The influence of popular beliefs about childbirth on fertility patterns in mid-twentieth-century Netherlands

"Ever since the Princeton European Fertility Project on the decline of fertility, the question of how (changes in) cultural beliefs have influenced the historical fertility transition has been in the forefront of historical demographic research. Previous research has however mostly assessed the influence of religious denomination and has not examined the impact of wider beliefs or 'cultural life scripts'. On the basis of a folklore questionnaire, this article examines the occurrence, content, and geographical patterning of popular beliefs about childbearing in relation to fertility patterns in 1.022 rural Dutch communities during the nineteen forties. Beliefs in isolation and churching of women existed in almost half of all communities, particularly among Catholic populations, while fear of enchantment of infants was still alive in about a fifth of all municipalities. To be sure, such popular beliefs were rapidly vanishing and remnants were still found in isolated and strongly religious areas. A multivariate analysis shows that in communities where beliefs in churching and witchcraft still existed, birth rates were significantly higher. The study shows the salience of including popular beliefs in studies of fertility behavior and fertility decline. Moreover, it extends the concept of cultural life scripts beyond that of age norms to include prescriptions on social contexts, conducts, and practices surrounding important life passages." (author's abstract

Heterogeneity in 'High Fertility' Societies:Insights from Compositional Demography

Demographic transition theory has been conducive to a rather dichotomous view of global fertility: traditional versus modern, high versus low fertility. The knowledge that high fertility could be achieved by subpopulations with different characteristics and reproductive behaviors somehow vanished from (historical) demographers' attention. This study unpacks heterogeneity in a 'high fertility' society, i.e. 19th-century Zeeland, the Netherlands. Sequence and cluster analysis were employed to distinguish groups with disparate reproductivetrajectories with data from Genlias/LINKS including 15,014 full birth histories and 87,204 observed live births over the period 1811–1911. Multilevel binomial logistic regression models of membership of the two discerned high fertility subgroups were then estimated. The 'Traditional 1' subpopulation, with 10.5children per woman on average, was composed of skilled, unskilled, and farm workers living in rural areas. Couples married early and were characterized by large spousal age gaps. The 'Traditional 2' subpopulation had on average 7.2 children per woman, more often lived in towns, married significantly later, and had more equal gender relations. Compositional demography, revealing subpopulations with divergent cultures of marital self-restraint and reproductive management, not only nuances previous (historical) demographic findings, but may well offer more tools to develop family planning and reproductive health policies than the demographic transition model does

Domestic service, migration and the social status of women at marriage: the case of a Dutch Sea Province, Zeeland 1820-1935

Die Autorin untersucht, inwieweit Mädchen vom Lande, die als Dienstmädchen in die Stadt abwanderten, mit ihrer Eheschließung einen höheren sozialen Status erreichen konnten. Sie stützt sich auf Daten aus den Jahren 1820 bis 1935, die in der niederländischen Provinz Zeeland ermittelt wurden und vergleicht diese mit entsprechenden Daten der Stadt Middelburg für denselben Zeitraum. Die Auswertung belegt, dass der Dienstmädchenberuf nicht zu Ehen mit Männern höherer sozialer Stellung führte als nach dem gegebenen Sozialstatus des Mädchens zu erwarten war. Hingegen bieten sich anderen in der Stadt lebenden Frauen größere Chancen auf eine Ehe mit höherem Sozialstatus. Die Untersuchung widerlegt damit die Auffassung anderer Wissenschaftler, wonach die Hausangestelltentätigkeit in der Stadt für Mädchen vom Lande als 'Brückenschlag' zu einem höheren Sozialstatus anzusehen sei. (prh)'Some scholars have seen female domestic service as a 'bridging occupation', facilitating the migration of women from the countryside to the cities and enabling them to make advantageous marriages and become upwardly socially mobile. However, previous research has yielded contradictory results with regard to the marriages of female servants. On the basis of 1800 marriage records, in this article it has been estimated how social background, occupation and migration determined the status at marriage of women in the province of Zeeland the Netherlands, in the period 1820-1935. When holding everything equal, just exercising the occupation of domestic service didn't result in marriages with men of higher social positions as could be expected given the status of the job. However, living in a city by the time of one's marriage, did indeed offer women greater chances on a high status marriage.' (author's abstract

Sibship size and status attainment across contexts: Evidence from the Netherlands, 1840-1925

This paper investigates the effects of sibship size on status attainment across different contexts and subgroups. Resource dilution theory predicts that with larger sibship size, children’s status outcomes fall. However, the empirical record has shown that this is not always the case. In this paper we have tested three alternative hypotheses for neutral or even positive effects of sibship size on status attainment on the basis of a large-scale registry database covering the period of industrialization and fertility decline in the Netherlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Our findings offer support for the family developmental cycle, buffering by kin groups, and socio-economic development as alternative explanations to the resource dilution hypothesis.child well-being, family size, Netherlands, nineteenth century, resource dilution theory, sibship size, status attainment

Changing gender relations, declining fertility?:An analysis of childbearing trajectories in 19th-century Netherlands

