Britain's Fertility Decline, 1870-1930 : Causes and Interpretations

There is certainly considerable debate between demographers, economists and historians about the factors and assumptions behind the revolutionary fertility decline c. 1870-1930. Perhaps the two most basic arguments can be reduced to whether one believes that attitudes had changed in the period to accommodate the wishes of both husband and wife in accepting the necessity for some form of birth control ; or whether, as Szreter argues the persistence of a ‘long Victorian era’ in Britain (dissolving only in the permissive 1960’s) had immense repercussions with regards to Britain’s fertility decline. The argument that sexual ignorance and abstinence played important roles must be considered important in the fertility decline and cannot be dismissed - yet analysed alongside other varying economic, social or cultural theories. We must be careful not to speak of the fertility decline as a single unitary process transcending class, regional and cultural barriers. The concept that as the trend was widespread throughout the Western European industrialised nations there must be some form of general causation at work is highly misleading. The role of the British state must not be ignored, neither too the changing perceptions of motherhood and the concept of ‘separate spheres’ for husband and wife merely reinforced by the Great War. Furthermore, different methods of contraception have been promulgated by various sources and their influence needs careful analysis. Therefore the concept of fertility decline is littered with varying, contrasting, sometimes overlapping theories ; what seems most plausible however is that the fertility decline was most likely not due to a single cause, the varying degrees of social class and culture and conjugal ideology behind the different social strata’s in British society suggest there may well be multiple, yet equally acceptable theories.

Undisputedly however, beginning in the 1870’s, women were starting to stop before the end of their fertile years, signalling not only a fundamental change in patterns of family limitation but also new attitudes towards fertility itself. In the space of just a few decades, longstanding childrearing patterns changed irreparably, moving toward the modern norm of two children born in early marriage. McLaren’s research demonstrates that the method of birth control chosen in Britain was strongly influenced by class culture. Generally speaking, the middle-class preference for mechanical devices owed not only to the face that the more affluent could afford such contraception, but to a class culture that promoted conjugal intimacy and encouraged co-operation between men and women in sexual matters. McLaren argued that a sharper division emerged from the working-class marriages, and that lower class women were more likely to choose abortion as the first line of fertility control. Factors of class therefore weighed heavily ; and yet views on ideal family size are still compounded and mediated by a variety of social, cultural and economic considerations. However, perhaps most importantly, the enormous stress that large families placed on working-class parents in the later 19th and early 20th centuries had significant consequences : the recognition that in a competitive and growing society it would no longer to be possible to raise a horde of children amongst the working class : and the promulgation of the ‘quality over quantity’ childrearing theory amongst the middle classes must be considered crucial to the overall fertility decline. The crucial distinction that therefore emerges is whether fertility transitions result from changes in parents motivation to limit family size or from changes in attitudes and access to birth control.

While Malthus emphasises delayed entry to marriage as the most effective control of fertility, demographers since the late 19th century have looked to neo-Malthusian controls such as contraception and abortion. However, modern economic approaches have suggested a somewhat different approach ; instead of focusing on the successes or failures of the contraceptive techniques themselves, the real problem to be explained is why couples go to the trouble to prevent another birth. They must therefore weigh the costs and benefits of life without another child plus the costs of preventing the birth of the next child. The most important example of this problem is the question of the ‘cost of children’. It is frequently asserted that children have become more expensive. Subjects in surveys and interviews by Knodel and Debavalya overwhelmingly report that children cost more now than they did in the past. However, they are not describing a change in the costs of children as much as a change in their own definition of appropriate childrearing. Historically, children have become expensive not because the prices of commodities consumed by children have risen, but rather because parents have decided to invest more goods and services into providing and caring for their children. In effect, parents have chosen to raise one or two highly cared for, educated children rather than five or six less expensive offspring. This is therefore the result of a cultural change and carries with it considerable weight in validity. Easterlin’s Supply-Demand model applies this cultural factor and adds to it extra economic significance. The model certifies that couples implicitly have in mind a desired family size. They thus compare the costs and benefits of children to the costs and benefits of alternative life-styles available with their income. Parents subjectively evaluate the costs and benefits of the family that they will have if they don’t employ birth control techniques. However, we may criticise this theory for its overt rigidity - applying economic ‘cause and effect’ and ‘planning’ principles to complex patterns of human reproductive behaviour is somewhat deterministic. Simply put, do families make these kinds of decisions? Oral testimony has often revealed that ‘family planning’, especially amongst working-class families, was often non-existent. Perhaps fertility decline would therefore be better explained through emerging and wider patterns of demographic transition.

