Infant mortality in London, 1538-1850: a methodological study

A review of evidence on infant mortality derived from the London bills of mortality and parish registers indicates that there were major registration problems throughout the whole of the parish register period. One way of addressing these problems is to carry out reconstitution studies of individual London parishes, but there are a number of problems with reconstitution methodology, including the traffic in corpses between parishes both inside and outside of London and the negligence of clergymen in registering both baptisms and burials. In this paper the triangulation of sources has been employed to measure the adequacy of burial registration, including the comparison of data from bills of mortality, parish registers and probate returns, as well as the use of the same-name technique. This research indicates that between 20 and 40 per cent of burials went unregistered in London during the parish register period.     

Charles Henry Pearson on the Decline of the Family

A common observation and frequent lament about family change in contemporary societies is of the shift of childraising responsibilities from parents to the state. This shift (and what might be done to reverse it) was a theme, for example, of James S. Coleman's 1992 presidential address to the American Sociological Association. In the new circumstances, said Coleman, “carrying the family's honor into the future is less important”; in many families adolescent children “are abandoned psychologically and socially.” The state, however, still has “strong interests in maximizing a child's value to society, or minimizing its cost.” A century before Coleman, Charles Henry Pearson, in the passage reproduced below from his book National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), wrote of the decline of the family in quite similar terms. He argued that state intervention was undertaken only reluctantly, a byproduct of changes in conjugal relations from arranged marriages to “marriages of inclination,” along with easier divorce, and consequent lessening of parental interest in the family line. The state, almost by default, needed to assert the public interest in the raising of children, even though its measures, notably compulsory education, further eroded parents' rights over their children and children's sense of duty and obligation to their parents. While Pearson mostly welcomed the gender equity and individualism he saw emerging, he regretted their effect on the family—on what he termed (metaphorically) “the religion of household life.” His prescient forecast was of “a state of things in which marriages will be contracted without reflection, and broken up without scruple, in which children will be cared for when they are young with, it may be, even more tenderness than of old, but with incomparably less anxiety to fit them for the moral obligations of life, and in which the claim of parents to be obeyed will cease with the children's need of support.” His conclusion: “Family life will be a gracious and decorative incident in the system of such a society; but the family, as a constituent part of the State, as the matrix in which character is moulded, will lose its importance as the clan and the city have done.” Charles Henry Pearson (1830–94) was a British historian who had a second career as an educationist and politician in the colony of Victoria in pre‐Federation Australia. Educated in London and Oxford, he was appointed professor of modern history at King's College, London. His early work included travel writings and a well‐received History of England during the Early and Middle Ages (1867). When his academic career stalled (partly because of very poor eyesight) he emigrated to Australia, where he became closely involved with educational issues. He was elected to the Victorian legislature and was for a time minister of education, able to put into practice his firm views favoring secular education. (See his remark below that Church‐run schools “have generally been strong enough to exclude competition, [but] not rich or enlightened enough to use their monopoly well.”) In 1892 he returned to England, and the following year published National Life and Character. This work, widely read and praised at the time, went through several editions over the next two decades. It essayed forecasts in various domains of society and politics, including a prediction (couched in elitist language) of the passing of the ascendancy of European peoples as other nations grew in numbers and strength (“We shall awake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside,…”). The excerpt is from pages 261–270 of Chapter 5, “The Decline of the Family,” in National Life and Character: A Forecast (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893).     

Aspects of the demographic situation in seventeen parishes in Shropshire 1711-60. An exercise based on parish registers

The area chosen for study was the Coalbrookdale coalfield, a fairly closely knit community north of the Severn at Ironbridge, and at that time undergoing industrialization, based on the Darby works in the Dale. It is believed to have been a fairly closed population, little affected by migration, and with little nonconformist influence. All the registers are available in printed form. There were few gaps of much significance, and they were filled by linear interpolation wherever possible. All information was recorded on standard forms and may be summarized as follows:

Baptisms show severe setbacks in 1728-9, 1741-2 and 1756-7. There is a marked excess of male baptisms. There was an increase in illegitimacy over the period, and observed levels were higher than, for instance, in recent French studies. The vast majority of children were those of local residents, a few from adjacent villages.

