Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvii:1 (Summer, 2006), 35–58.
ROCKING THE CRADLE
Gloria L. Main
Rocking the Cradle: Downsizing the New
England Family Sometime around the year 1800, if not be-
fore, couples throughout New England began talking to each
other about the desirability of postponing children. Why they did
so is something of a mystery, but the consequences of those con-
versations are unmistakable: The median size of completed fami-
lies in the region halved for cohorts marrying between 1790 and
1840. The number of children per family fell in the rural interior
as well as in crowded coastal communities. How couples in the
period actually managed to control family size is also a mystery,
because no magic pills or rubber condoms were then available. No
one at the time even understood the physiology of human repro-
duction. People obtained their health information from gossip or
folklore, and women shared recipes for herbal “remedies.” The
timing of ovulation was utterly unknown even to university-
trained doctors. Any rhythm method was necessarily based on false
assumptions and any success with it based on luck. The only con-
traceptive barriers available in the early decades of the nineteenth
century were clumsy sheaths made of animal organs used by city
prostitutes and their customers. Their unsavory connotations
aroused disgust and revulsion among the respectable few who
knew about them, yet no acceptable alternatives existed.1
Ordinary families living in New England’s countryside who
avoided or terminated pregnancies did so without the aid of any
new contraceptive technology or medical knowledge. Neither
were they being encouraged in their efforts by media campaigns or
government-funded clinics, as more recently in Asia and else-
where. Consequently, it was far more difªcult to prevent babies in
the New England of 1800 than it is today in Bangladesh.2
Gloria L. Main is Professor of History, University of Colorado. She is the author of Peoples of
Spacious Lands: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); To-
bacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton, 1982); “Naming Children in Early
New England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXVII (1996), 1–27.
© 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc.
1
John C. Caldwell, “The Delayed Western Fertility Decline: An Examination of English-
Speaking Countries,” Population and Development Review, XXV (1999), 479–513; Janet Farrell
Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 1994).
2
Susan E. Klepp, “Lost, Hidden, Obstructed, and Repressed: Contraceptive and Abortive
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36 | GLORIA L. MAIN
Given the technological obstacles to controlling fertility and
the apparent unlikelihood of people deliberately foregoing sexual
pleasure at a time when farming was still the dominant way of life,
New England’s claim to a precocious modernity invites scrutiny.
Until recently, child/woman ratios calculated from federal census
summaries have had to serve as proxies for actual birth rates in
early America, because no states registered births or deaths before
the middle of the nineteenth century, and only a few were doing
so by 1900. Child/woman ratios, which are based on the relative
sizes of key age groups as reported by census takers, are subject to
such potentially confounding factors as age-differentiated migra-
tion patterns and changing mortality levels.
Hacker has recently argued that rising mortality in the nine-
teenth century reduced the numbers of young children appearing
in the censuses relative to the numbers of women of child-bearing
age. He views the declining ratios as a product not of women hav-
ing fewer babies but of fewer babies surviving to be counted. By
applying new estimates of child mortality to direct counts of
women and children in samples from manuscript census schedules,
he imputed missing children to census households and from them
generated a new historical series of birth rates for the United States
between 1830 and 1890. Hacker’s revised rates show no sustained
decline occurring before 1880, roughly the same time as it began
in England and much of Western Europe.3
Hacker’s argument pivots on the presumption of worsening
mortality among children below the age of ten. In the absence of
data based on direct reports of such deaths, he turned to a life table
originally calculated in 1906 from vital data then available in sev-
eral states. By ªtting published estimates of white adult mortality
Technology in the Early Delaware Valley,” in Judith A. McGaw (ed.), Early American Technol-
ogy: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850 (Chapel Hill, 1994), 68–113.
3
See J. David Hacker, “Rethinking the Early Decline of Fertility in the United States:
New Evidence from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series,” Demography, V (2004),
605–620; Maris Vinovskis, Fertility in Massachusetts from the Revolution (New York, 1981);
Daniel Scott Smith, “Early Fertility Decline in America: A Problem in Family History,” Jour-
nal of Family History, XII (1987), 73–84; Michael R. Haines and Hacker, “The Puzzle of the
Antebellum Fertility Decline in the United States: New Evidence and Reconsideration,” pa-
per presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, Chicago, Ill.,
November 20, 2004. See discussion of the pertinent literature in Haines, “The White Popula-
tion of the United States, 1790–1920,” in idem and Richard H. Steckel (eds.), A Population
History of North America (New York, 2000), 305–370; Herbert S. Klein, A Population History of
the United States (New York, 2004), 77–82.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 37
in the nineteenth century to this life table, he estimated the pro-
portions of white children who died. Direct counts of deaths by
age and sex would obviously be preferable to such a roundabout
procedure, just as our knowledge of the early history of fertility
would be equally well served by counting the actual births in local
records—a piecemeal approach at best, but the only alternative.
New England offers an exceptionally good place to begin, be-
cause its townships kept vital records, albeit of uneven quality.
