Magic Moment? Maternal Marriage for Children Born Out of Wedlock

To test the existence of the “magic moment” for parental marriage immediately post-birth and to inform policies that preferentially encourage biological over stepparent marriage, this study estimates the incidence and stability of maternal marriage for children born out of wedlock. Data came from the National Survey of Family Growth on 5,255 children born nonmaritally. By age 15, 29 % of children born nonmaritally experienced a biological-father marriage, and 36 % experienced a stepfather marriage. Stepfather marriages occurred much later in a child’s life—one-half occurred after the child turned age 7—and had one-third higher odds of dissolution. Children born to black mothers had qualitatively different maternal marriage experiences than children born to white or Hispanic mothers, with less biological-parent marriage and higher incidences of divorce. Findings support the existence of the magic moment and demonstrate that biological marriages were more enduring than stepfather marriages. Yet relatively few children born out of wedlock experienced stable, biological-parent marriages as envisioned by marriage promotion programs.     

Population and social structure in a Bedfordshire parish: The Cardington listing of inhabitants, 1782

Abstract This paper describes some of the main social and demographic characteristics of a Bedfordshire parish in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is based on an analysis of the 'Listing of Inhabitants' of Cardington in 1782, and on the use of the parish registers. The listing does not allow an analysis of the entire population of the parish. Its most serious deficiency is the failure to give sufficient detail for the upper social strata of the parish population, viz. the residents of 'farm tenements' and a small number of other properties likewise poorly documented. In the main, the data given in the article refer only to the residents of 'cottage tenements'. They represent the majority of the parish population, but omit the small group at the top of village society. For the 'cottage tenement' population a number of conclusions are drawn. Within this population there was an overall excess of females over males, but the excess was slight, and the number and proportion of males and females in each age-group balanced quite closely. 43-44% of the population of known age were less than 15 years old, and almost half the population were aged between 16 and 60 years. An analysis of marital status tentatively suggests that adult celibacy was rare. The average number of residents per 'cottage' household was only a little higher than the average size of family, confirming that only a small proportion of households contained more than one family. Household and family size may have been larger among craftsmen than labourers, with the households and families of the former containing more resident offspring than those of the latter. About one in every three marriages was either a broken marriage or are-marriage. A reconstitution of certain 'cottage tenement' families tentatively suggests an average of over five baptisms per family. Yet there were only two resident offspring per family in 1782. The difference may be explained by the high level of infant and child mortality, with one-third of all baptised children failing to reach the age of 15 years, and by the high degree of population mobility, albeit over short distances.     

Brides N' Bumps

This paper accounts for the rise of a monolithic contemporary post-feminist pregnant bridal identity that is upheld and sold as the “ultimate” pleasure of femininity in Australia, the US, and the UK. I shall critically analyse the enfranchisement of the contemporary pregnant bride as a “new” consumer identity using the purchase of a maternity wedding dress as a key example. I argue that as pregnancy is already an experience deeply embedded in the marketplace, with this comes the added pressure for pregnant women to use bridal maternity clothing to conform to normative feminine bodily ideals. This claim is supported by interviews with a sample of Australian pregnant brides as part of a longitudinal qualitative study of pregnancy and body image. I conclude that as much as the pregnant bride challenges convention, in many ways, paradigms of femininity, in this context, remain ultimately unchanged and unchallenged.     

Trends in age at marriage in postwar Ireland

Age at marriage in the Republic of Ireland has declined substantially from the very high level that prevailed in 1946. Between 1946 and 1969 the median age of grooms fell from 32 to 26 and of brides from 27 to 24. To some extent this is a reflection of the declining importance of the rural population but to a much greater extent it is due to the falling age at marriage among all sections of the population. Simultaneous with the decline in age at marriage, the frequency distributions of brides' and grooms' ages have become both more skewed and more peaked. Thus earlier marriage has also meant greater uniformity in age at marriage, but the phenomenon of first marriage at a fairly advanced age persists. There has been a marked trend towards greater equality between husbands' and wives' ages over the postwar period: the proportion of marriages in which there was less than five years' gap between the ages of the bride and groom rose from 49 percent in 1946 to 71 percent in 1969. The percentage of marriages in which the groom was ten or more years older than the bride has fallen from 22 to seven percent. The evidence suggests that the “marriage market” became less favourable to males (especially older males) over the period and that part of the narrowing in the gap in relative age of brides and grooms has been due to the greater willingness of younger males to marry. It also seems that changes in the age structure of the unmarried population has had an impact on the age distribution of grooms.     

Dade Parish registers

Over the last thirty years parish registers have been used with great effect to throw light on the population history of England. To decide whether a parish register was suitable to be used for such purposes systems were developed to assess the quality of that register, and in particular to assess whether a satisfactory percentage of the baptisms, marriages and burials that took place in that parish are likely to have been entered in the parish register. However, until recently relatively little consideration has been given to the quality of the individual entries in a parish register, and still less as to why entries of above average quality appear in a given register. This paper is concerned with the extended parish registers that are to be found in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in particular the so-called Dade registers that are to be found in the dioceses of York and Chester, which contain substantially more information than most parish registers of the period. It will, it is hoped, lead to a clearer understanding of these registers and make local historians and demographers more aware of their potential.     