From the demographic history of Europe we can discern a common sequence of events that were key in predicting future developments. Advances in technology beginning in the 18th century led to a rising standard of living and improved public health care. These forces thus reduced the level of mortality and increased the rate of population growth in the subsequent century. Lower mortality increased the survival, and the supply of children - yet the growth of industrialisation and urbanisation introduced new life-styles reducing the demand for children. However, critics have charged that this is not a theory at all : but only a vague description of empirical correlations. It is not entirely clear whether the changes described are economic or social in origin. Yet all currently developed societies have undergone a fertility transition, despite differences in timing and culture. Thus, a variety of specific incentives for lower fertility rates can be related to the general process of positive economic development : historiography from the 1960’s and 70’s generalised that “economic development is the best birth control pill”. However, this sketches over the degree of personal and individual conscious choice that such a personal subject warranted. We must therefore dig deeper beneath the surface to find what exactly motivated men and women to limit fertility. In 1976 Caldwell offered a restatement of the demographic transition theory that cultural changes - associating the fertility transition with a change in the direction of “intergenerational flows of wealth”. Caldwell argued that in pre-transition families ‘wealth’ tends to flow from children to parents, making large families and unrestricted fertility most desirable. In contrast, “post-transitional” societies are characterised by the heavy investments that parents make in the education and support of their children - the fertility transition thus occurs when the net flow of ‘wealth’ shifts direction. However, there are several problematic features of the wealth-flows theory, Caldwell’s terminology has caused severe confusion about the character of ‘wealth-flows’. Economists are further likely to object to ‘wealth’ being defined beyond a purely economic category as traits such as “deference” and “prestige” are part of the wealth-flow from parents to children. Although economic change is a large part of the historical explanation of fertility decline, Caldwell’s theory is a fundamentally cultural model : his description of the potential for demographic change in Africa and Asia points to the central role of ‘westernisation’, the spread of European concepts of family relationships and life-styles. It’s inherent weakness however, is glossing over the role of personal choice in relation to contraceptive advice and techniques among different sections of society.