From these records and other local sources, literally hundreds of
genealogists have generated family histories over the past 150
years. The best of them have been refereed by professionals and
published by reputable presses. They offer major advantages for
historians working in the pre-1850 era, because they document
the links between speciªc parents and children and endeavor to
supply birth, marriage, and death information about every family
member. Nor do compilers of these genealogies rely solely on
ofªcial vital statistics for their information. They also utilize a wide
array of sources—such as wills, deeds, family Bibles, and grave-
stone markings, as well as the federal manuscript-census schedules
for the years when they are available. Comprehensive compila-
tions follow descendants in the male line wherever they went;
some even track female lines, a far more difªcult target. As a result,
historians making use of such genealogies are not tied to a single
locale, as in town studies, nor to a single source like the federal
census. They can compare the life events of movers as well as of
stayers in a variety of settings.4
New England is, admittedly, a distinctive region; it cannot
serve as a surrogate for the country as a whole. But its inhabitants
made up one-quarter of the nation’s population in 1820, and their
cousins and descendants settled across the entire northern tier of
territories claimed by the United States—eventually reaching all
the way to the Paciªc. Knowing when and how New Englanders
sought smaller family sizes will help to explain why they did so and
provide insights into the phenomenon more generally.
4
Jennifer Wahl, “New Results on the Decline in Household Fertility,” in Stanley L.
Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (eds.), Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth (Chi-
cago, 1986), 391–425; Lee L. Bean, Geraldine P. Mineau, and Douglas L. Anderton, Fertility
Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation (Berkeley, 1990). Mean completed
family size and total fertility rates reported for New England by Wahl in Table 8.7 on page
406 are much higher for the 1650 to 1749 period than those calculated from my sample of ge-
nealogies.
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38 | GLORIA L. MAIN
method The present study uses a composite database of sample
families culled from a broad spectrum of published genealogies.
The sample includes only ªrst marriages resulting in at least one
child born in New England, beginning in 1620 through 1854. Al-
though the sampling design deliberately omits childless couples
and overstates births to some degree, it should not distort any
trends, since this overstatement is likely to have been a consistent
fraction of all ªrst marriages. Applying state-based population
weights to sample families according to where they lived when
their ªrst child was born permits a variety of demographic indices
for New England as a whole from 1620 through 1864. Individual
vital events that could not be precisely dated have been interpo-
lated from other information. Families for whom information
proved insufªcient for such interpolation were not included in the
sample.
Even the best modern genealogies are not without problems.
Since male heads of large households generated longer paper trails,
genealogies are inevitably biased toward large families with many
male descendants. Likewise, founders with the largest families en-
gendered the most numerous descendants, and their potential as
an audience attracts the compilation and marketing of genealogical
works. Easier to recognize are the errors and gaps in the underly-
ing records that hinder the process of family reconstitution. Un-
fortunately, they multiplied in post-Revolutionary New England
towns when previously credible recording systems began eroding
due to high rates of mobility. New towns were slow to establish
good recording systems and heavy out-migration from older
towns led to the disappearance of many people. The effect of that
slide on the quality of the genealogical data has been dampened by
compilers’ use of compensating sources, but the problem is suf-
ªcient to require efforts at measurement and correction.5
Note ªrst that under-recording of births and deaths, espe-
cially of females, by town clerks in New England occurred from
the outset. The ratio of sons to daughters recorded to sample cou-
ples was 112 before 1675, dropped to 103 between 1675 and 1775,
and then rose again to 110. Reporting of deaths among male de-
scendants in the genealogies was also better than that among fe-
males, averaging 55.5 percent of all recorded and interpolated
5 Compared to the ipums New England sample from the federal census of 1850, the geneal-
ogies overstate the number of births by about 6%, even after adjusting for dead children miss-
ing from in the census.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 39
male births in the sample. These rates did not worsen noticeably in
the nineteenth century. The year of death could be discovered or
inferred only for 43 percent of the entire sample of women. Cov-
erage was poorest in the seventeenth century, gradually improving
to 50 percent of those born between 1800 and 1840, before falling
to 41 percent of those born after 1845. Information about the old-
est females, especially widows, is the most scarce, as is evident in a
comparison of the proportions of unknowns between the sexes
when grouped by age. This invisibility of elderly women in the
records imparts a strong downward bias to calculations of female
life expectancy because their ages at death do not enter into calcu-
lations. Yet, genealogies often provide sufªcient information, such
as “died young,” “served in wartime,” or “had a marriage re-
corded,” to estimate proportions of birth cohorts surviving to
adulthood. This judgment is possible for four-ªfths of sons and
daughters in the sample born between 1750 and 1840, but, again,
this information grows spottier for those born after 1840, when
rates of survival can be determined for only 78 percent of males
and 73 percent of females.6
Since rates of survivorship can be calculated for large majori-
ties of the children in the genealogies, they offer valuable surro-
gates for estimates of life expectancy. Figure 1 displays the propor-
tions surviving to adulthood in successive birth cohorts from 1620
to 1864. Survivorship peaked for both sexes born between the
inclusive, and began sliding thereafter.
years 1775 and 1824,
Judging by these data, the federal census of 1850 took place when
life expectancy for children in New England was low, therefore
reducing the number of children present to be counted by census
takers. Hence, child/woman ratios calculated from the federal
censuses signiªcantly understate the birth rate between 1840 and
1850. Notwithstanding this serious problem in the 1850 census
due to worsening mortality, prior federal censuses appear unaf-
fected; movements in the child/woman ratios based on them
probably replicate those in the birth rate itself.
