The Decline of Fertility in Los Angeles,California, 1880–1900

Data from the 1900 U.S. Census of Population show that fertility in Los Angeles California, declined by more than 50 per cent between 1880 and 1900. Women's mean age at first marriage, which rose by approximately three years, contributed to the decline, but change in marital fertility was more important than change in nuptiality. Although the fertility of in-migrating U.S.-born women was lower than that of California-born women, the decline was not explained by in-migration. The emergence of a class differential in fertility, with couples of higher status having fewer children than those of lower status, and the simultaneous weakening of class differentials in secondary-school attendance, together suggest that the rise of universal secondary schooling probably did not account for the marital fertility decline experienced in middle- and upper-status families.     

Age at marriage and proportions marrying

This paper deals with the recent widespread increase in marriage rates in the Western world. The principal materials used are data on the proportions single in each age group at various times. These data are used to estimate how far the ‘marriage boom’ has reflected decreases in the proportions of persons remaining single throughout life or reductions in the age at marriage of those who do marry. The conclusion is that changes of both types have occurred; the mean age at marriage has been declining in several countries at a rate of more than one-tenth of a year per annum. A number of ancillary technical problems relating to the analysis of nuptiality are discussed.     

Nuptiality and population growth

Abstract In the European historical experience, nuptiality patterns played a very significant role in the development of low fertility. Late marriage and widespread celibacy provided one of the mechanisms by which age-specific fertility rates were brought to low levels in the populations of Western Europe. In Eastern and Central Europe on the other hand, where marriage customarily occurred earlier and was more nearly universal, a somewhat slower fertility transition was achieved through a reduction in marital fertility - without any drastic accompanying nuptiality change. Populations of developing countries, however, commonly exhibit nuptiality patterns characterized by a still higher incidence and a considerably younger age-pattern of marriage than even the earliest observed schedule from Eastern Europe. With few exceptions, little work has been done to date to examine the implications of these very early and universal marriage schedules for fertility in general and for the growth of these populations in particular.(1) We have therefore tried to analyse the impact of nuptiality on the fertility and growth of a series of populations from developing nations where extra-marital fertility is negligible. Populations in which the prevalence of cohabitation by age is not well documented by existing marital-status data (mainly those in Latin America and tropical Africa) are excluded from this analysis; an attempt will be made in later work, however, to extend the analysis to these populations.     

Multidimensional Life Table Estimation of the Total Fertility Rate and Its Components

Using discrete-time survival models of parity progression and illustrative data from the Philippines, this article develops a multivariate multidimensional life table of nuptiality and fertility, the dimensions of which are age, parity, and duration in parity. The measures calculated from this life table include total fertility rate (TRF), total marital fertility rate (TMFR), parity progression ratios (PPR), age-specific fertility rates, mean and median ages at first marriage, mean and median closed birth intervals, and mean and median ages at childbearing by child’s birth order and for all birth orders combined. These measures are referred to collectively as “TFR and its components.” Because the multidimensional life table is multivariate, all measures derived from it are also multivariate in the sense that they can be tabulated by categories or selected values of one socioeconomic variable while controlling for other socioeconomic variables. The methodology is applied to birth history data, in the form of actual birth histories from a fertility survey or reconstructed birth histories derived from a census or household survey. The methodology yields period estimates as well as cohort estimates of the aforementioned measures.     

The comparative analysis of the dynamics of childbearing women's birth at Yanging County, Beijing]

At the end of 1981 Yanging County had 26 communes, 375 production brigades and a total population of 211,098. A random sampling of 5.07% of the production brigades was taken, which included teams from the plains as well as mountainous regions. The sample had a population of 10,888, or 5.16% of the entire county, among whom 189 subjects were interviewed. These 189 women, whose ages ranged from 35-67, were divided into 5 birth year cohorts (1914, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1946). Findings include: 1) Age at marriage: the average age at marriage (about 17 years) between the 1914 and 1946 groups rose 1.82 years, indicating that early marriage was the norm. The time between marriage and 1st birth has shortened. 2) Fertility data: from 1914 to 1946 the lifetime fertility rate tended to decline from 4.60 to 3.70, but the 1930 cohort was the highest (6.42), followed by the 1920 cohort (6.26). The fertility rate of the 1914 cohort tended to rise in the 1950s after already having reached a peak in the early 1940s, probably because after Liberation fertility rose due to a higher standard of living and a stablized society. The fertility of the 1930 cohort was highest around 1963 when they were already 30 years old. The fertility of the 1940 cohort was also highest beginning around 1963. In both cases, the reason probably was because the national economy improved at this time. Indeed, the national fertility rate rose from a 1960 low of 20.9/1000 to 43.6/1000 in 1963. 3) Contraceptive use: prior to 1972 before there was an offical birth control policy, a sizeable number of women already desired to use contraceptives, the reason being most of these women felt they already had enough children. However, many women did use contraceptives in response to the call to do so. 4) Factors influencing fertility standards: in general, the less a woman's education and the lower her income, the higher was her standard of fertility, and vice versa. 5) The percentage of women who had children who died before the age of 15 ranged from 35.9% of the 67 year olds to 12.6% of the 35 year olds.     