Marriages exhibit fewer fluctuations than baptisms. There were minor booms, in 1730 (following high mortality), and in 1756-7. The great majority of marriages were between people of the same parish. Only 11 per cent involved one or both partners not resident in the county. The proportion of marriages where one partner was not ‘of this parish’ actually falls towards the end. It is not known whether this was a real movement or due to attempts to enforce the Settlement Laws.

Burials show the most pronounced fluctuations. There were peaks of burials in 1728-9, 1741-2 and 1757-8. Children were counted separately, according to definitions used in previous studies. Over 40 per cent of all burials were those of children. Infants were counted where it was possible to check on the baptisms of buried children. In these villages about a third of the child burials were those of infants of about one year old or less. There is a tendency for child burials to rise over the period, but this may be due to more accurate registration later. Where marital status could be determined in three parishes, only 2·5 per cent of women buried were spinsters. The sex ratio of deaths is similar to that of baptisms. The ratio of male burials to females is highest in infancy and then falls. 98 per cent of those buried were ‘of this’ or of the adjoining parish.

Different fertility calculations were made giving ratios of either 5·18 or 5·43 baptisms per marriage in the related period.

The fifty years were marked by long-term growth, with three pronounced peaks of natural increase (1716-25, 1731-45, 1746-55). For the whole period there was an excess of either 40 or 46 baptisms over each roo burials.

An attempt was made to reconstruct total population at each point. A starting figure of about 11,500 people was established for 1676 from the Compton census, the hearth tax returns being found unsuitable. Various growth models were tried to see which would fit the observed facts. Constant growth rates were found unrealistic, but a formula was found which allowed for the wave-like movements during the observed period. It is shown that if baptisms ware inflated by 15 per cent to arrive at births, and burials by 10 per cent to find deaths (as in previous studies), it is possible to calculate a population of 11,500 in 1720 and roughly 20,000 in 1760, with intermediate figures tallying with the observed natural increase or desrease, and a plausible set of birth rates (between 30 and 42 per thousand) death rates (between 16·1 and 43·5 per thousand, the latter figure in 1729), and marriage rates between 4-6 (in years of disaster) up to 10·5 (in the recovery year 1730).     

Yet another inquiry into the trustworthiness of eighteenth-century London's Bills of Mortality

This is an enquiry into how eighteenth-century London's Bills of Mortality were compiled. It concludes that while they remain tolerably accurate in aggregate, particularly when considered over a number of years, they are liable to be very misleading if particular localities or parishes are considered. They are a record of registered burials-not deaths-of most of those who had been baptised as Anglicans, so they omit some burial grounds within London, and some dissenters. Crucially, they are most misleading guides to those who had died in one parish but whose family chose to have them buried in another. Several London parishes deliberately undercut their neighbours by charging lower burial fees to attract custom; others opened extra-parochial burial grounds. St Martin-in-the-Fields offers an example of the latter from 1806, but the scale of the new burial ground was not large and it was mainly confined to those who had died in the workhouse. Much more significant was the neighbouring parish of St Anne Soho, which at its peak period in the 1760s to the 1790s was alone handling the equivalent of between 2 and 5 per cent of all Anglican burials within the total area of London's Bills of Mortality. This was only one, though perhaps a particularly egregious, London parish, while the export of corpses to one's erstwhile 'home' parish demonstrates why the Bills cannot be trusted in their detailed geography, as well as providing a warning to all English population historians confronted with a sudden fall or rise in their burial totals.     