If a careful and conscientious compiler identiªed a child in an otherwise well-
6
documented family but found no further information on that child, the child was coded as not
surviving to adulthood. Age at death can be calculated or inferred for 82% of fathers and 69%
of mothers. Coverage of women improved over time—60% in the seventeenth century, 65%
in the ªrst half of the eighteenth century, 71% in the second half, and 75% in the ªrst half of
the nineteenth century.
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40 | GLORIA L. MAIN
Fig. 1 Proportion of Children Surviving to Adulthood in New Eng-
land, 1620–1864
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source
Sample genealogies weighted by state.
correcting for biases The argument for declining birth rates
in New England, based on child/woman ratios, is supported by
genealogical data, but the increasing severity of under-reporting
requires attention. One way to test for, and correct, it is to track
the length of intervals between ªrst and second births in successive
marriage cohorts, because couples presumably felt the least need to
avoid pregnancy during this period. If that presumption is correct,
any gap in the genealogies longer than four or ªve years could be
camouºaging the birth of an unrecorded infant who died without
leaving a trace. But longer intervals could also be due to such real
causes as temporary infertility, longer absences by fathers, rising
levels of miscarriages or abortions, or increasingly successful efforts
at deliberate contraception.7
Of couples with two or more children in the marriage cohort
of 1750 to 1774, 2.8 percent showed intervals of more than sixty
7 My thanks to David Hacker for suggesting a way to test under-recording of births by
means of the length of the interval between the ªrst two births. “Completed” families make
up about two-thirds of the more than 10,000 ªrst marriages of couples in the sample.
ROCKING THE CRADLE | 41
Fig. 2 Total Marital Fertility Rate and Completed Family Size in New
England, 1620–1854
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between the ªrst and second births was longer than sixty months.
Sample genealogies weighted by state, excluding cases in which the interval
months between the ªrst two births. That percentage grew to
6 percent for the cohort of 1815 to 1824, 11.2 percent in 1835 to
1844, and 16.9 percent by 1845 to 1854. If this pattern is due solely
to under-recording of early births, dubious cases must be excluded
before calculating marital fertility levels. Figures 2 and 3 display
three measures of marital fertility based on this narrowed sample,
from the time of New England’s founding through 1854. The to-
tal marital fertility rate, tmfr, measures reproduction among each
marriage cohort of fecund women based on the childbearing his-
tory of every member. Completed family size, cfs, records the to-
tal number of births to couples who both survived to the wife’s
forty-ªfth birthday. With both measures, the data summarized for
each time period are retrospective in nature, and the cohorts stretch
over decades, obscuring the timing of this major shift in human
behavior. The third measure, kidsby30, provides a much more
time-sensitive reading of the fertility decline, because the behavior
under observation took place in a narrower frame of time and
closer to the date of marriage for women from the same birth co-
hort. kidsby30 represents the number of births by age thirty to fe-
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42 | GLORIA L. MAIN
Fig. 3 Number of Births to Mothers Who Married between Ages
Twenty-One and Twenty-Three, by Age Thirty in New Eng-
land, 1620–1854
source
two births longer than sixty months.
Sample genealogies weighted by state, excluding cases with intervals between ªrst
cund women who married within a ªxed and narrow age inter-
val—in the present case, between the ages of twenty-one and
twenty-three, bracketing the mean age at marriage that prevailed
for most of the period under view. The data points are weighted
by the relative size of the population in the colony/state where a
couple’s ªrst child was born, making the cases from each state
equivalent in weight to their proportion of the region’s population
in each period. As ªgures 2 and 3 suggest, fertility peaked in mar-
riages formed between 1725 and 1749 and again between 1775 and
1794, declining thereafter. Altogether, tmfr fell from 10.4 chil-
dren per married woman at its peak before 1750 to just 6.9 a cen-
tury later, a drop of roughly one-third. Mean completed family
size shows an even steeper decline, from 7.9 births to 4.3, and the
median, not shown, halved in size, falling from 8 in the 1620 to
1794 period to 4 in the late 1830s. The number of children born to
mothers by age thirty, of those marrying between twenty-one to
twenty-three, fell by a ªfth, from 3.45 to 2.80.8
8 The total marital fertility rate is a composite ªgure that represents the total number of
births that a woman of the place and time would have if she married at age ªfteen, stayed mar-
ried until age forty-ªve, and gave birth at the average rate of the women in each successive
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 43
Even after excluding cases with intervals between the ªrst
two births longer than sixty months, some couples in the sample
were successfully avoiding pregnancies before the end of the eigh-
teenth century, and many more were doing so from 1805 to 1814.
