The European Experience of Declining Fertility: A Quiet Revolution, 1850-1970.

I

Taken together, this collection of essays provides the most innovative attempt thus far to explain the decline of fertility in Europe. The Introduction lays out an ambitious project: in contrast to the normal emphasis on socioeconomic factors in studies of the fertility transition, these authors are concerned with "cultures of contraception, specific to place and to time, constantly changing even as they contributed to the quiet revolution". Even more intriguing, they believe that "childbearing and childbearing remains one of modem Europeans' most important symbolic activities," a way of representing themselves to the world. The promise, then, is of a novel approach to the decline of fertility.

The introductory essay links the book to the current state of the field as George Alter outlines the principal recent theoretical and empirical approaches to fertility decline: demographic transition theory, the Princeton Fertility Project, and wealth-flows theory. He places these theories within Richard Easterlin's supply-demand framework, and suggests that the impact of both the Princeton project and wealth-flows theory is to undercut the persuasiveness of the socioeconomic emphasis of transition theory, leading to greater interest in cultural factors, even if it remains difficult to choose among different cultural explanations. Alter's summary poses the problem faced by these essays: how to incorporate concerns about other factors into the usual social and economic discussion of fertility decline. The following essays approach this theme from the different perspectives of "Family and Gender," "Community and Class," and "State and Politics."

The first section emphasizes the private context of fertility. The first two essays examine changing versions of what "motherhood" represented. John Gillis describes the changing perception of motherhood in the Victorian middle classes, as childbearing, a lifelong occupation, replaced childbearing, a separated event, as the defining element. Ellen Ross continues the theme in an article on the effects on working-class mothers in London of early twentieth-century British legislation concerning the care of children, legislation that imposed new standards of child care on working-class mothers.

The remaining essays in this section address other aspects of attitudes towards fertility. Wally Seccombe examines the impact of conjugal relations on the willingness of a couple to limit their fertility. In an essay notable for its awareness of the power relations involved in cultural matters, Angus McLaren shows how the attempt by middle-class family reformers in pre-World War I Britain, especially Marie Stopes, to impose not only contraceptive information but also a system of family values on working-class women worked against the adoption of contraception in the face of working-class dependence on abortion as a birth control method. Mary Jo Maynes compares nineteenth- and early twentieth-century working-class autobiographies in France and Germany. She concludes that the timing of changes in the structure of childhood--mortality changes, family strategies, education, and intergenerational sentiments--meant that in France more "modern" characteristics of childhood had taken hold by the second half of the nineteenth century, while in Germany this "idealized" childhood was still to be achieved.

The second and third sections move away from private places into the public arena. Michael Hanagan examines the ways in which population increases, domestic industry and rural social structure in the areas that sent migrants to Birmingham in England and Saint-Etienne in France influenced migration patterns, labor relations, and workers' militancy. Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider show that the fertility transition among landless laborers in a Sicilian village was associated with changes in social relations and the availability of goods that made possible the achievement of longstanding, "traditional" goals of families, especially those associated with honor and respectability. Leslie Page Moch outlines a history of European migration that includes not only permanent migration but also the temporary and seasonal migrations that made even seventeenth-century rural Europe a place of significant population movement. These ongoing migration patterns knitted regions together by contact, experience and kinship. Michael Haines examines occupational differentials in the fertility declines in Britain, the United States, France, Norway and Germany. Martine Segalen compares the adoption of fertility limitation in two Breton villages, a comparison that highlights the importance of the social and economic contexts of fertility decline as well as the process by which fertility became a subject of individual conscious choice. Chiara Saraceno explores the role of the Italian state in reshaping gender and generational relationships in the family. Susan Cotts Watkins shows that while diversity of demographic behavior decreased throughout western Europe between 1870 and 1960, differences within countries decreased even more, reflecting social integration brought about by market integration, state formation, and nation building. Jay M. Winter examines the effects of the two World Wars on the sex ratio and women's participation in the labor force. He argues that these changes dramatically widened women's opportunities; however, the postwar demobilizations drastically reduced those opportunities by reinforcing the domestic position of women with an emphasis on childbearing and protecting the health of mothers and children. Lynn Hollen Lees shows that population developments--urbanization, increased mortality, declining fertility--affected policy decisions about social investments.

