Masculinity of Birth Registrations in Australia, 1880-1915: Another Aspect of the Population Debate

Abstract

At a public level in the early years of the twentieth century Australia's population debate was conducted on several, at times conflicting, fronts. There were those that held the size of the population was a matter of national importance and there were those, sometimes called eugenicists, who were more concerned with its quality. There was the issue of responsible family limitation and the issue of family responsibility to procreate. Underpinning and driving these debates was the unprecedented decline in fertility that Australia shared with much of the western world. That decline was in itself evidence that in private some were considering these issues quite differently. Those in authority followed the fertility decline statistically, and officials charged with the task of assembling the data, Commonwealth and State Statisticians, were usually of senior rank and highly regarded. Some of their data provides evidence of the different ways population issues were considered in private. Masculinity of birth registrations is one such data set and it forms the central theme of this inquiry. In particular, it is used to explore how some people thought and behaved in private during the period of fertility decline.