The theory of demographic transition implies that family planning programs could do little to create a fertility transition. However, the more modern European Fertility Project has damagingly weakened the link between economic development and fertility decline and strengthened the case for family planning : economic development would not, therefore, necessarily reduce fertility. Gillis furthered the argument that family planning and shifting perceptions of motherhood were principal causes of the fertility decline : “the crucial cultural shift was from an understanding of motherhood as childbearing to an understanding of motherhood as childrearing.” The new understanding of motherhood and fatherhood therefore involved a sharp division of labour between the sexes, the male labelled as ‘breadwinner’ and the mother as the vanguard of the home. Mothering was thus transformed into motherhood, a personal identity integral to woman’s growing femininity : by 1870, it had become the equivalent to the masculine career. Now understood as childrearing, good motherhood thus ceased to be defined in terms of numbers. A woman’s claim to femininity was established by the first birth - additional children did not add to a woman’s status. The ancient middle and upper class tradition of sending children ‘out to nurse’ was terminated by the middle class especially. After 1870, most middle-class women felt fully responsible for the nurturance and training of their infants. The individuality of the mother-child relationship meant an intensification of childrearing, transforming it from a part-time occupation to a lifelong career. Can it therefore be that in this context me may begin to understand the fertility decline that occurred after 1870? The ‘rising costs’ theory fails to take into account the changing meaning of parenthood. We may argue therefore that the significant change was not the changing cost of children but the regendering process that created an everlasting bond between mother and child. However, what of working class families? One might argue that this theory fails to account for the different aspirations and ideology underpinning working-class fertility behaviour. Secombe promulgates the fertility decline “almost entirely to the reduction of marital fertility”, that in most regions the reduction of marital fertility was achieved entirely be means of ‘stopping’ - the cessation of childbirth prior to menopause. ‘Stopping’ was accomplished through either a rise in the incidence of induced abortion, frequent resort to coitus interruptus, decline in coital frequency through sexual abstention and increased use of contraceptive devices. Beginning with abortion : there is considerable attention that its incidence did rise significantly. Studies by hospital gynaecological departments and women’s clinics estimated that roughly 16-20% of pregnancies were deliberately terminated. Therefore, it seems highly reasonable to assume that a rise in the abortion rate contributed considerably to the decline of the birth rate prior to the widespread use of contraception in marriage. However, because a great many working-class women in the 19th century has sought abortions, it is unlikely that rates would have risen sufficiently in the early 20th century to account for the continuing decline at that time. With regards to coitus interruptus, Lewis-Faning’s retrospective study (1949) concluded that nine out of ten limiters before 1920 had relied upon coitus interruptus. However, the famous correspondence received by Marie Stopes in “Mother England” tells a very different story. 40 correspondents propose sexual abstinence as the method they most practised, with “withdrawal” only in 13. Data from maternal clinics in Manchester and Salford revealed that both abstinence and coitus interruptus were widely practiced by working-class couples, although the former far more frequently. Yet all sources do seem to agree that contraceptive devices were infrequently used by working-class couples before 1930. For many working people, fears of physical injury and deep moral reservations meant contraceptives were regarded as repulsive and unnatural. Furthermore, condoms had a deeply unsavoury reputation, being associated with prostitution and the permeation of venereal disease, which was indeed the principal context of their use in this period. However, despite this, there were also problems with sexual abstinence or coitus interruptus. Many husbands would not be coercive : and while wives could put off intercourse for a time, the vast majority of female respondents in the Stopes material could not steadfastly refuse a cohabiting husband his “conjugal rights”. Without the active co-operation of their husbands, celibacy was impossible. Even with husbands’ consent, abstinence and withdrawal wracked marital relations, one woman remarking, “the result is our married life is spoiled and we are gradually drifting apart.” However, in “Mother England” there are a substantial number of examples of willingness on the part of many husbands to restrain their desires. Yet to engender family limitation, both spouses must have a strong desire to cease childbearing and the capacity to take effective action towards that end. The traditional view is that women were strongly motivated to limit fertility yet lacked the “marital power” to avert conception, while men had it in their power to abstain but were, in many cases, not sufficiently motivated to restrain their sexuality. Therefore a vital aspect thus emerges : the underlying shift in the family makeup, moving men’s reproductive interests increasingly into line with that of their spouses.

The realisation by fathers that family limitation was not only necessary but also beneficial to their general standard of living is a fact that cannot be ignored. Research undertaken by Fisher exemplifies this argument through thorough usage of oral testimony. The research draws explicit attention to the vital part played by the husband in contraceptive strategies. The central assumption in the majority of analyses of the gendered dynamics of birth control is that, according to Secombe, “that women were the driving force behind family limitation”, and to Caldwell that, “common to all fertility transitions is women’s increased ability to determine their own fertility.” Thus the role men may have played has often been either understated or ignored. Importantly, the concept that men were extremely affected by the increased costs of childrearing must be considered in the process of fertility decline. Fisher interviewed 107 individuals, both male and female, from two working-class communities of Oxford and South Wales. Oral testimony suggest that men’s knowledge of birth control was far more extensive than women’s and that men’s networks of information about contraception were much more developed and varied. Over half the women interviewed claimed to have known nothing at all about any form of birth control before they were married - only three male interviewees claimed such ignorance. Women’s lack of basic sexual knowledge had profound consequences for their ability to absorb birth control advice : one testimony recorded that, “men knew all about those things long before they got married.” Hall has also referred to forms of information to which young men were far more likely to be exposed, and sexual subcultures from which young girls were vigorously sheltered from. Mass Observation’s ‘Little Kinsey’ survey from 1940 found that at the end of the 1940’s, “women are worse informed than men” about birth control - surely this must have been even greater in decades previous. Men seemingly “took the responsibility of seeing that there were no conceptions…it was the man, it was the man’s job.” Male methods of birth control (coitus interruptus and condoms) were much more frequently used than female methods (caps and abortion). The increased choice of these male methods facilitated male initiative ; taking responsibility for contraceptive choices fitted into a dynamic in which men took the central role in sexual activity.