Population in the UN Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook 2000

Most specialized agencies in the United Nations system have taken to compiling a periodic status report on their field. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) issued the first in a proposed biennial series in 1998, titled Global Environment Outlook‐1 or GEO‐1. The second in the series, Global Environment Outlook 2000, was published in 1999. GEO‐2000 is described by the UNEP's Executive Director, Klaus Töpfer, in the foreword as “a comprehensive integrated assessment of the global environment at the turn of the millennium… [and] a forward‐looking document, providing a vision into the 21st century.” Its status, however, is rendered uncertain by the printed caution that “The contents of this volume do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of UNEP or contributory organizations.” GEO‐2000 paints a generally bleak picture of environmental trends. It evidences a wide array of particulars (“In the Southern Ocean, the Patagonian toothfish is being over‐fished and there is a large accidental mortality of seabirds caught up in fishing equipment”), but perhaps of more import are its statements about the root causes of environmental problems and what must be done. The excerpts below reflect some of these general views as they pertain to population. They are taken from the section entitled “Areas of danger and opportunity” in Chapter 1 of the report, and from the section “Tackling root causes” in Chapter 5. High resource consumption, fueled by affluent, Western lifestyles, is seen as a basic cause of environmental degradation. Cutting back this consumption will be required, freeing up resources for development elsewhere. Materialist values associated with urban living are part of the problem, given the concentration of future population growth in cities. And “genuine globalization” will entail free movement of people as well as capital and goods, thus optimizing “the population to environmental carrying capacity.” Some of these positions are at least questionable: the supposed “innate environmental sensitivity of people raised on the land or close to nature,” or the aim of “globalization of population movements.” The latter does not appear in the recommendations, perhaps because of an implicit assumption that the effect of open borders on environmental trends is unlikely to be favorable. (For an earlier statement of the same sentiment—from 1927—see the comments by Albert Thomas, first director of the ILO, reproduced in the Archives section of PDR 9, no. 4.)     

Sidney Webb on the Penalization of Parenthood

The costs of educating and socializing children to take on adult roles in the economy and society are borne in part by their parents and in part, recognizing the substantial public‐good element involved, by the community or the state. The size of that public subsidy and how it is allocated across families of different incomes potentially affect decisions on childbearing—that, at least, is the assumption behind one category of measures seeking to raise fertility where it is very low. That the arguments underlying this area of social policy are of long standing is shown by the statement reproduced below by the prominent British socialist Sidney Webb. It is his evidence before the National Birth‐rate Commission, delivered on July 8, 1918. The Commission was set up in 1913 by the National Council of Public Morals, a self‐appointed group of prominent citizens. It issued a widely read report, The Declining Birth‐Rate: Its Causes and Effects, in 1916. However, the continuing drop in the birth rate (from 24 per 1000 in 1913 to 18 in 1918) led to calls for further investigation and to a reconstituted Commission. One of the terms of reference for this second deliberation was to consider “the economic problems of parenthood in view of the rise of prices and taxation and their possible solutions.” Sidney Webb's statement takes up this matter with characteristic clarity and conviction. Webb is exercised both by the overall deficit of births and, more particularly, by its disproportionate weighting among “the prudent and responsible, and those capable of foresight.” (This eugenic concern is spelled out more strongly in his 1907 Fabian Tract, The Decline of the Birth‐rate.) Various ways in which “the economic penalisation of parenthood might be mitigated” are considered, including free schooling, public housing, and abolition of the “marriage penalty” in income tax. But he puts most store in “some system of universal endowment of children during their period of complete dependence.” (In its subsequent report, the Commission declined to recommend any such scheme.) Webb's proposals prefigure many of the social policies later adopted in European welfare states—with at best seemingly modest influence on fertility. Sidney Webb (1859–1947) was a significant figure in the history of social democratic thought in Britain. He was an early member of the Fabian Society and one of the group that in 1895 established the London School of Economics. As a member of Parliament in the 1920s, he held ministerial posts in the first two Labour governments. In collaboration with his wife Beatrice, Webb was a prolific writer on social problems and policies—notably trade unionism, local government, and Fabian socialism. The text below is taken from Problems of Population and Parenthood [Being the Second Report of and the chief evidence taken by the National Birthrate Commission, 1918–1920.], London: Chapman and Hall, 1920.     

