Subreplacement Fertility in the West before the Baby Boom (1900-1940): Current and Contemporary Perspectives (version September 1, 2008) Jan Van Bavel – Interface Demography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel 1
[email protected] Abstract - Between 1920 and 1940, fertility has been below the replacement level in many western countries for about ten to twenty years. In today's scholarly literature, the interwar fertility trough is explained by economic crisis and war threat. This paper first collects series of fertility and net reproduction rates that are hard to reconcile with such a view. It then confronts current with contemporary interpretations of low fertility during the interwar period. The views held by interwar demographers appear to differ remarkably and systematically from current interpretations. According to the contemporary interpretations, low fertility was not due to war threat or economic crisis but rather to rising individualism, secularization, rationalization, and consumerism. These were trends that, according to leading sociologists, economists, and demographers of the first half of the twentieth century, were already going on at least since the nineteenth century. The paper concludes by discussing some implications for current theorizing about subreplacement fertility. 1 Many thanks to Anneleen Baerts for entering some of the fertility and economic indicators employed in this paper. Also thanks to Stephanie Coontz, Ron Lesthaeghe, Tomáš Sobotka, and Robert Woods for their useful suggestions and encouraging comments about earlier versions of this paper. Of course, all claims made in the current version remain the sole responsibility of the author. Subreplacement fertility before the baby boom Subreplacement Fertility in the West before the Baby Boom (1900-1940): Current and Contemporary Perspectives During the past decades, demographers have increasingly been debating causes and consequences of contemporary below-replacement level fertility in the Western world (overviews include Davis et al.