core of middle-class formation in a virtual domestic revolution, among other changes. A review of recent, diverse evidence, focused on nineteenth-century Ontario, suggests alternatively that in some places the roots of the twentieth-century hegemony of middle-class family culture are more widespread, and are more deeply buried in the last century than current theory and research allows.     

Criminal justice and the nineteenth-century paradigm

This article examines the influence of psychological individualism on nineteenth-century law and criminal justice policy. The nineteenth century—a formative period both for American law and for human sciences—was dominated by a single overarching conception of human behavior. This article explores the implications and consequences of that domination by first examining the general conditions under which individualism flourished in the United States, and then focusing on specific criminal justice policies that were pemised on this individualistic paradigm. It suggests that individualistic assumptions about human behavior were incorporated into what became intractable legal and institutional forms. The article also develops the relationship between law and human science during this period, and the way in which criminal justice policies were advanced as scientific doctrines. Finally, it concludes with a brief discussion of the role played by psychology in criminal justice policy since the nineteenth—century, and the recent resurgence of psychological individualism.     

Domestic revolution and cultural formation in nineteenth-century ontario, canada

Postwar consensus theory ensured that a middle-class cultural order was fated in North America. Its abandonment encouraged alternative perspectives, including close historical studies of the rise of the urban middle class family through the mid-nineteenth century. These studies located the core of middle-class formation in a virtual domestic revolution, among other changes. A review of recent, diverse evidence, focused on nineteenth-century Ontario, suggests alternatively that in some places the roots of the twentieth-century hegemony of middle-class family culture are more widespread, and are more deeply buried in the last century than current theory and research allows.     

Houses,heirs, and non-heirs in the adour valley: Social and geographic mobility in the nineteenth-century

“Providing for the children's future” is a problem that parents should solve by the time children reach adulthood. In the case of a peasant family, the solution involved giving children part of the estate. In the Pyrénées, landownership as well as social status were bequathed to a single heir, while the other children had to leave the family house. What became of these others and where do they go? A small village from the Adour plain has been chosen to show how the system functioned during the nineteenth century, which was replete with economic crises. The study shows that roles and the duties connected with them changed during this century: internalization of local social norms was no longer going to be as successful as in the past. Also, the meaning of the family changed. Earlier, a simple domestic group working for the House, the family began to take on more autonomy as a production unit and started a long trend towards being a haven, a protector of the weak, old and unmarried members of the family.     

The fertility decline in the Dutch province of Limburg, 1880–1960: On understanding historical actors in a constrained environment

The Dutch province of Limburg is mentioned in the European Fertility Project studies because of the fact that its fertility was remarkably high well into the twentieth century and declined only gradually. This article explores the structural background of changes in reproductive behavior in Limburg. The province is economically differentiated in industrial areas and traditional agricultural regions. Also, there is a clear cultural heterogeneity. Using data at the community level, the article analyzes of the economic motivation as well as of the mental acceptation of the introduction of neoMalthusian behavior. The results show that we are better able to explain the variance in behavior as the twentieth century proceeds, and that the factor “economy” appears to be the best predictor, although the effects of a cultural filter become evident.     

Of men,macho, and marital violence

Recent evidence suggests that there may be a relationship between marital satisfaction and the sex role identities of the couple. Specifically, couples in which the husband is either feminine or androgynous appear to be happier. Conversely, couples in which the husband is classified as undifferentiated are apparently more dissatisfied. There is some evidence, as well as theoretical speculation, that abusive husbands may be low in femininity, less likely to be classified as androgynous, and more likely to be classified as undifferentiated. This investigation compared the sex role identification of abusive husbands to that of comparison samples of both discordant, and satisfied, nonviolent husbands. The results indicated that batterers were lower in masculinity, less likely to be classified as androgynous, and more likely to be classified as undifferentiated than husbands in either of the comparison groups. Lack of differentiation between the two nonviolent groups suggests the possibility that findings of previous investigations supportive of a relationship between sex role identity and discord, in general, might be artifactual. The theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.     

Economic status,religion, and demography in an Ulster town in the early twentieth century

The paper offers an analysis of the demography of the confessionally-divided and heavily industrialized northern Irish town of Lurgan in the early twentieth century. Its main source is the individual household forms of the Irish population census of 1911. This was the first Irish census to provide household-level data on the number of children born—and the number still surviving—to married couples co-resident at the time of the census. The paper begins by producing standard cross-tabulations of socio-economic status, as represented by literacy, numeracy, occupation, and the labour force participation of married women, by religion. It then presents econometric analyses of female labour force participation, marital fertility, and infant and child mortality. The greater poverty of Catholic households forced a higher proportion of mothers to work outside the home, mainly as unskilled workers in the town's linen mills. The analysis of the marital fertility suggests that confessional affiliation did not influence family size much at this juncture. The analysis of infant and child mortality suggests that religious affiliation was to a significant extent a cloak for living standards and socio-economic advantage.     

Prison registers,their possibilities and their pitfalls: the case of local prisons in nineteenth-century Quebec

This article presents a methodological discussion and analysis of nineteenth-century local prison registers, using two datasets drawn from the common gaols of Quebec City (1813–1871) and of Montreal (1836–1899). It first examines the analytical possibilities offered by the wealth of serial data in these sources, concentrating especially on marital status and on the reconstruction of prisoners' incarceration histories. It then turns to the pitfalls inherent in exploiting such administrative records, notably the vagaries of social categorization and of stature measurement, arguing for the importance of reconstructing the legal and administrative contexts of prisoner data collection.