The US National Intelligence Council on the Changing Geopolitical Landscape

The National Intelligence Council, a body reporting to the Director of National Intelligence, draws on expertise from within and outside the US intelligence community to assess strategic developments bearing on national security. In addition to its classified reports (notably the National Intelligence Estimates) the Council also issues unclassified versions of some of its work. In December 2004 it released a report, Mapping the Global Future, the outcome of a year‐long study known as the 2020 Project, looking at geopolitical trends in the world over the medium term. Robert L. Hutchings, the NIC's then chairman, writes in a preface that this report “offers a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss.” It differs from a preceding NIC exercise, Global Trends 2015 (2000), in the wider range of experts consulted—preparatory workshops were conducted in a number of countries—and in the heavier store it places on formal scenario development. While the underlying scenario‐building techniques employed are not spelled out in the document (some are described elsewhere on the NIC's website), four specific “fictional scenarios” are selected to enliven the report: Davos World—illustrating “how robust economic growth, led by China and India, … could reshape the globalization process”; Pax Americana—“how US predominance may survive the radical changes to the global political landscape and serve to fashion a new and inclusive global order”; A New Caliphate—“how a global movement fueled by radical religious identity politics could constitute a challenge to Western norms and values as the foundation of the global system”; and Cycle of Fear—proliferation of weaponry and terrorism “to the point that large‐scale intrusive security measures are taken to prevent outbreaks of deadly attacks, possibly introducing an Orwellian world.” (The quotes are from the report's executive summary.) The excerpt reproduced below comprises the section of the report headed “Rising Powers: The Changing Geopolitical Landscape,” omitting text boxes and charts. The summary table appended is taken from the beginning of the document. The full report is available at http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020.html .     

Queering the Cosmology of the Vikings: A Queer Analysis of the Cult of Odin and “Holy White Stones”

ABSTRACT

Ideas concerning Eros, honor and death were central to the Norse perception of the world. Odin is the greatest war god, and associated with manliness. However, Odin is also the most powerful master of seid (sorcery), an activity associated with women. Seid may be interpreted as a form of shamanism. If a man performed seid he could be accused of ergi, that is, unmanliness. Therefore it could be said that Odin exercised an activity considered unmanly. How could Odin perform seid without losing his position as the god of war and warriors? This paradox is discussed from a queer theoretical perspective. On this basis a new interpretation of the so-called “holy white” phallic stones in western Norway is suggested. Most of these stones are associated with burials from the later part of the Scandinavian Early Iron Age. The temporal distribution of the white phallic stones correlates well with the increasing importance of the cult of Odin. There may be a cultic association between the cult of Odin and the burial practices involving white holy phallic stones.     

Natives and migrants in the London labour market, 1929–1931

Migrants are sometimes regarded as marginal workers in metropolitan labour markets. London has long been a major destination for migrants from elsewhere in Britain and abroad. In this paper we examine the earnings and unemployment experience in 1929–1931 of male workers who migrated to London, or within London. We use data from the New Survey of London Life and Labour, a large survey of working class households, the records from which have recently been computerised. Our findings indicate that migrants were not marginal, in fact they enjoyed slightly higher earnings and lower unemployment incidence than native Londoners. Much of the advantage can be explained by differences in average skill levels and personal characteristics. Received: 2 November 1999/Accepted: 3 August 2000     

Changing Urban Spaces: Mobile Phones on Trains

Abstract

Mobility is changing the ways people routinely behave in public places. Since the appearance of digital mobile phone networks, mobile phones have become part of suburban and urban landscapes globally. Both the use of public transport and mobile telecommunications are integral for daily life and self‐presentation in most large cities such as London and Tokyo. Public places and spaces are being transformed into hybrid geographies through the introduction of new spatial infrastructure. In this paper, we present our analysis of the responses of our survey sample of commuters concerning their use of mobile phones on trains.     

