The Emergence of a Two-Child Norm among American Birth-Controllers

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to call attention to the often overlooked fact that below-replacement fertility is a macrodemographic phenomenon with a surprisingly long and intriguing history in the US. The analysis begins by explicitly noticing that a universal 2-or3-child program such as was called for by social theorists of neo-Malthusian persuasion during the 19th century was itself a sort of anti-population time bomb. Next it is shown that far from remaining a utopian ideal the suggested 2-or-3-child program actually was translated into practice remarkably quickly by and large among white native-born American married couples who were established urbanites. Some previously unavailable evidence is presented to suggest that the remarkably widespread acceptance of rudimentary birth control methods among urban dwellers was connected with the commitment of a growing number of married couples to an individual family strategy of bare even at a comparatively early stage of the US fertility transition. The evidence offered on this point is both indirect and unrelievedly quantitative. It takes the form of estimates of the distributions of terminal parities (i.e. completed fertility) for successive cohorts of married native-born white couples who had employed effective methods of birth control. These estimates have been obtained by applying some newly devised methods for analyzing parity distribution information collected by the US censuses in 1900 1910 and 1940. The analysis of those sources shows how early a socially defined 2-child norm came to be reflected in the behavior of the large population of married couples who managed in some degree to regulate their fertility. After reviewing some details of these and other related statistical measures and presenting some insights into the way they were derived the article concludes with brief speculations about the forces promoting this early historical convergence toward a small-family norm that was incompatible with the biological replacement of the population from which the controllers were being drawn.