A Not-So-Modest Proposal, or, Children as Consumer Goods in the Antebellum Rural North

Abstract

In this concise, well-written, but highly technical study, economist Lee A. Craig revisits a longstanding issue in American economic and demographic history, the decline of rural fertility in the North during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1800 and 1860, American women began having about 25 percent fewer children, as the total number of live births an average woman could expect declined from 7.04 to 5.21. Although similar dramatic declines, known as fertility transitions, occurred in almost every Western nation and typically began in urban areas, the one in the United States began earlier and affected families on farms at the same time or even before it affected those in the cities. Moreover, although fertility declined throughout the rural North, it varied considerably by region and was much lower in the settled Northeast than in the Midwest or on the frontier. Historical demographers and economic historians have long struggled to understand this phenomenon for the light it can shed on the historical processes of economic development in the United States and for its implications for the present-day dynamics of change in less-developed or newly emerging societies. Consequently, fertility decline has been explained by a host of variables and conditions, ranging from the broadest effects of industrialization and urbanization to the most specific changes in contraceptive technology, and, with respect to the particular case of the antebellum rural North, in terms of the declining availability of land. Craig does an admirable job summarizing the literature and the current state of knowledge on this topic, some of which he agrees with and some not. He is ultimately dissatisfied, however, because none of it incorporates a precise model for calculating the economic value of farm children. According to his reading of these works, this is the key issue for understanding the fertility behavior of northern farm families and its variation between regions.