Family Planning Programs for the 21st Century: Rationale and Design

Diffusion Processes and Fertility Transition: Selected Perspectives. 2001. Edited by John B. Caster‐Line. National Research Council, Committee on Population. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Pp. xi + 271. N.p.g. ISBN: 0‐309‐07610‐2. Available online at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309076102/html/Rl.html

The Explanatory Power of Models. 2002. Edited by Robert Franck. Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pp. x + 310. £74.00. ISBN: 1‐4020‐0867‐8.

Communism, Health and Lifestyle. The Paradox of Mortality Transition in Albania, 1950‐1990. 2001. By Arjan Gjonça. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Pp. ix + 227. US$69.95. ISBN: 0‐313‐31586‐8.

Historical Studies in Mortality Decline. 2002. By William H. Hubbard, Kari Pitkänen, Jürgen Schlumbohm, Sølvi Sogner, Gunnar Thorvaldsen, and Frans van Poppel. Oslo: Novus Forlag. Pp. 134. ISBN: 82‐7099‐360‐3.

Population and Society in Western European Port‐Cities. 2002. Edited by Richard Lawton and Robert Lee. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Pp. xx + 385. £18.95. ISBN: 0‐85323‐907‐X.

The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation. 2003. Edited by Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Pp. xi + 408. US$39.95. ISBN: 0‐87154‐517‐9.

The Demography of Victorian England and Wales. 2000. By Robert Woods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xxv + 447. £50.00. ISBN: 0‐521‐78254‐6.

The Life Table: Modelling Survival and Death. 2002. Edited by Guillaume Wunsch, Michel Mouchart, and Josianne Duchêne. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (European Studies of Population, Volume 11). Pp. x + 306. £89.00. ISBN: 1‐4020‐0638‐1.     

William Farr on the Economic Value of the Population

The modern theory of human capital came to prominence in economics only in recent decades, but its antecedents can be traced back to the earliest economic writings. The notion that human skills represent economic value comparable to that of capital was clearly articulated by the classical economists, notably by William Petty and Adam Smith. That improvement of skills and increase in the number of persons in whom skills are embodied are sources of economic progress follows from their conceptual clarification. Attempts to quantify the economic value of the population and assessment of the effect of mortality improvements and population growth were, however, later developments. Among the earliest contributions to such calculations, one by William Farr, published in 1877 and reprinted below, is particularly notable. Defining the economic value of a person as the discounted sum of expected future earnings, Farr arrives at a figure of £5,250 million (for 1876) “as an approximation to the value which is inherent in the people [of the United Kingdom], and may be fairly added to the capital in land, houses, cattle or stock, and other investments.” In addition to providing insightful commentary on the rationale and weaknesses of his calculations, he estimates the addition to that amount from population growth in the preceding four decades, discusses the impact of outmigration to the colonies and the United States during that time, and notes the dependence of the economic value of the population on the level of education, on the state of health of the population, and on people's longevity. William Farr (1807–1883) was perhaps the most influential British statistician of the nineteenth century. Although trained as a physician, in 1839 he accepted a post in the General Register Office and from 1842 to 1880 he served as Statistical Superintendent. During his long tenure he was the main force in the development and analysis of British vital statistics and in setting the foundations of modern epidemiology. He constructed the first British life table (based on deaths in 1841) and carried out a wide range of creative analyses of British mortality statistics, especially on mortality differentials, with an aim of promoting social reform. The most accessible route to his written output for modern readers is a posthumously published collection: Vital Statistics: A Memorial Volume of Selections from the Reports and Writings of William Parr (London: Offices of the Sanitary Institute, 1885). A reprint edition of this work was published under the auspices of the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine (Metuchen, N. J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1975). The passage reproduced below (pp. 59–64) is an excerpt from the Registrar‐General's 39th Annual Report (1877), titled The Economic Value of Population. The topic was earlier treated in Parr's paper “The income and property tax,” Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society of London (March 1853), excerpted on pp. 531–550 of the book under the title Cost, and the Present and Future Economic Value of Man.     