II

This volume indicates that a significant amount of historical research has been produced over the last several decades that needs to be incorporated into interpretations of the fertility decline. Indeed, it is an attempt to rescue population history from demographers who focus too narrowly on quantitative measures of fertility behavior and to place population history closer to the center of historical narratives. The analyses offered consider a wide range of social, economic and political structures in their search for an explanation of fertility decline. Yet it is especially noteworthy that this collection continually raises questions about what its authors often refer to as "culture." They appear to have reached this perspective as a result of the inadequacy of the social and economic explanations offered by theories of fertility decline. The invocation of culture is thus a part of the process by which, as E. A. Hammel has put it, culture has been used "as an analytic principle |that~ might elevate contextualization to a higher level," an attempt to establish a general statement about the causes of fertility decline on the basis of local (cultural) characteristics."(1)

This collection therefore provides an opportunity for taking stock of the current position of this slippery concept in population history. As Hammel suggests, incorporating culture is no easy task, for the meanings of the term are not fixed in the social science discipline most directly devoted to in study, anthropology. We might add that the current tendency in literary studies, at least in some places, to be increasingly oriented towards cultural studies also raises questions about the use of the term.(2) The most important aspect of the shift over the last generation in the meaning of the term "culture" has been its movement from "the institutional, structural-functional approach" towards "local, culture-specific rationalities, in the building of which actors are important perceiving, interpreting, and constructing agents." Culture appears less as a cause or effect than as a "negotiated symbolic understanding."(3) It has, in this form, been effectively appropriated into the work of a number of historians of culture.(4)

I do not mean to suggest that this use of "culture" is the only possible use of the term. There are strong dissents within ethnography and literary studies from these approaches to the study of culture, dissents that need to be considered as the concept is appropriated for population history. There may ago be good heuristic reasons why such a meaning is inappropriate in the study of population behavior. This is a discussion that largely remains in the future, however, and it should take place with the understanding that the implications of bringing culture closer to the center of population history can be substantial.

A shift in the meaning of culture in the direction of symbolic understanding raises questions about the overarching metanarratives that structure inquiry and about the metaphors used in that inquiry.(5) The principal theories of fertility transition posit broad connections between large social and economic changes, on the one hand, and fertility transition on the other. The story then is one of, on the one hand, narrowly defined changes in fertility behavior--a drop in the birth rate(6)--and industrialization, urbanization and other transformations. To bring culture into these theories, as the Princeton Project and wealth flows theory have attempted, it must be added on, as another contextualizing factor, similar to urbanization, industrialization, or rising standards of living. This positioning makes it difficult to adopt fully the implications of seeing culture as something continuously created and reshaped in social interaction. Tacking culture onto functionalist metanarratives of the fertility transition means freezing culture into a rigid "thing" that bears little resemblance to the ways in which it is used in much current ethnographic or literary practice. These essays make us ask if something so marginal in the story of demographic history can ever be brought into the center of that story without a complete rewriting to make, for example, the central line of the account perceptions of children rather than the number of children ever born.

A second consequence has to do with the metaphors with which we talk about population behavior. What is fertility decline like? In many accounts it is like economic activity, a series of calculated decisions by individuals intending to maximize some characteristic of their lives.(7) These actors draw on a range of contextual factors--income levels, prospects for the future, public policies, religious attitudes, even their ability to make rational decisions--to decide how many children to have. But as culture has become a primary concern of some historians, the economic metaphor has been replaced by the metaphor of a text. It is in fact this metaphor that the editors of this collection use when they refer to childbearing as a symbolic activity.(8) Positing behavior as representation rather than as the result of rational calculation breaks down the boundaries between text (fertility behavior) and context (culture) and makes it difficult to continue telling the same story of demographic history. Existing theories of the fertility transition--since they are stories that assert that fertility behavior is like an economic activity--can construct that relationship with culture as context; a different story that asserts that fertility behavior is a cultural activity cannot maintain that distance.(9)

Works that attempt to bring culture into their field of study, such as the essays here, could then be classified in terms of the extent to which they accept the breakdown of these boundaries. Those that lie closest to the pole of identifying fertility behavior and culture are also those that have rewritten the metanarrative and changed the metaphor. They are not about significant differences in fertility rates between occupational groups or different regions, but about what having children meant in terms of family, gender, public policy, or other factors. Fertility behavior in these accounts is not like calculating profit and loss, it is like constructing onself, assuming a particular subjectivity. Others remain more insisistent on maintaining culture as a distinct entity that provides the context for fertility behavior; these also remain closest to the narrative of demographic transition and the economic metaphor in which it is written. Those that seem to come closest to accepting the identity between text and context--i.e., children as a symbolic activity--seem to be about something other than the fertility transition. Conversely, those that resist this identification seem best able to address the questions raised by demographic transition theory. This difference is not surprising: they are telling different stories.

