Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the dramatic fall in family size in Britain between 1860 and 1940. It overturns current thinking and presents new and surprising findings about the importance of sexual abstinence and widely spaced births.
Trade Review'… required reading for anyone interested in the still unresolved debate over the nature and causes of the origins and process of the modern fertility transition.' English Historical Review
Table of ContentsIntroduction; Part I. Historiographical Introduction: A Genealogy of Approaches: 1. The construction and the study of the fertility decline in Britain: social science and history; Part II. The Professional Model of Social Classes: An Intellectual History: 2. Social classification of occupations and the GRO in the nineteenth century; 3. Social classification and nineteenth-century naturalistic social science; 4. The emergence of a social explanation of class inequalities among environmentalists, 1901–1904; 5. The emergence of the professional model as the official system of social classification, 1905–1928; Part III. A New Analysis of the 1911 Census Occupational Fertility Data: 6. A test of the coherence of the professional model of class-differential fertility decline; 7. Multiple fertility declines in Britain: occupational variation in completed fertility and nuptiality; 8. How was fertility controlled? The spacing versus stopping debate and the culture of abstinence; Part IV. Conceptions and Refutations: 9. A general approach to fertility change and the history of falling fertilities in England and Wales; 10. Social class, communities, gender and nationalism in the study of fertility change; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.