The bias-adjusted measures of marital fertility in early New Eng-
land show substantial declines long before 1850 and decades ahead
of old England.
clues about motives Why, and how, couples in New England
started having fewer and fewer children are formidable questions,
but the genealogies furnish some clues. A woman’s age at ªrst
marriage was a powerful inºuence on how many children she
would bear over the course of her childbearing years. Women in
the sample married youngest in the early nineteenth century, as
Figure 4 depicts, and they began marrying at slightly older ages af-
ter the trough from 1805 to 1815. Thereafter, mean age at ªrst
marriage rose to nearly twenty-three, shortening the term of
wives’ connubial exposure by the equivalent of one pregnancy. Of
greater signiªcance, however, was the steep downturn in premari-
tal pregnancy in the nineteenth century, depicted in Figure 5,
not only because it lengthened the average interval of time be-
tween the wedding and the ªrst child by more than half—visible
in Figure 4—but because it signaled a new willingness among
young adults to control sexual impulses.9
As the ªgure suggests, premarital sex between engaged cou-
ples had become common practice in the eighteenth century, just
as it did in England at the same time. This relaxation of sexual
codes may have represented nothing more than a reversion to pre-
Puritan ideas about the binding nature of marriage promises, or it
may have been a response to loosening patriarchal controls. The
important point is that the boom in early births came to an end in
New England long before it did in England. This return to more
stringent restraints on premarital sex in New England coincided
with the onset of the sharp decline in the number of births to
ªve-year age group. So long as a woman’s age is known, her recorded fertility experience can
be calculated even if she died or disappeared from the records before she reached her forty-
ªfth birthday. The tmfr tends to overstate observed completed family size, but its great
strength is that it is comparable across cohorts and makes use of all available information.
9 Of daughters who lived to age forty-ªve, the proportion never marrying rose from 4%
before the American Revolution to 20% of those born after 1835.
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44 | GLORIA L. MAIN
Fig. 4 Wives’ Ages at Marriage and at Birth of First Child in New Eng-
land, 1620–1854
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source
Sample genealogies weighted by state.
mothers by age thirty noted above. The lapse of time after the ªrst
birth before the next one also began climbing. Spacing between
later children likewise grew as couples became more expert in
managing. The interval before the last birth grew from 39.9
months between 1750 and 1774 to 50.6 months by the 1825-to-
1834 period. By that same decade, women who married at ages
twenty-one to twenty-three and who survived to age forty-ªve
were ending childbearing a full three years sooner than they had in
the years before 1750, at age thirty-seven rather than at slightly
older than forty (see Figure 6).10
This pattern of births exhibited by birth-controllers in New
England is better described as “spacing” rather than “stopping”
after a quick two or three. The reasons for spacing rather than
stopping become clear with the realization that control over re-
production was painfully achieved and not facilitated by any new
Smith and Michael S. Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America 1640–1971: An Over-
10
view and Interpretation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, V (1975), 537–570.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 45
Fig. 5 Premarital Pregnancy Rates in New England, Children Born 8
Months or 7.5 Months after Wedding
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sources Vital records, town and family genealogies weighted by state.
contraceptive technology or scientiªc knowledge. According to
Bogue, “Contraception is a goal-oriented, voluntary behavior,
each episode of which is the result of conscious volition.” Fertility
decline, he argues, required “a distinctive behavior change”
among an “increasing prevalence of couples.” Not only did such
couples have to beat against the tide of strong pronatal traditions in
early New England, but, if the argument below is correct, they
had to break the customary silence on personal matters between
husband and wife in order to negotiate key changes in their sexual
relations.11
According to the genealogical evidence, when couples began
actively avoiding pregnancy, they did so early in their relationship.
They were forced into new modes of expressing and gratifying
sexual needs because existing contraceptive methods were too un-
11 Donald J. Bogue, “Normative and Psychic Costs of Contraception,” in Rodolpho A.
Bulatao and Ronald D. Lee (eds.), Determinants of Fertility in Developing Countries. II. Fertility
Regulation and Institutional Inºuences (New York, 1983), 151, 153.
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46 | GLORIA L. MAIN
Fig. 6 Age at Birth of Last Child in New England, 1620–1854—
Women Who Married between Ages Twenty-one and Twenty-
three and Survived to Age Forty-ªve
source
Sample genealogies weighted by state, excluding cases when interval between ªrst
and second births exceeds sixty months and cases when mother’s age at birth of last child was
purportedly over ªfty-two.
