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Fertility and Marriage in a Nineteenth-Century Industrial City: Philadelphia, 1850–1880

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Michael R. Haines
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Abstract

This paper examines age-specific and differential fertility, both marital and total, and nuptiality for census samples of white Philadelphia families headed by native white Americans, Germans, and Irish for 1850–1880. Using Philadelphia Social History Project data, own-children techniques are employed to construct age-standardized child-woman ratios and age-specific total and marital fertility rates. Conclusions are that the low fertility among native whites was due to both low marital fertility and later marriage; that rapid declines in marital fertility occurred among second generation migrants; and that variations existed in marital fertility across occupational groupings within ethnic groups.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 151 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1980

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References

1 The proportions married are the actual numbers for 1880. They were estimated for 1850–70 from the proportion of spouses and adjusted upward for the proportion of total married women to spouses in 1880.

2 From this point, the discussion treats marital and overall child-women ratios as fertility, although they are net of mortality. In general, the differentials are present even after correction for mortality.