Recently Peter Steams broached the possibility of a collaboration between social historians and postmodernists, suggesting that postmodernism held out the potential for improving social historians' ability to deal with cultural relationships in the past, and arguing that social historians' prior experiences of adapting other disciplinary approaches to their own use bolstered this hope.(10) "Postmodern" covers a wide range of theories, but the questions I have raised about this collection flow from the kinds of concerns that mark much recent cultural theory. And the question of culture in the fertility transition suggests that the task may be more difficult than past borrowings from the social sciences. Notions of what culture is and how it is to be positioned in an inquiry need to be reexamined and possibly changed dramatically; forms of inquiry--in Clifford Geertz's words, "the ways we think about the ways we think"--must also be reconsidered.(11) The aims of social history may be so tightly wedded to functionalist approaches that it must reject the insights into culture that have marked other fields.

III

These essays tend to work around the question of culture in more or less direct ways and with more or less success. When they have difficulties in handling the question, I would argue that it is the result of their attempt to graft culture onto functionalist economic models of the fertility transition. It is clear that much theoretical work remains to be done as the category of "culture" is brought into the study of demographic behavior. The theoretical impetus of newer versions of culture may however be lost in the concern to "operationalize" these concepts for specific topics of study.(12) Without rethinking the metanarrative of demographic change and the metaphors with which we represent it, we cannot treat fertility as a way of representing to the world; it remains something acted upon by representations of the world.

For scholars whose interests lie in understanding those phenomena to avoid such theoretical work is to leave it to ethnographers, literary critics, and others whose interests may be far from such concerns. Such an academic division of labor accentuates the perception that History is an atheoretical discipline concerned only with facts, a position that social historians have sought in the past to resist as they borrowed not only methods but also theories from social science disciplines.(13) It also abandons the conversation about the future of social history to those with little understanding of the aims and methods of the field. This collection is important therefore in that it so highlights the question of culture that these issues come into the open. It provides an opening for students of population history to consider the role of culture in their analyses, and whether a "linguistic turn" is in order for a field that has, for the last several decades, marked itself as one of the most innovative in the study of the past.

Department of History Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

ENDNOTES

1. E. A. Hammel, "A Theory of Culture for Demography," Population and Development Review 16 (1990): 455.

2. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, 1988) and Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (New York, 1991).

3. Hammel, op.cit., p. 456. For an earlier, very influential discussion of the meaning of the term, see Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), pp. 3-30.

4. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives (Stanford, 1987); David Sabean, Power in the Blood (Cambridge, 1984); Richard White, The Middle Ground (Cambridge, 1991); William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge, 1980); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).

5. On metanarratives and the ways they structure histories, see the work of Hayden White: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973); Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978); and The Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1987).

6. Often this is even further defined, as in the case of the ten percent decline in |I.sub.g~ used by the Princeton Fertility Project or the definition based on stopping rather than spacing used in family reconstitution studies.

7. Donald McCloskey has written two excellent studies of the rhetorical aspects of economics: The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison, 1985), and If You're So Smart (Chicago, 1990).

8. On the use of the textual metaphor, see Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text" in The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 1-22; Clifford Geertz, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought," The American Scholar 49 (1980): 165-179; Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text," New Literary History 5 (1973): 91-117.

9. See Hans Medick, "'Missionaries in the Row Boat'? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a Challenge to Social History," Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1987): 76-98 for a discussion of the challenge to structural concerns posed by new ethnographic methods.

10. Peter N. Stearns, "Social History Update: Encountering Postmodernism," Journal of Social History (1991): 449-451.

11. Geertz, "Blurred Genres," p. 166.

12. As Lynn Hunt shows, this has happened in the past as historians appropriated methodologies from other disciplines; see "History Beyond Social Theory," in David Carroll, ed., The States of "Theory": History, Art and Critical Discourse (New York, 1990), p. 99.

13. See Mark Cousins, "The Practice of Historical Investigation," in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, eds. Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 126-136.