The conflicting effects of delayed marriage and declining divorce rates on cumulative fertility in Indonesia

The impact of nuptiality patterns on fertility in Indonesia is examined with multivariate analysis controlling for 8 socioeconomic variables. Data were obtained from the 1987 Indonesian Contraceptive Prevalence Survey. Marriage is usually universal by age 35, and in this study all women 30 years had been married at least once. 20% were married at 15 years and 45% married at 18 years. For those married more than once, prevalence of 1st marriage was 7% for women 15-24 years, 15% for 25-34 years, and 29% for 35-49 years. In 1976 and 1987, the age at 1st marriage and number of times married were both strongly and negatively correlated. The % never marrying between 15-49 years rose from 21.5% to 26.4% between 1980-87. Cumulative fertility w as related to both age at 1st marriage and number of times married. Muslim women, women in Java and Bali, and rural women all marry at younger ages. 27% of the variance in age at 1st marriage is explained by women aged 25-34, current residence, region, religion, language, education, and work or not before marriage. The number of times married is also associated with socioeconomic characteristics without control, i.e., Muslim women 25-34 years were 3 times more likely to have been married more than once than in other faiths. With controls for socioeconomic factors, only 13% of the variance is explained and being Muslim has no statistically significant effect. The important net effects were being interviewed in Balinese, age, and age at 1st marriage. In the analysis of cumulative fertility, age at 1st marriage consistently is related to cumulative fertility in almost every socioeconomic group when age and number of times married is controlled for. Women married more than once have lower fertility. 36% of the variance is explained by all the variables. Being married more than once leads to having 2.1 fewer children. A 5-year delay in marriage leads to .75-1.1 fewer children. When other variables are controlled for, neither educational level nor prior work experience has a statistically significant effect on cumulative fertility. In the contraception analysis, women married more than once used contraception less. Among women 35-49, those marrying later had higher contraceptive use, but in general contraceptive use declined with age. More information is needed on why marriage patterns are changing.     

Cohort nuptiality in England and Wales

Summary A computerized nuptiality system, called GENMAR, has been developed to investigate trends in cohort nuptiality in England and Wales. This system has five main programmes dealing with first marriage, the effects of changes in mortality on nuptiality measures, divorce, re-marriage, and marital status distribution. This paper summarizes the results of the application of the first programme to England and Wales data on first marriages of persons who were born in every single year since 1900. GENMAR-1 generated for each of these cohorts a 'complete' gross nuptiality table. The analysis shows that there have been substantial increases in the intensity of first marriage at young ages, a downward shift in the modal age at marriage, and a significant rise in the proportion ever married among women. The cohort nuptiality tables also show that the change in the nuptiality of women was due to changes in both the tempo and level of nuptiality, whereas the change for men was mainly the effect of shifts in the temporal pattern of nuptiality. There are, however, signs of a slow down of marriage among the cohorts born since the early 1950's.     

Nuptiality and population growth

In the European historical experience, nuptiality patterns played a very significant role in the development of low fertility. Late marriage and widespread celibacy provided one of the mechanisms by which age-specific fertility rates were brought to low levels in the populations of Western Europe. In Eastern and Central Europe on the other hand, where marriage customarily occurred earlier and was more nearly universal, a somewhat slower fertility transition was achieved through a reduction in marital fertility — without any drastic accompanying nuptiality change. Populations of developing countries, however, commonly exhibit nuptiality patterns characterized by a still higher incidence and a considerably younger age-pattern of marriage than even the earliest observed schedule from Eastern Europe. With few exceptions, little work has been done to date to examine the implications of these very early and universal marriage schedules for fertility in general and for the growth of these populations in particular.¹ We have therefore tried to analyse the impact of nuptiality on the fertility and growth of a series of populations from developing nations where extra-marital fertility is negligible. Populations in which the prevalence of cohabitation by age is not well documented by existing marital-status data (mainly those in Latin America and tropical Africa) are excluded from this analysis; an attempt will be made in later work, however, to extend the analysis to these populations.     