A multivariate analysis of homogamy in Montevideo,Uruguay

This paper develops multivariate models to describe homogamy or, more generally, marriage preferences, for corresponding characteristics of brides and grooms. The purpose of these models is to obtain interpretable measures of the degree of homogamy (or marriage preference) on one dimension and to adjust these measures for homogamy on other dimensions. The models are applied to a sample of marriages in Montevideo, Uruguay, with pairs of corresponding variables for the brides and grooms. The analysis estimates the unadjusted and adjusted levels of homogamy on previous marital status, age, education, religion, and location. Homogamy on location, or propinquity, is the single most important variable. Previous marital status and age describe the readiness or eligibility to marry and are associated in their effect on homogamy. Education and religion describe vertical and horizontal differentiation of marriage partners, respectively. The multivariate analysis verifies that these dimensions are largely independent of each other.     

Bias in Age at Marriage in Family Reconstitutions: Evidence from French-Canadian Data

Age-at-marriage estimates from family reconstitutions may be biased downward when they are based only on marriages of people who continue to live in their parish of birth, because when the probability of migrating rises with age, younger people are selected in preference to older ones. Micro-simulations show that the bias can have dramatic effects. In this paper French-Canadian data are used to investigate the importance of the bias and to verify empirically the micro-simulation results. Although a high proportion of people moved between birth and marriage, the bias had virtually no effect, given the specific characteristics of the migrations. If one cannot avoid discussing the timing of migration before marriage, when measuring age at first marriage using only data on “stayers”, it is just possible that in most settings, it is the same for those who lived in their parish of birth, and those who had moved.     

Population statistics and population registration in Norway. Part 1. The vital statistics of Norway: An historical review

From olden times in Norway, as also in Sweden and Denmark, the church official in each parish has kept the official registers of marriages, births and deaths, and has produced the records which form the basis of Norwegian vital statistics.     

Age at marriage and timing of the first birth

Summary An attempt has been made to measure the effect of age at marriage of brides on the timing of the first birth. In Australian vital statistics, first nuptial confinements have been tabulated by age of mothers and by single years of marriage duration in single months for the first two years and by single years for all other durations since 1916. A simple technique has been used to link such data with marriage cohorts. The study briefly reviews the prevailing patterns of the timing of first births by mothers' age at marriage and changes in this pattern since the marriages of the 1925/9 period. The analysis shows that after a period of relative stability of family formation patterns in the 1950s and early 1960s, women married in the late 1960s started postponing the first birth beyond the first two years of marriage. It is suggested that a fraction of the decline in total births recorded in Australia since 1972 can be attributed to the postponement of first nuptial confinements by women married in the late 1960s and early 1970s.     

Age at baptism in pre-industrial England

Abstract The adequacy of English parish registers as demographic sources has been a subject for much debate.(1) Most attention has been directed to the problem of how far the population at large continued to use the sacraments ofthe Established Church in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in areas affected by urban growth or Nonconformity. But the more general problem of how far the ecclesiastical registers of ceremonies are acceptable substitutes for registers of vital events also deserves some attention.     

Age at baptism in pre-industrial England

The adequacy of English parish registers as demographic sources has been a subject for much debate.¹ Most attention has been directed to the problem of how far the population at large continued to use the sacraments ofthe Established Church in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in areas affected by urban growth or Nonconformity. But the more general problem of how far the ecclesiastical registers of ceremonies are acceptable substitutes for registers of vital events also deserves some attention.     

The marriage squeeze

If the sex-age structure of the population is equilibrated, observed marriage patterns are assumed to reflect preferred mate selections. With regard to age, these preferences can be expressed in terms of the probabilities of unmarried persons of given ages marrying persons of various ages. To study the situation of unequilibrated sexes, these probabilities can be used to compute, for each combination of ages of groom and bride, the expected number of grooms and the expected number of brides. If either of these numbers exceeds the other, the corresponding sex is in a "marriage squeeze." The comparison among the expected number of grooms, that of brides, and the observed number of marriages supplies information on the effects of the squeeze.In Australia, marriage statistics of 1949 were considered to reflect preferred selections. In 1958, men of most ages were in a squeeze. As a consequence, some relatively younger and older men did not get married, and some relatively younger and older women improved their chances of marriage in the year under consideration. 291-299.     

Changing patterns of family growth: The value of linked vital records as a source of data

Abstract Marriage and birth registrations for the Canadian province of British Colombia have been 'linked' by computer into family groupings to provide reproductive histories of married couples. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated by a comparison of the early productivities of marriages contracted in 1961 and in 1951, taking into account the age of the bride, the duration of the marriage, and the religions of the groom, bride and officiating clergyman. Older Catholic brides are shown to run counter to the otherwise general trend towards increasing productivity in the early years of marriage.     

