Marriage and European Views Fertility

The organization of national social systems of education and welfare during the last decades of the nineteenth century combined with the spread of public health measures, which radically changed children's chances of survival, to provide the historical context in which the ongoing revolution in the family was keynoted by the decline in fertility. The average English woman marrying in the 1860s had 6.16 children; her daughters, marrying in the 1890s, had an average of 4.13 children; her granddaughters, marrying in the 1920s, had on average 2.31 children. The decline of marital fertility was both an innovation and an adjustment; it not only responded to macrolevel changes in social organization but also represented one of the primary ways in which individual men and women acted to make their own history. Not only were the numbers of children dropping dramatically—and almost all of these children surviving infancy—but the period of the family cycle devoted to child-raising was likewise abridged. The very nature of married life changed in response to these demographic innovations.

Some demographers have explained this phenomenon in terms of a shift from "quantity to quality" in relation to the time, energy, and resources devoted to each individual child; but something else was at work. A Manchester woman's 1945 observation weaves together several threads into something like a whole cloth: "People wish to have a small family on account of public opinion which has now hardened into custom. It is customary—and has been so during the last twenty-five years or so—to have two children and no more if you can avoid it. A family of five or six children loses in prestige and, some think, in respectability. It is on behalf of their children that parents feel this most keenly" (Mass-Observation, pp. 74–75). She captures, first the temporality of change ("During the past twenty-five years or so"—namely, since the end of World War I); second the reconstruction of mentalities that have "now hardened into custom"; third the interpenetration of the public and the private, neatly encapsulated by the use of those notoriously elastic terms "public opinion" and "respectability"; fourth "on behalf of their children" joins the sentimentalization of childhood together with the exigencies of human-capital formation; and fifth that it is both "parents"—the respectable husband and his Malthusian wife—who decide together to control their fertility within marriage.

Fertility control was possible without the active involvement of both husbands and wives—the widespread prevalence of abortion stands in testimony to the studied indifference of many men—but the sentimentalization of the family made it more likely that methods of control would come within the parameters of conjugal agreement. Because most of the decline in marital fertility was the product of two ancient practices—coitus interruptus and abstinence—it is clearly important to pay close attention to the changing temper of communication between husbands and wives. Cultural forces, especially the "regendering" of the marital union, both narrowed the scope of the marital union and intensified its internal dynamics. The texture of the intimate relationship within marriage was not just important in its own right but also of crucial significance in reconstructing attitudes to the quality of married life, particularly in relation to the importance of parenting. In contrast to older images that emphasized the importance of work and kinship alliance, modern marriage was portrayed as the romantic union of two individuals. The modern family of "mom, dad, and the kids" was based on the idea that romance was not inimical to marriage and the experience of childhood was massively reimagined by this transition to privacy, domesticity, and, above all, child-centeredness.