The United Nations on the Demographic Impact of the AIDS Epidemic

A report prepared by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and released in Geneva on 27 June 2000 (just prior to the XIIIth International AIDS Conference held in Durban, South Africa) updates estimates of the demographic impact of the epidemic. It characterizes AIDS in the new millennium as presenting “a grim picture with glimmers of hope”—the latter based on the expectation that national responses aimed at preventing and fighting the disease are in some places becoming more effective. According to the report, which emphasizes the considerable statistical weaknesses of its global estimates, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in 1999 was 34.3 million (of which 33.0 million were adults and 1.3 million were children under age 15; slightly less than half of the adults affected, 15.7 million, were women). Deaths attributed to AIDS in 1999 amounted to 2.8 million, bringing the total since the beginning of the epidemic to 18.8 million. These figures represent moderate upward revisions of earlier UN estimates shown in the Documents section of PDR 25, no. 4. The revised estimate of the number of persons newly infected with HIV in 1999 is, in contrast, slightly lower: 5.4 million, of which 4.7 million were adults and 2.3 million were women. An excerpt from the 135‐page Report on the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, focusing on countries in the worst‐affected area, sub‐Saharan Africa, is reproduced below. (Figures shown have been renumbered.)     

John Weyland on Encouragements to Population Increase

Modern worries about the economic and social consequences of low fertility and eventual population decline have led to numerous proposals for subsidy arrangements aimed in effect at “buying” healthy and potentially productive children. The most innocuous of such schemes, typically with welfare rather than population goals in mind, is the institution of the family wage—paying labor based on family size. The passage reproduced below, from John Weyland's Principles of Population and Production (1816), offers an early instance of such a scheme being argued for on demographic grounds. Weyland's account of the “artificial” encouragement of population increase begins with an artless analogy to managing a stud‐farm, but the stance is mercantilist rather than totalitarian and is leavened by a strong concern for the health and morals of the future citizens. That the state might wish to raise its population growth was of course contrary to Malthusian doctrine. The long and contentious debates on Britain's Poor Laws gave more prominence to the opposite goal: that of preventing births that threatened to become a charge on the community. Weyland, however, asserted that the tendency of population was to “keep within the powers of the soil to afford it subsistence.” A prior population increase (to a level “just beyond the plentiful supply of the people's want”) was a necessary stimulant to productivity—indeed, was “the cause of all public happiness, industry, and prosperity.” (Modern versions of this view are found in the writings of Ester Boserup and Julian Simon.) Moreover, he argued, with urbanization came an inevitable fall‐off in population growth—reaching “a point of non‐reproduction” when around a third of the population lived in towns. Malthus responded to Weyland in an appendix to the fifth (1817) edition of the Essay: Weyland's premise, he wrote, is “just as rational as to infer that every man has a natural tendency to remain in prison who is necessarily confined to it by four strong walls.” Weyland's book as a whole he dismissed in unusually intemperate terms: “It is quite inconceivable how a man of sense could bewilder himself in such a maze of futile calculations, and come to conclusions so diametrically opposite to experience.” More concisely, and specifically on the subject of the extract below, an entry in the Essay's highly distinctive index reads “Encouragements, direct, to population, futile and absurd.” John Weyland (1774–1854) was an English rural magistrate of independent means. He took an active part in the Poor Law debates of the early nineteenth century, arguing for payments under them to include child allowances. The full title of his major work is: The Principles of Population and Production as they are affected by the Progress of Society with a View to Moral and Political Consequences (London, 1816). There are modern reprints by A. M. Kelley and Routledge/Thoemmes Press. The excerpt is from pp. 167–175.     