reliable. The rubber necessary to make elastic condoms or syringes
for cold vinegar-water douches did not yet exist. Only four meth-
ods of birth control were available: (1) More intensive and/or pro-
longed breastfeeding to extend postpartum amenorrhea, (2) in-
creased resort to herbal or chemical abortifacients for unwanted
pregnancies, (3) less frequent coitus, and (4) male withdrawal prior
to orgasm during coitus. Wives did not need their husbands’ sup-
port or consent to use the ªrst and/or second techniques, whereas
the third and fourth required the husband’s active cooperation.12
Breastfeeding Most women in early America nursed their in-
fants as a matter of course, but breastfeeding is not without cost. It
is disruptive to household routine and time-consuming. How
long mothers pursue it, and how intensively, determines how
soon their ovaries resume ovulation. Modern studies indicate that
breastfeeding can postpone the return of the menstrual cycle for as
long as two years, but the actual delay for any particular mother
depends on the strength and frequency with which her child suck-
12 Comfortable and effective condoms made of latex did not appear until the 1930s. The
introduction of the rubber-ball syringe, which allowed quick, effective douching through the
powerful propulsion of the astringent, is difªcult to date.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 47
les. Thus does the nursing relationship greatly inºuence how long
a woman can avoid another pregnancy after she and her husband
resume coital relations. The decision of when to wean a child
probably depended on the state of its health and of the mother’s
health and whether suitable alternative foods for the baby, such as
cow’s milk, were seasonally available. Consequently, the duration
of the intervals between pregnancies varied widely from woman
to woman for reasons unrelated to any desire to avoid or terminate
pregnancy.13
In a region where immigration was low, new ideas about
baby care may have been slow to take hold. So long as women
continued to practice their mothers’ mode of nursing and wean-
ing,
the customary variation in birth intervals would center
around a stable mean. The mean ceased to be stable after 1740, but
there is no evidence that signiªcant numbers of women in the late
colonial period or in ªrst half of the nineteenth century were
adopting more intensive styles of breastfeeding or postponing
weaning. Admittedly, ªnding such evidence would be difªcult,
but, in any event, breastfeeding’s efªcacy in postponing pregnancy
was both limited and unsure, and its investment in a mother’s time
would have been sizable.
Abortion Any decision to terminate a pregnancy would be
the wife’s to make, and it was not illegal if done early enough. The
Massachusetts Supreme Court determined in 1812 that abortion
early in pregnancy was beyond the scope of the law and not a
crime. This decision remained the ruling precedent in the United
States as a whole until the 1850s. Since a woman could not be ad-
judged to be pregnant with certainty until she felt the movement
of the fetus, abortion was not “abortion” prior to that “quicken-
ing.” Did married women freely resort to legal abortion? Klepp
cites numerous references in letters written by women from the
Philadelphia area during the Revolutionary and early national eras
13 Ross W. Beales, Jr., “Nursing and Weaning in an Eighteenth-Century New England
Household,” in Peter Benes (ed.), Families and Children (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 48–63.
James W. Wood, Dynamics of Human Reproduction: Biology, Biometry, Demography (New York,
1994), 338–343, 368–370; Paula A. Treckel, “Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality in Colo-
nial America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XX (1989), 25–51. Mary Beth Norton, Lib-
erty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980),
233–234, argues for many alterations in white women’s lives in the post-Revolutionary era,
among them cooperation between husband and wife in the prevention of pregnancy and a
greater willingness among women to control fertility through extended breastfeeding.
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48 | GLORIA L. MAIN
indicating knowledge of herbal remedies to “restore” menses. She
argues that women were accustomed to controlling their fertility
in this way and were the prime instigators of the fertility decline.
Van de Walle, however, cautions that abortion did not lie behind
every mention of herbs for menstrual regulation. Classical and me-
dieval medical writers viewed menstruation as a wholesome pur-
gation of bodily impurities and placed great importance on regular
menstruation for women’s health and to her ability to conceive.
They often prescribed one or another of a large set of herbal em-
menagogues to cause the uterus to shed its burden or to expel the
placenta after birth. Van de Walle also notes that herbal abortifa-
cients, though present throughout recorded history, were unreli-
able or ineffective, and dangerous to the mother. The extent to
which women actually used them remains unclear.14
Whether married women in early New England commonly
resorted to the use of abortifacients is likely to remain unsubstanti-
ated for lack of objective sources. Nonetheless, since these herbs
posed some danger to mothers, any increase in usage should have
left traces in the mortality data. The proportion of women in sam-
ple families who died before age forty-ªve in New England actu-
ally fell between 1750 and 1825. Prior to 1750, 28 percent of
14
James Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origin and Evolution of National Policy (New York,
1978). The anti-abortion movement, which began in the middle of the nineteenth century,
was led by medical practitioners who claimed that one out of ªve pregnancies was intention-
ally terminated, a claim that Mohr and others have accepted at face value. Given the probabil-
ity that doctors then did not know the normal rate of spontaneous abortion, they tended to
identify every failed pregnancy as the result of deliberate action on the part of the mother. See
the discussion of this issue in Paul A. David and Warren C. Sanderson, “Rudimentary Con-
traceptive Methods and the American Transition to Marital Fertility Control, 1855–1915,” in
Engerman and Gallman (eds.), Long-Term Factors, 331. Klepp, “Lost, Hidden, Obstructed, and
Repressed,” 68–90. Etienne van de Walle, “Flowers and Fruits: Two Thousand Years of
Menstrual Regulation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXVIII (1997), 183–203. Van de
Walle seeks to rebut arguments by John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient
World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), and Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals:
The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1984).