Nuptiality and fertility of birth cohorts

The impact of changes in age patterns of nuptiality on the net reproduction rate is examined using life table techniques and assuming that age-specific fertility within marriage and fertility outside of marriage are fixed. In the second section, a standardization technique is used to investigate the impact of changes in nuptiality on age-cumulative measures of marital fertility. Examples using data for selected generations of Australian women demonstrate the extent to which recent changes in average completed family size in Australia were affected by changing nuptiality patterns.     

A new look at the marriage market and nuptiality rates, 1915–1958

The system of nuptiality probabilities for never married males and females, the “marriage regime,” is viewed as a population transformation, which operates on a population thereby changing the composition. The marriage regime has many properties common to other population transformations, but embodies a constraint such that, in general, the marriage regime cannot be strictly stable over time. The approach is applied to study the “marriage squeeze,” the alteration in marriage patterns that results from an imbalance in the “marriage market” or numbers of never married males and females at the usual marriage ages. Using data on age at first marriage for the 1960 American white population, nuptiality probabilities by single year of age and sex are estimated for the years 1915–58. Annual estimates also are made of the relative number of eligible mates (never married of the usual marriage ages) for never married persons of a given age and sex. No close correspondence is found between annual fluctuations in the marriage market and in the nuptiality probability, possibly because of the crudeness of the estimates. Alternatively, response to the imbalance may take another form such as marriage postponement or a redefinition of eligibility.     

关于中国1990年代低生育水平的再讨论

本文根据全国第五次人口普查样本计算了 1 990年代各年份的分性别平均初婚年龄 ,这一结果再次表明这一时期中初婚年龄有显著提高。本文还根据以往历次调查的各年份年龄别生育率按队列计算了累计生育率 ,结果发现 2 0 0 0年时各队列的累计生育率水平高于五普数据中各队列的平均活产子女数。本文还就队列累计生育率计算结果详细分析了 1 990年代终身生育水平的趋势。这些分析从一个新的角度说明 ,1 990年代各队列的终身生育水平也在发生显著的下降 ,正在接近现行生育政策所要求的水平     

Age patterns of marriage

Abstract In different populations there is a common curve describing first-marriage frequency (first marriages per woman) as a function of age for each cohort. To fit the variety of patterns of human nuptiality it suffices to choose the age that serves as origin for a standard curve of first-marriage frequency, and to choose appropriate horizontal and vertical scales for the curve. The prevalence of a standard form for first-marriage frequency implies that the proportion ever-married in any cohort also rises along a standard curve, subject to choice of origin (the earliest age of first marriage), vertical scale (the proportion ever-marrying by the end of life), and horizontal scale (the pace at which the proportion ever-married increases with age). A mathematical expression (a double exponential) is found to fit the risk offirst marriage (among those who ever marry), and some of the implications of uniform features of nuptiality in different populations are discussed.     

The interrelations of marital status,fertility, family size and intelligence test scores

In this paper data relating to men born in 1924 in the two southernmost counties of Sweden, and called up for military service in 1944 are analyzed. The population registers yield certain demographic and social information about these men, and this may be related to their performance in an intelligence test administered when they were called up. The association between test scores and level of schooling on one hand, and such variables as nuptiality, age at marriage, number of sibs, marital fertility, the incidence of pre-nuptial conceptions and occupational class is discussed, and an estimate of the influence of differential fertility on the trend of intelligence is given.     

Marriage at an earlier than ideal age in six Latin American capital cities

Abstract The study of nuptiality has taken on urgency, for demographers as well as for sociologists, with the increased world concern over sustained high fertility and the evident contribution of early marriage to that high fertility. Moreover, along with despair over the efficacy of conventional family planning programmes has come an expectation that more basic institutional changes, such as changes in marriage patterns, will be necessary in order finally to achieve a tolerably low world population growth rate. Yet our understanding of the determinants of such primary nuptiality dimensions as age at first marriage is very imperfect and unlikely to give much guidance in policy formation.     

