The Whaling Industry and Fertility Decline: Nantucket, Massachusetts 1660-1850

Abstract

The central interest of this article is to describe the interrelationship of fertility patterns with occupational structure for a sample of married couples in one maritime community—Nantucket, Massachusetts—over a period of nearly 200 years. Marital fertility declined substantially in Nantucket from its first white settlement in 1660 to 1850. During this time the whaling industry was undergoing intervals of expansion, prosperity, virtual destruction, and renewal, eventually failing to recover from a long decline that began in the 1840s. An explanation of the observed Falls in fertility is not possible without reference to trends in the whaling industry, as this article attempts to demonstrate.A sustained decline in American fertility rates from at least 1800 and perhaps earlier has been documented (Coale and Zelnik, 1963; Easterlin, 1971, 1976a, 1976b; Forster and Tucker, 1972; Vinovskis, 1976; Yasuba, 1962). Causes of the decline may include the changing availability of farmland, urbanization and industrialization, literacy, and such demographic factors as a decline in mortality, changes in the sex ratio at marriageable ages, and ethnic composition. A number of researchers have even suggested that Falls in family size were at least partly due to deliberate attempts by individual couples not to exceed their desired number of children (Kantrow, 1980; Osterud and Fulton, 1976; Temkin-Greener and Swedlund, 1978; Wells, 1971). For Nantucket in particular, Byers (1982) also presented evidence for a substantial fertility decline from 1680 to 1840, claiming that his findings “demonstrate community-wide acceptance of voluntary fertility control.” The present study, in contrast, found no evidence of deliberate fertility control in Nantucket.