See also van de Walle, “Towards a Demographic History of Abortion,” Population: An English
Selection, XI (1999), 115–131. Roger Thompson’s examination of Middlesex County court
records in seventeenth-century Massachusetts turned up only four instances of the use of savin
or pennyroyal, all by unmarried women. The outcome is unknown in one case, but in the
other three, “the women later gave birth” (Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts
County, 1649–1699 [Amherst, 1986], 26). Cornelia Hughes Dayton relates the tragic story of a
young unmarried woman who took an abortifacient at the urging of her lover and subse-
quently died (“Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century
New England Village,” William and Mary Quarterly, XLVIII [1991], 19–49).
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 49
mothers for whom the information is available (73 percent of all
mothers in the sample) died before the age of forty-ªve, whereas
from 1750 to 1824, only 17 percent died. Even in the higher mor-
tality years from 1825 to 1854, just 22 percent failed to outlive
their reproductive years. The reduction in childbearing after 1750
helped to lower the risk of dying in childbed, but the rise in the
maternal survival rate between 1750 and 1824 easily exceeds any
gain attributable solely to the decline in births during those years.
Given this buoyant level of maternal well-being, self-induced
abortion seems hardly to have been a primary means for control-
ling family size in New England, although it undoubtably contin-
ued so for desperate women.15
Coital Infrequency Longer intervals between lovemaking re-
quired greater self-control than married couples in New England
had hitherto been accustomed to exercise. Some Pennsylvania
Quakers in the eighteenth century may have adopted periodic ab-
stinence for spiritual reasons, but marital abstinence was no virtue
in conventional Protestant thought. As Morgan pointed out long
ago, Puritans and their descendants most emphatically enjoyed
sex. They would have been loathe to give it up. Yet something in
their lives or circumstances began prompting young couples to
manage their sex lives. In the nineteenth century, men who re-
garded themselves as progressive and enlightened came increas-
ingly to accept a new, romanticized image of women as pure-
minded nurturers whose natural disinterest in sex could help their
husbands discipline their own urges. According to David and San-
derson, however, women who acceded to this rariªed version of
their femininity could not signiªcantly lower their chances of get-
ting pregnant unless they and their husbands also employed a
complementary contraceptive practice. David and Sanderson cal-
culated the efªcacy of alternative forms of contraception using
data from a late nineteenth-century California survey of “middle
class” wives. They came to the surprising conclusion that reducing
coital frequency from twelve times a month to four would, by it-
self, avoid only one pregnancy during the course of a woman’s re-
productive life! However, the addition of one other contraceptive
15 The greatest gains in proportions successfully reaching age forty-ªve between 1620 and
1749 and between 1750 and 1824 were those by mothers with ªve or fewer children.
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50 | GLORIA L. MAIN
practice caused the estimated completed family size to fall by at
least one-half.16
Douching in an unheated bedroom with a cold vinegar rinse
seems a particularly daunting method, especially in winter, and a
sponge was far less effective in reaching the full extent of the birth
canal than was the rubber syringe, which did not make its appear-
ance until much later. Coitus interruptus, male withdrawal before
orgasm, was the sole recourse. It was the probable method of
choice in France. The Bible condemns the practice as unnatural,
but it is simple in concept and requires no special equipment. To
be effective, however, withdrawal requires good timing and spe-
cial care by the husband to ejaculate well away from his wife. If
husbands effectively and consistently combined this method with
fewer episodes of lovemaking, they could substantially improve
their wives’ chances of avoiding pregnancy and, according to Da-
vid and Sanderson, might reduce ªnal family size by as much as
two-thirds. Husbands had to be highly motivated to make infre-
quency and withdrawal work, and they ran a serious risk of frus-
trating themselves or their wives sexually.17
The success that couples in New England had in lowering
their lifetime fertility is a measure of the strength of their motiva-
tion and the degree of their cooperation. Whereas a woman could
decide on her own whether to try abortion, both partners had to
16 Robert V. Wells, “Family Size and Fertility Control in Eighteenth-Century America: A
Study of Quaker Families,” Population Studies, XXV (1971), 73–82; Harry S. Stout, The New
England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986); Mark
A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002); Edmund
S. Morgan, “Puritans and Sex,” New England Quarterly, XV (1942), 591–607; Nancy F. Cott,
“Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs, IV
(1978), 219–236; Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in
the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review, LXXIX (1974), 1467–1490; idem, At
Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1982). Jan
Lewis and Kenneth Lockridge argue that upper-class Southern women manipulated their hus-
bands into reducing coital frequency on the grounds that frequent pregnancy and childbirth
endangered their health (“‘Sally Has Been Sick’: Pregnancy and Family Limitation among
Virginia Gentry Women, 1780–1830,” Journal of Social History, XXII [1988–1989], 5–19).
