1. Hill, Christopher, “Sex, Marriage, and the Family in England,” Economic History Review 31 (1978): 463CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. The classic statement of the theory is Notestein, Frank, “Population: the long view.” in Food for the World, ed. Schultz, T. W. (Chicago, 1945), 36–57Google Scholar.

3. An overview of the development of this theory is given by Watkins, Susan, “Conclusions.” in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, eds. Coale, Ansley and Watkins, Susan (Princeton, 1986), 420–29Google Scholar.

4. A recent variant of this argument sees the whole process of fertility decline as a cultural innovation related to the spread of secular attitudes and education. This is tracked by correlating voting and religious patterns at the regional level with marital fertility. For an example of this approach see Wilson, Chris and Lestaeghe, Ron, “Modes of Production, Secularization, and the Pace of Fertility Decline in Western Europe 1870–1930,” in Coale and Watkins, Decline of Fertility, 293–313Google Scholar.

5. See Wrigley, E. A., Population and History (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

6. For example, Becker, Gary, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar For a review of the literature see Robinson, Warren, “The Time Cost of Children and Other Household Production.” Population Studies 41 (1987): 313–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. For a critique of the new home economics, see Folbre, Nancy, “Of Patriarchy Born: the Political Economy of Fertility Decisions,” Feminist Studies 9 (Summer 1983): 261–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Levine, David, Reproducing Families: the Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; Seccombe, Wally, “Marxism and Demography,” New Left Review 137 (1983): 20–46Google Scholar; Kertzer, David and Hogan, Dennis, Family, Political Economy, and Demographic Change: The Transformation of Life in Casalecchio, Italy, 1861–1921 (Madison, 1989)Google Scholar.

9. Of course, no method, local or aggregate, is unproblematic. A general discussion of family reconstitution can be found in Tranter, Neil, Population and Society 1750–1940 (London, 1985): 20–26.Google Scholar For a criticism of family reconstitution's inability to track mobile and poor populations, see Derek Hirst's review of Hey, David, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts, in Social History 3 (1976): 382.Google Scholar For a methodological discussion of the issue, see Norton, Susan, “The Vital Question: Are Reconstructed Families Representative of the General Family?” in Genealogical Demography, eds. Dyke, B. and Morrill, W. (New York, 1980), 11–22Google Scholar.

10. Knodel, John, The Decline of Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939 (Princeton, 1974)Google Scholar.

11. Knodel uses a number of measures to demonstrate this decline. The most significant is m, a measure developed by Ansley Coale and J. T. Trussel to measure the extent of a population's deviation from uncontrolled fertility by comparing its age-specific fertility curve to that of a composite of known noncontrolling populations. Knodel argues that a level of m greater than 0.3 is indicative of fertility control. All but two villages exceeded this level by 1900, even if marital fertility had not yet fallen dramatically. See Coale, Ansley and Trussel, J. T., “Finding Two Parameters That Specify a Model Schedule of Marital Fertility,” Population Index 44 (1978): 203–13CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

12. Natural fertility refers to the level of fertility achieved in a population in the absence of conscious efforts to control reproduction.

13. One important element was the changing seasonality of births as the dip in conceptions related to the harvest months disappeared and births took place more evenly throughout the year.

14. Another important factor Knodel cites is the high level of maternal mortality, which averaged about 1 percent per birth, a rate that subjected the average woman to a 5 percent chance of death in childbirth.

15. Elinor Accampo sees both earlier stopping and longer intervals, suggesting a mixture of strategies (120–22, 136–37).

16. For a discussion of some of these issues see Moeller, Robert, ed., Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany (London, 1986)Google Scholar and Evans, Richard and Lee, W. R., eds The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

17. Cho, Lee-Jay, Retherford, Robert, and Choe, Minja Kim, The Own-Child Method of Fertility Estimation (Honolulu, 1986)Google Scholar.

18. Haines, Michael. Fertility and Occupation: Population Patterns in Industrialization (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Woods, R. I. and Smith, C. W., “The decline of marital fertility in the late nineteenth century: the case of England and Wales,” Population Studies 37 (1983): 207–25CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

19. The argument that relative deprivation and status anxiety played a role in middle-class family limitation was first advanced by J. A. Banks in his study of British fertility in the late nineteenth century. Banks, J. A.. Prosperity and Parenthood (London, 1954)Google Scholar.

20. Stern, Mark, Society and Family Strategy (Albany, 1987), 93.Google Scholar The debate over the relative importance of education in changing the behavior of working-class families was spurred in part by John Caldwell's work on education and fertility. Levine argues that education had little impact on working-class fertility because of its limited scope and importance in working-class life. Caldwell, John, “Mass Education as a Determinant of the Timing of Fertility Decline,” Population and Development Review 6 (1980): 225–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levine, , Reproducing Families, 194–200Google Scholar.

21. The rates of school attendance for the children of skilled workers as compared to the children of unskilled workers differed by only 4 percent for males and 2 percent for females.

22. While this need not be true, it is more likely that lower rates of decline could disguise family limitation, as Knodel argues in his discussion of the increasing level of natural fertility in his German villages. Stern's decision not to use m, for unexplained technical reasons, makes it more difficult to date the transition in Buffalo.

23. This decline would have been even more pronounced if factory workers had been graded as unskilled or semiskilled rather than skilled.

24. Indeed it seems plausible that improvements in schooling and material comforts may have been an effect, not a cause, of family limitation. Cf. Levine, , Reproducing Families, 188–95, 202–5Google Scholar, which basically agrees with Stern.

25. The first group included about 4,312 individuals and the second 12,264.

26. Illegitimacy went from 5.8 per 100 births to 8.1 per 100 births, while the level of prenuptial pregnancy doubled to almost 25 percent. Knodel found similarly high rates in Germany.

27. These figures include births into the 1890s. Accampo calculates that m rose from 0.3378 to 0.4578, a clear indication of the adoption of family limitation.

28. For a discussion of these issues, see Lynch, Katherine, Family, Class, and Ideology in Early-Industrial France (Madison, 1988)Google Scholar.

29. Demography has long attempted to make this connection, and the applicability of transition theory to the less-developed world has always been a key consideration in the study of the history of Western populations. See Knodel, John and van de Walle, Etienne, “Lessons from the Past: Policy Implications of Historical Fertility Studies,” in Decline of Fertility, eds. Coale and Watkins. 390–419Google Scholar.

30. Seccombe, Wally, “Patriarchy stabilized: the construction of the male breadwinner wage norm in nineteenth-century Britain,” Social History 11 (1986): 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.