Fisher’s study shows that fertility decisions were very often mutual, “well he knew I really didn’t want to keep on having children”, shared between husband and wife. Therefore, despite historians understanding that men often controlled sexual activity - male roles in birth control have not been presented as pivotal to the changes in contraceptive behaviour. Fisher’s research reveals that male perspectives were much more helpful than once though, and suggests that changes in male attitudes formed one of the most crucial components of the fertility decline. Furthermore, can this change in male attitudes be attributed to a relative degree of marital abstinence? Szreter argues this certainly may well have been the case. Individuals brought up in British society over many centuries accepted the norm to delay marriage and to therefore submit to coital abstinence as young adults. Sexual self-denial had been the societal norm for young unmarried adults, associated with the British institution of late marriage : average age at first marriage remained above 25 well into the 20th century. This long-term trend may well be relevant to the demographic evidence from 1911 which has show a continuing relationship between delayed marriage and restricted family size and the spacing of births from early on in marriage. These findings do suggest that during the period of declining fertility the practice of abstinence may have provided the populace with a principal means to limit fertility once married. We must not forget that abstinence within marriage may also have been associated with keeping mistresses or using prostitutes, especially amongst the upper classes. So long as the incidence of delayed marriage continues to be positively correlated with limitation of births within marriage, as has found to be the case in the 1911 occupational data analysed by Szreter, there is thus strong primary evidence that the principal method of birth control being deployed by the populace was some form of sexual abstinence within marriage. Probably the most important source of direct testimony came from the National Birth Rate Commission’s ‘voluntary census’ of 1914, distributed to assess differences in fertility and contraceptive practices between different classes of women. Of the 289 birth controllers, 13% practised coitus interruptus, 10% used condoms, 16% douches, 10% ‘artificial’ means and an overwhelming 52% ‘continence’. Abstinence certainly seems entirely plausible given the context of the period : the National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act commenced in 1869 and secured, by the mid-1880’s, nit only repeal but also the strictest rules against sex in the world at that time, raising the female age of consent from 13 to 16. By the 1880’s this was part of a wider ‘moral purity’ campaign whose objectives were to engender an increasingly strict formal regulation of various forms of sexuality, both public and private. The legislation and opinion on such matters as venereal disease, homosexuality and prostitution can be taken as signs that many forms of sexual behaviour were cast in an extremely negative light by the late Victorians.

Many individuals therefore may well have come to entertain strongly negative or at best guilty or ambivalent feelings towards sex - associating it with disease and dishonour. Szreter concludes the argument, that “attempted abstinence within marriage was the single most widespread and frequently used method of birth control during the period before 1920.” The argument, in its wider societal context also envelops an understanding of the important role played by the state. The role central or local government played in the fertility decline is conveyed by Johansson, who argued that state policy will always have a vital effect on fertility as “they provide an important set of institutional rules within which childrearing costs and benefits are defined and perceived.” Especially toward the end of the 19th century, the policies of the state on labour and education shifted underlying perceptions of childhood - the transition to them becoming total dependents. With regards to education, the Foster Education Act (1870), Sandon Act (1876) and the Mundella Act (1880) furthered the state’s commitment to provide elementary education for all children. Working-class parents thus found themselves faced with a compulsory set of educational expense and inconvenience in having large numbers of children. Working-class child school attendance at elementary school increased from 68% in 1870 to 82% by 1895. Small families were becoming increasingly favoured by a new set of societal, cultural and economic constraints.

Therefore, the attempt to describe fertility decline has provoked high levels of debate and theorising amongst historians. It appears that socio-economic explanations no longer have significant context with regards to the specific example of Britain. Cultural and specific examples with regards to marital behaviour by both male and female partner have shed new light on the fertility decline. Furthermore, Szreter’s stress on the importance of marital abstinence has opened up new avenues of debate and theory. It would be somewhat foolish to label one direct factor as totally responsible for the fertility decline. The change in national perceptions of childhood towards being a time of learning and financial dependence of parents, particularly mothers proved immeasurably important. Mothers thus invested their time in parenthood : fathers capital. This made having large numbers of children not only undesirable, but in many cases impossible, and led to many of the coital restraint practices that become so prevalent amongst large numbers of British married couples.

Bibliography :-

L. Hall, Sex, gender and social change in Britain since 1880
S. Szreter, Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860-1940
H. Cook, The long sexual revolution, English women, sex and contraception
J. Gillis (ed.), The European experience of declining fertility
L. Hall, Hidden Anxieties, male sexuality 1900-1950
M. Stopes, Mother England
K. Fisher, “She was quite satisfied with the arrangements I made” gender and birth control in Britain 1920-50, Past and Present (2000)
L. Davidoff, The family story
A. McLaren, Birth control in 19th century England