Jean-Louis Flandrin (trans. Richard Southern), Families in Former Times: Kinship, House-
17
hold and Sexuality (New York, 1979), 219–225, believes that men practiced withdrawal at the
behest of their wives who, until the eighteenth century, did not have sufªcient status within
the marriage to win such sympathy and consent. The Biblical reference to coitus interruptus is
Genesis 38. David and Sanderson, “Rudimentary Contraceptive Methods,” 356–359. The
precise reduction achieved depends on assumptions about a wife’s age at marriage, the prob-
ability of the method’s failure and the couple’s failure to use it, as well as coital frequency.
Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was,” 1474.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 51
work together to avoid pregnancy in the ªrst place. Husbands had
to overcome their fear of female sexuality and to respect their
wives as stable, rational, and responsible individuals. The decision
to restrict sex with their wives required self-control on their own
part, but it also represented a vote of conªdence in their wives’
loyalty and self-discipline. Wives, too, had to refashion the femi-
nine ideal for themselves. They had to cease regarding childbear-
ing as a self-justifying end in itself and to embrace the new view of
sexual reproduction as a process that could and should be under the
control of wives and husbands.18
Planned and shared continence probably helped to make
marriage a more equal partnership, and perhaps encouraged par-
ents to invest more personal time with each young child. But why
did they want fewer babies in the ªrst place? The growth in life
expectancy that took place between 1750 and 1825 gave parents
more children to feed, clothe, house, and educate. But chance
played such a large role in who and how many would survive that
a modest improvement in average life expectancy at birth seems an
unlikely inducement to give up the joy of spontaneous sex in or-
der to prevent pregnancy, especially early in married life.
motives for restricting family size The rewards of smaller
families for women that loom largest to modern eyes are fewer en-
counters with the danger and pain of childbirth and more time
free from pregnancy, diapers, and midnight feedings. Yet such
prospects did not persuade couples in England to control their sex-
ual relations; nor did they tempt New England families who were
moving to newly opened territories in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. Unlike the comparatively crowded
countries of the Old World, North America’s high land-to-man
ratio made farm ownership a viable prospect for many families, but
usable undeveloped land was never free for the taking. Indians, the
French, and the Spanish disputed access in the colonial period,
and, after the imposition of certain treaties on Indian nations after
the War of Independence, operating a farm remained a realizable
dream only for those willing to move greater and greater distances
18 Klepp, “Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic
Region, 1760–1820,” Journal of American History, LXXXV (1998), 910–945, examines
women’s changing ideas about nature and reproduction in the Philadelphia area and locates
the origins of change in Revolutionary rhetoric. Cott, “Passionlessness,” 219–236.
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52 | GLORIA L. MAIN
from home. That dream was dying in the older settlements along
the eastern coastline even before the colonial period ended.
Demographers making use of the federal censuses have long
emphasized the early and persistently lower child/woman ratios in
the more densely populated northeastern United States—the Mid-
Atlantic states as well as New England—compared to the rest of
the country. This marked disparity among the country’s regions
led scholars to hypothesize local land scarcity as the root cause of
the fertility decline, but when tested at the local level, differential
land prices do not predict birth rates.
Reªnements of this thesis focused on inheritance practices
and parental desires for old-age security. Most parents in the
Northeast divided up the cash value of their estate equally among
their children, giving land to sons, if possible, and personal estate
to daughters. The more children that a couple had, the smaller
were the individual portions. If
family landholdings were no
longer capable of subdivision among children without damage to
their productivity, parents either directed their executor to sell the
farm and divide the proceeds or else give the whole farm to one
child, who would then pay the others their cash shares, usually by
mortgaging the farm. Numerous siblings imposed a heavy burden
on the primary heir, who often assumed care of the elderly parents
as part of the bargain. If income from the farm did not cover all his
costs, including mortgage payments, the heir had to sell out, evict-
ing his aged parents in the process. Probate records in Massachu-
setts and Connecticut contain numerous examples of this dilemma
beginning as early as the second decade of the eighteenth century.
Presumably, couples in older settlements would have opted for
fewer children when the good land was all taken up, whereas fam-
ilies moving to newly opened territory, where returns to labor
were greater and the costs of portioning children lower, would
have had more children.19
Theories about the consequences of land scarcity and old-age
insecurity on family size are consistent with the downturn in fer-
tility that took place ªrst in the southern states of New England,
where English settlements were oldest and densest. But are they
both true and sufªcient? Did young couples reach an economic
tipping point at which they realized that large families simply cost
19 Morton O. Schapiro, “Land Availability and Fertility in the United States, 1760–1870,”
Journal of American History, XLII (1982), 577–600.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 53
too much? The kinds of data supplied by genealogies will not pro-
vide answers. Neither the occupations of male heads of house-
holds nor any other money-making activities by family members
can be determined prior to the 1850 federal census. Not even fam-
ily members’ religious afªliations or voting habits are available to
suggest nonmaterial motives for controlling births. Values were
shifting in the eighteenth century, as the rising rates of premarital
pregnancy suggest, and studies of an emerging consumer culture
reveal changing lifestyles. Perhaps large families would have inter-
fered with adults’ enjoyment of such newly popular values as pri-
vacy, cleanliness, personal comfort, and social stimulation.