Edward Alsworth Ross on Western Civilization and the Birth Rate

A declining trend in fertility had taken hold in Western Europe, North America, and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, attracting much social scientific interest and public policy concern. Explanations advanced at the time—for example, in the writings of John S. Billings, Lujo Brentano, Arsène Dumont, Adolphe Landry, and F.W. Taussig—mostly posited multiple causes and in many respects anticipated the arguments subsequently made by the theorists of “demographic transition” in the 1940s and 1950s. A prominent figure who should be added to the names just mentioned is the American sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross (1866–1951). Ross's account of fertility decline is best captured in his article, “Western civilization and the birth‐rate,” American Journal of Sociology, volume 12, no. 5 (March 1907), pp. 607–632, which is excerpted below. Writing in a vigorous and fluid style, he gives weight to the lessening of class divisions offered by democracy, the “newly awakened wants” that crowd out children, the emancipation of women, the decay of religious authority, and the numerous elements of modern life that “enthrone reason over impulse” and hence make for enlightened foresight. In the parts of the article not reprinted, Ross discusses the then widespread worries about the implications of differential fertility—the possible dysgenic effects within nations and the prospective demographic marginalization of the West as a whole (requiring “the bristling frontiers between peoples and races” to remain in place until the economic gaps are narrowed). In an acute and prescient comment on Ross's article, published in the same issue of AJS, the demographer Walter F. Willcox (1861–1964) remarked on the prospect of the fertility decline going too far, with individual interests diverging from the interests of society:

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Relative Cohort Size,Relative Income,and Married Women's Labor Force Participation: United States, 1968–2010

Relative cohort size—the ratio of young adults to prime‐age adults—and relative income—the income of young adults relative to their material aspirations—have experienced substantial changes over the past 40 years. Results here show that changes in relative cohort size explain about 60 percent of the declines in women's starting wage—both relative and absolute—in 1968–82, and 97 percent of its increase in 1982–2001. Relative income is hypothesized to affect a number of behavioral choices by young adults, including marriage, childbearing, and female labor force participation, as young people strive to achieve their desired standard of living. Older family income—the denominator in a relative income variable—increased by 59 percent between 1968 and 2000, and then declined by 9 percent. Its changes explain 47 percent of the increase in the labor force participation of white married women in their first 15 years out of school between 1970 and 1990, and 38 percent of the increase in hours worked in the same period. The study makes use of individual‐level measures of labor force participation and employs the lagged income of older families in a woman's year‐state‐race‐education group to instrument parental income and hence material aspirations.     