The relations between male and female nuptiality in a stable population

Both male and female nuptiality conditions can be calculated from any given population. Generally these conditions will be inconsistent in the sense that if applied continuously with given mortality and fertility conditions they would produce different sets of marriages, both in total numbers and in age distribution of bridegrooms and brides. It is shown that, given, say, male nuptiality, female nuptiality conditions consistent in the sense that both male and female conditions could hold in a stable population can be deduced. These consistent conditions depend on the ultimately stable rate of growth of the population. The mathematical formulae for the relations connecting various characteristics of the two consistent sets of nuptiality conditions are worked out (e.g. net probability of marrying, mean ages at marriage, marriage-rates at particular ages, etc.), the magnitudes of the parameters in the relations estimated and the relations are translated into numerical terms, showing the effects of changes in the level of the stable rate of growth on the. consistent nuptiality conditions.     

A model of the age patterns of births by parity in natural fertility populations

This research develops a convolution model to express the age patterns of fertility at each birth order in natural fertility populations in terms of six parameters, directly representing the proximate determinants of fertility, and a series of parity level indicators. The parity level indicators at each birth order are simply the proportions of women in a cohort who will eventually have births at each birth order it the age‐related fecundity decline is controlled. The Coale‐McNeil nuptiality model is adopted to represent the age pattern of first marriage rates and the natural fertility schedule employed in the Coale‐Trussell fertility model is incorporated to adjust age effects. The fast Fourier transform is used in solving the model numerically. It proves that the model is able to provide excellent fits to fertility for rural Chinese women in the 1950s.     

Bluestockings, spinsters and pedagogues: Women college graduates, 1865-1910

Summary This article is a study of the demographic behaviour of women college graduates in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. The nuptiality and fertility patterns of this group of highly educated women are described, and several explanations of their 'unusual' behaviour are evaluated. Marriage rates of women college graduates declined during the second half of the nineteenth century, even as more women attended college. Only about half the women graduating during the 1890s ever married. Still, the number of children ever born per alumna only varied between 1.0 and 1.5 for the graduation classes of 1865 to 1910. An explanation based on changing labour market opportunities for educated men and women best explains this population's demographic patterns over time as well as their deviations from those of other women in their birth cohort.     

The fertility of teachers in England and Wales

Data on the fertility of teachers in grant earning schools in England and Wales were collected in 1955 as part of a general survey into the social characteristics of teachers. The survey was financed by the Nuffield Foundation with a contribution from the Population Investigation Committee. A subsequent article will discuss some possible determinants of fertility and in particular the interrelationship between social mobility and fertility. The present note describes changes in cohort fertility of teachers since 1915 and compares average family size with that of other sections of the population. The average number of children per married male teacher declined from 1.81 for the pre-1920 cohort to 1.47 for 1930–34. Segmental data after 1935 indicate a rise to approximately 2 children per family. Comparison with the Family Census suggests that the number of children of teachers is between 10% and 20% below that of all professions combined when the age at marriage of the wife is taken into account.     

Timing effects on first marriage: twentieth-century experience in England and Wales and the USA

Recent substantial declines in first marriage in Western countries have been accompanied by increases in the average age at first marriage. Since the period proportion ever marrying, PEM, is sensitive to cohort tempo changes, the recent fall in the PEM may simply reflect cohort delays in marriage. The importance of timing factors is examined in the light of twentieth-century experience of first marriage in England and Wales and the USA. Using a variant of the Timing Index developed in research on fertility, we measure cohort timing effects for marriage and calculate an adjusted PEM. After examining twentieth-century trends in nuptiality for men and women, we find substantial tempo effects on the period PEM. Adjusted PEM values show a real decline in marriage for cohorts, but that decline is considerably smaller than the one shown by the unadjusted figures. This is especially true for England and Wales, where the decline in marriage was much greater.     

Patterns underlying fertility schedules: A decomposition by both age and marriage duration

Summary Model fertility schedules based on the proportions married and the age pattern of marital fertility are unsatisfactory to the extent that marital fertility does not depend on age alone but also on other factors. Most notably, models based just on age fail to allow for differences between populations in their composition by marriage duration. Examination of the major series of fertility rates specific by both age and duration of marriage (Sweden 1911-70, England and Wales, 1941-70) reveals striking underlying regularities. The marital fertility rates observed at any given point in time can be factored into three independent components - an overall level, a vector of age effects common to all marriage durations and a vector of duration effects common to all age groups. A simple product of these three components is shown to approximate the data very closely over the entire series, despite major changes in the aggregate levels of fertility and nuptiality during the periods concerned. Not only are the data tightly structured, conforming very closely to this simple multiplicative model, but the vectors of age and duration effects themselves are shown to exhibit clear and meaningful regularities.