BACKGROUND A long-standing and still unresolved debate has developed on whether the historical fertility transition was caused by ‘spacing’ (increasing the time between births) or by stopping (terminating childbearing at younger ages). Moreover, there is little consensus about the relative importance of gender relations in effecting reproductive change. OBJECTIVE First, we wish to shed new light on the stopping versus spacing debate by applying a sequence analysis approach, allowing us to describe changes in complete childbearing trajectories. Second, we want to understand the association between gender relations, among other factors, and reproductive trajectories during the historical fertility decline. METHODS We use longitudinal data from GENLIAS, a dataset constructed from linked civil registers of the province of Zeeland, the Netherlands, covering the period 1811‒1911. We employ cluster and sequence analysis to identify different types of childbearing trajectories and logistic regression to estimate their correlates. RESULTS We identified five often-experienced trajectories: two high-fertility traditional trajectories (differing in the length of the reproductive phase), a ‘Stoppers’ trajectory, a ‘Late Starters’ trajectory, and an ‘Almost Childless’ trajectory. Our results show that stopping was the way through which couples controlled their fertility during the early phase of the historical fertility transition in Zeeland, the Netherlands. Although couples with more egalitarian relationships had a higher likelihood to follow a Stoppers trajectory rather than the highest-fertility trajectory, stopping was most clearly linked to birth cohort and social class. CONTRIBUTION Our paper extends the literature on the process of the historical fertility decline and its determinants via a detailed empirical examination of childbearing trajectories and the conditions under which these trajectories took place. With our sequence analysis approach we add both substantively and methodologically to long-standing debates

The age difference between spouses and reproduction in 19th century Sweden

Background: The influence of spousal relations on reproductive outcomes has received considerable attention in the demographic literature. Previous studies have shown the complex interplay between age difference, female autonomy, and reproductive outcomes, but only a few have focused on historical high-fertility populations.Objective: This study investigates the associations between spousal age difference and the timing of first and higher order births, as well as the total number of children born.Methods: Data from the Demographic Data Base (married women, born between 1840 and 1889, first marriages only) are used to construct individual life courses in central and northern Sweden. The relative risk of age-homogamous and age-heterogamous couples having a child is examined using event history analysis. Poisson regression is applied to identify the effects of age difference on the total number of children born.Results: After controlling for the age of the wife, women in wife-older marriages show higher hazard rates for the transition to first and later order births compared to women in age-homogamous marriages. By contrast, women in husband-older marriages show lower hazard rates for the transition between births, with the exception of first childbirth. However, the net effect of spousal age difference on the total number of children ever born is small.Contribution: This study provides empirical evidence of the association between spousal age gap and fertility outcomes, using the spousal age gap as a proxy for conjugal power. It shows that women in wife-older marriages used their greater female autonomy to shorten the interval between childbirths, although the effect on the total number of children born is negligible

Contexts of Reproduction:Gender Dynamics and Unintended Birth in sub-Saharan Africa

Objective This study examines how women's chances of having an unintended birth is related to gender inequalities in education, employment, intra-household decision-making, and norms at individual, household, and community levels in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Background Women in SSA have the highest rates of unintended births in the world, often with severe implications for the health and well-being of families. A comprehensive understanding of how gender dynamics are associated with their chances of unintended birth is however lacking. Method Multilevel binomial logistic regression models of unintended birth were estimated with harmonized data from 123 Demographic and Health Surveys including 534,533 married women living in 43,136 communities within 39 SSA countries over the period 1992–2019. Results The odds of unintended birth are higher among higher-educated women, women with a small age difference with their husband, and women living in communities with more higher-educated women, and better (reproductive) health facilities. These women are more willing to acknowledge a birth as unintended. In communities where women are relatively more educated than their husband and in households where husbands and wives are equal in terms of education, higher occupational status, and fertility preferences, odds of unintended birth are lower. Conclusion Unintended birth is a complex reproductive experience related to local gender systems, women's relative position in intra-household power relations, and their willingness to acknowledge a birth as unintended. Implications Improving gender equality at household level may result in women's improved reproductive health. However, outcomes are also strongly shaped by the local gender system

Clustering and dispersal of siblings in the North-Holland countryside, 1850-1940

'Why are some families scattered over a larger area than others? In this article we use a dataset with the complete life courses of all children from 210 families, originating from the same village in the commercialized North-Western part of The Netherlands. We experiment with multinomial logistic regression on sibling sets to discover the factors behind geographical sibling dispersal. The most important factors turn out to be the survival of the parents, the civil status of the siblings, and the size and gender composition of the sibling set.' (author's abstract)

Surviving in Overijssel:An Analysis of Life Expectancy, 1812–1912

The rise in life expectancy is one of the main processes of social change in the 19th century. In the Netherlands, regional differences in life expectancy, and their development, were huge. Therefore, studies on average life expectancy or studies, which examine the whole of the Netherlands do not fully capture the differential determinants of this process. This study focuses on social, economic, and geographic differences in life expectancy in 19th-century Overijssel using the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN). Exploiting Cox regression, the influence of several factors on life expectancy are investigated. The article shows that birth cohort, urbanisation, and gender had an important relation with life expectancy in 19th-century Overijssel, while industrialisation, religion, and inheritance customs were not associated with age at death