Between 1870 and 1939, most European countries experienced a substantial decline in birth rates. The most influential recent research on this `European fertility transition' has been carried out under the auspices of the Princeton Project. According to the Princeton view, the fertility decline initially resulted from the conscious adoption by couples of techniques to terminate their childbearing after a certain number of births. This form of fertility control, `stopping', is distinguished from `spacing', whereby couples increase the intervals between births. It was only well into the twentieth century, it is argued, that the deliberate spacing of children within marriage became important. The Princeton school also tends to stress cultural factors and increased access to methods of family limitation as the major stimuli to lower fertility, rather than the influence of economic factors on the demand for children. Other researchers, however, have suggested that, for the United States at least, spacing behaviour may have been of substantial importance throughout this period. They argue that the unreliability of contraceptive methods forced couples to inhibit fertility early in marriage, rather than relying on their subsequent ability to terminate childbearing completely.

In Discussion Paper No. 252, Programme Director Nicholas Crafts examines the evidence on UK fertility control behaviour in the late nineteenth century, using the data collected in the 1911 Census of England and Wales. This included a detailed Fertility Census, which provides a unique opportunity to examine patterns of childbearing early in marriage at an important point during the fertility decline. Crafts derives from the Census data a cross-section analysis of 101 major urban areas relating family size (disaggregated according to age and duration of marriage) to socio-economic characteristics such as employment, social composition, wealth, mortality and literacy. Crafts finds that about one in eight couples where the wife married at ages 25-34 delayed their first child, although not remaining childless eventually. His multivariate analysis suggests that postponement of births early in marriage was much more common in districts offering greater opportunities for women to participate in paid work.
These findings differ from the conventional wisdom of the Princeton school, Crafts notes. They suggest that women were keen to protect the contribution their wages made to the family budget while their children were young and not yet earning themselves. If opportunities for paid work did exert a restraining influence on fertility, then it does seem likely that this effect would hold throughout marriage, and not just encourage `stopping' behaviour. The findings are confirmed by the 1949 Royal Commission's questionnaire evidence, which revealed that of those married in the early twentieth century, over 70% of those who had tried to limit their families had used birth control within five years of marriage.
Crafts concludes that by 1911, `spacing' behaviour was well established in urban England and Wales and accounted for a sizeable fraction of the total births averted. Evidence of the importance of spacing and its sensitivity to economic conditions gives further reason to doubt the Princeton group's general stress on cultural factors and on improved knowledge or availability of birth control techniques

Duration of Marriage, Fertility, and Female Employment Opportunities in England and Wales in 1911
N F R Crafts

Discussion Paper No. 252, June 1988 (HR)