Emile Zola Against Malthusianism

Fertility declined in France earlier than in the rest of Western Europe and remained lower than that of its neighbors throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. France's birth rate in 1900 was around 22 per 1000, compared to about 29 in Britain and 35 in Germany. Worry over depopulation, absolute or relative, has long been a staple element of French population thought. In the late nineteenth century, that concern was expressed in scholarly but vigorous works like Arsène Dumont's Dépopulation et civilisation (1890) and Natalité et démocratic (1898) and in political activism through the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population. Other population ideas, not always compatible, were current as well—most notably, variants of Malthusianism. This was also a time of ferment in social policy debate over the implications of new ideas about public health and hygiene and about heredity and environment. While supporters and opponents of Malthusian views could often be identified with the political right and left, combating depopulation was the cause of all. Equally, imperial ambition was not confined to one side of politics: few contradictions were seen between socialism at home and colonization abroad. (French territorial ambitions at this time looked particularly to North and West Africa.) Unsurprisingly, many of these themes also cropped up in contemporary novels—among them, those of Emile Zola. Born in 1840 of Italian and French parents, Zola was one of the best‐known writers of his time. His many novels include Nana (1880) and Germinal (1885). He is most celebrated, however, for his passionate open letter J'accuse (1898), denouncing the French high command over the Dreyfus Affair. (Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer, was wrongfully convicted of treason in an atmosphere of anti‐Semitism—a judgment eventually reversed.) Always somewhat of a propagandist, Zola, in temporary exile in the aftermath of this intervention, embarked on a cycle of four novels on the themes of fertility, work, truth, and justice. Fécondité (Paris: Charpentier‐Fasquelle, 1899) was the first of these. Two others were completed: Travail (1901) and Vérité (1903). Justice had barely been begun before his death in 1902. An English translation of Fécondité, by Ernest A. Vizetelly, was published under the euphemistic title Fruitfulness (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900). (Zola often skirted the margins of what was then considered acceptable language and subject matter, and Vizetelly had been jailed in England for an earlier Zola translation.) Fécondité is a didactic moral fable rather than a significant work of fiction. The Fortnightly Review (London) of January 1900 wrote of it: “The tale is a simple one: the cheerful conquest of fortune and the continual birth of offspring.” Mathieu and Marianne Froment, the central characters, convey Zola's anti‐Malthusian views through their life story—the meaning of which is underlined in the author's fulsome commentary. At the start of the novel, they are poor but already have four children. By its end, still stalwart and celebrating 70 years of marriage, they have had twelve, seven surviving, together with innumerable grandchildren and great grandchildren. Over the same period, through hard work and prudence, they have gradually amassed a large and highly productive landed estate, Chantebled, much of it acquired from once‐rich but feckless (and unprolific) neighbors whose decline in fortune mirrors the Froments' rise and whose depopulationist views are thereby shown to be groundless. (A fuller précis, also describing the novel's gothic subplots, is given in Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Academic Press, 1985), pp. 25–27.) The excerpts below are taken from the 1900 translation. (The page numbers refer to the more accessible 1925 reprint.) The characters mentioned, aside from Mathieu, are:

• Beauchêne, a relative of Marianne, owner of a farm equipment factory
• Boutan, family physician and friend of Mathieu
• Moineaud, a mechanic in Beauchêne's factory
• Santerre, a fashionable novelist
• Séguin, “a rich, elegant idler” whose estate is gradually lost to the Froments

The absence of a female voice on the matters discussed is faithful to the novel.     

James Mill on the Growth and Limitation of Population

The brief passages reproduced below from James Mill's 1821 work, Elements of Political Economy, present an early analysis of total and net fecundity, a discussion of the scope and limits of government influence on fertility, and a reflection on the goal of a stationary population. In his preface Mill describes the Elements as “a school‐book in political economy”—it was in fact based on the lessons he gave to his then barely teenaged son—and he disavows any claim to originality. Moreover, the chapter on wages, from which the excerpts come, has been generally disdained because of its espousal of the discredited wage‐fund theory of wage determination. But Mill's treatment of population is as fresh and stimulating as it is concise. James Mill (1773–1836) is now known more as the father of John Stuart Mill—and as the designer of the latter's famously rigorous education—than for his own writing. Born and educated in Scotland, Mill moved to England, making his living as a journalist. On the side, he was writing what became a three‐volume History of British India (1817), which led to long‐term employment in the London office of the East India Company. Mill's thinking on economics was strongly influenced by his friendship with David Ricardo and on public policy by Jeremy Bentham. The group of reformist thinkers that surrounded him, known as the philosophical radicals, were protégés in the main of Bentham. Mill, like others in this group, was a proponent of family planning, albeit far more cautious on the subject than the propagandist Francis Place. “Prudence,” which for Malthus meant only delay of marriage, Mill took equally to cover control of marital fertility: it should comprise measures “by which either marriages are sparingly contracted, or care is taken that children, beyond a certain number, shall not be the fruit.” In the last of the excerpts, offering an unapologetic vision of bourgeois leisure and affluence, he anticipates J. S. Mill's notable chapter on the stationary state (Book IV, Chapter 6) in the Principles of Political Economy (1848)—see the Archives item in PDR 12, no. 2. The text is reproduced from the 3rd edition of the Elements (London, 1826), this part of which is virtually the same as the first edition aside from some minor improvements in expression. The excerpts are from Chapter 2, Section 2, pp. 46–50, 57–59, and 63–66.