Bridal pregnancy in earlier rural England further examined

Abstract This paper elaborates the argument of a previous paper (Population Studies, 20, 1966, pp. 233-43). The results of an investigation of the experience of 2,340 brides are broadly similar to those reported earlier: in particular, they confirm that bridal pregnancy was more common in the eighteenth than in the seventeenth century. Evidence is presented to suggest that the sixteenth-century experience was similar to that of the seventeenth, while the nineteenth-century experience was similar to that of the eighteenth. It is argued that bridal pregnancy was the product of a courting convention, rather than of 'betrothal-licence', and that it was not especially common among widows or teenagers. It is incidentally shown that the interval between birth and baptism was very brief in the sixteenth century, but lengthened in later centuries; and that the forbidden seasons for marriage were gradually eroded. Finally, it is suggested that the application of Church discipline in relation to bridal pregnancy could be assessed in the Church Court records.     

Pathways to a Stable Union? Pregnancy and Childbearing Among Cohabiting and Married Couples

This study analyzes the stability of cohabiting and marital unions following a first birth. But unlike previous research, it compares the subsequent trajectories of unions that began with a pregnancy to those in which conceptions came after coresidence. The U.S. data from the 2006–2010 and 2011–2013 cross-sectional files of the National Survey of Family Growth indicate that roughly 1-in-5 first births were associated with rapid transitions from conception into either cohabitation or marriage. Moving in together following a pregnancy—especially an unintended one—is unlikely to lead to marital success or union stability. Compared with marital unions, dissolution rates following birth were particularly high for couples who entered a cohabiting union following conception. Only a small minority of these couples married (i.e., less than one-third), and these marriages experienced high dissolution rates. The results also suggest that the most committed cohabiting couples got married after finding themselves pregnant, leaving behind the most dissolution-prone cohabiting couples. The American family system is being transformed by newly emerging patterns of fertility among cohabiting couples.     

The Gendered Double Standard of Aging in US Marriage Markets

Using data on marriages collected in most US states between 1970 and 1988, we show that the older men are when they marry, the more years senior to their brides they are, whether it is a first or higher‐order marriage. While older men with more education marry down in age slightly more than less educated older men, the pattern of men marrying further down if they marry later holds strongly for all education groups. We consider several possible explanations for the tendency of men to marry further down in age if they are older at marriage. While we have no direct measure of physical attractiveness, we argue that the most compelling interpretation is that men, more than women, evaluate potential spouses on the basis of appearance. Because the prevailing standard of beauty favors young women, the older men are when they marry, the less they find women their own age attractive relative to younger women, leading them to marry further down in age if they are older at marriage. The consequence for women of men's preference for youth is more often that they remain unmarried than that they end up married to much older or less educated men.     

The demographics of same-sex marriages in Norway and Sweden

The present study investigates the demographics of same-sex marriages--that is, registered partnerships-in Norway and Sweden. We give an overview of the demographic characteristics of the spouses of these partnerships, study patterns of their divorce risks, and compare the dynamics of same-sex couples with those of heterosexual marriages. We use longitudinal information from the population registers of the two countries that cover all persons in partnerships. Our demographic analyses include information on characteristics such as age, sex, geographic background, experience of previous opposite-sex marriage, parenthood, and educational attainment of the partners involved. The results show that in many respects, the distributions of married populations on these characteristics differ by the sex composition of the couples. Patterns in divorce risks are rather similar in same-sex and opposite-sex marriages, but divorce-risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages. The divorce riskforfemale partnerships is double that for male partnerships.     

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).     

Marriage Migration and Inequality in India, 1983–2008

Using National Sample Survey data from 1983 to 2007–08, we investigate rising rates of female marriage migration in India. We find little evidence to support the idea that marriage migration is a form of disguised economic migration by women. We hypothesise that it is instead a result of the changing patterns of marriage by socioeconomic status. Regression analysis indicates that poor families are increasingly more likely to have brides who in‐migrate, a finding that is robust across a sectoral disaggregation of marriage migration. We also find that urban inequality increases the likelihood of migration by intensifying class stratifications within urban India, increasing the need for poorer urban households to seek migrant brides. Marriage thus serves to reinforce rather than undermine larger patterns of class (and not just caste) inequality.     

In Search of Asian war brides

Because of the long presence of U.S. soldiers in Asia, war-bride marriages involving servicemen and Asian women have been formed throughout the century. The literature, however, contains little empirically sound information on Asian war brides. This analysis develops a methodology to identify war brides and applies it to estimate the number of war brides from the six major Asian groups, using the national 1980 Public Use Microdata Sample. Further analysis comparing Asian war brides with other groups of Asian wives tends to support the traditional and lower socioeconomic images commonly associated with Asian war brides.