Probate inventories show that the material standard and style
of living had been rising for half-a-century among people in mid-
dling circumstances. Household incomes had to have risen for
them to afford the new consumer goods listed in these documents.
Houses were larger and better constructed. People ate more nutri-
tious diets, and they increasingly used pewter and ceramic ware.
Farm women drank sweetened tea with their friends, and their
husbands read newspapers in public houses over mugs of rum
punch. Most children in Massachusetts and Connecticut attended
public schools for at least a few months of the year, and the pro-
portion of rural women of ordinary means able to write their own
names had reached at least 50 percent by the era of the American
Revolution.20
Economic motives The reªnement of manners continued to
spread deeper into the social strata in the new nation, and values
continued to evolve in New England as religious revivals gained
force. Standards for education rose and surely increased the ex-
pense of equipping children for independent adulthood at a time
when household spending on consumption was rising. Did the
cost of living increase so much that parents decided they could no
longer afford more than four or ªve children? What was the value
of child labor relative to the cost of child rearing, and how did it
20 David H. Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England (Charlottesville, 1972); James Deetz,
In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 1996; orig. pub.
1977), 62–67; Michael P. Steinitz, “Landmark and Shelter: Domestic Architecture in the Cul-
tural Landscape of the Central Uplands of Massachusetts in the Eighteenth Century,” unpub.
Ph.D. diss. (Clark University, 1988), 165–168; David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and
the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1995), 189–240; Main, Peoples
of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England (Cambridge, Mass., 2001),
215–222; idem., “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial
New England,” Journal of Social History, XXIV (1992), 579–589.
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54 | GLORIA L. MAIN
change as the economy developed from 1750 to 1850? These
questions await research for deªnitive answers, but the context is
hardly obscure, if a little puzzling.
The kind of mixed farming that characterized most of south-
ern New England made heavy use of human labor only at haying
and harvest time. When all of the undeveloped land was gone,
older boys and young men sought other employment to supple-
ment their pay as common laborers. Until the population reached
a certain density, the lack of good means of transportation limited
the market for local manufactures, discouraging successful artisans
from expanding production and taking on apprentices. Conse-
quently, the value of child labor in the rural interior of southern
New England had probably sunk to its lowest point by the middle
of the eighteenth century, but child labor was far cheaper in Eng-
land at the time. There the birth rate was actually rising because
couples were marrying earlier. England was far more densely pop-
ulated. Land was so expensive, and wages so low, that ordinary
people had no expectations of ever acquiring any. However, mer-
chant-operated systems in the English countryside supplied tools
and raw materials to rural families for manufacture at home, put-
ting whole families to work. When England began industrializing,
family size did not fall. Only after the country reached a mature
stage of industrialization in the 1880s did birth rates begin their
long-term sustained decline.21
Had the economy of southern New England failed to develop
manufacturing occupations, average age at marriage would have
risen, and far fewer young people would have been able to set up
independent housekeeping. The birth rate would have fallen for
these reasons alone, and sexual relations within marriage might not
have altered. The putting-out system in textiles and shoemaking
that began in 1780s Massachusetts marked a transition away from
traditional ways of using family labor while greatly increasing paid
employment in the countryside. The proliferation of carding ma-
chines and spinning mills sharply increased the demand for weav-
ers’ services, many of whom were women. The ªrst spinning mill
21 Lee A. Craig used a sample of rural households from the 1860 manuscript census to com-
pare the relative contribution of children to farm output in the Northeast, the Midwest, and
on the frontier (To Sow One Acre More: Childbearing and Farm Productivity in the Antebellum
North [Baltimore, 1993]). Not surprisingly, children of either sex produced little before the
age of twelve, and teen-aged girls contributed far less than their male counterparts on north-
ern farms.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 55
erected at Fall River in the early nineteenth century found the
neighboring farm wives already fully employed as weavers for
Providence mills. Hence, its owners opened a store in Hallowell,
Maine (near modern Augusta), where it offered consumer goods
to local women in exchange for weaving yarn supplied by the
mill. Other forms of rural outwork eventually included the mak-
ing of straw and palm leaf hats in the 1820s, but the craft that un-
derwent the most complete transformation was shoemaking in
eastern Massachusetts. Women became binders, and employers
treated binders as independent workers. The practice gave rural
women the opportunity for the ªrst time to earn their own cash at
home.22
As shops turned into small factories, the manufacturing pro-
cesses subdivided in ways that opened up more employment for
children and teenaged girls, relative to men and older boys. The
same process did not cause the birth rate in England to fall. Have
we a paradox? Young couples in southern New England were
starving their sex lives in order to avoid conceiving a new baby
despite the fact that the value of child labor was rising, at least until
1830. In old England, neither proto-industrialization, early factory
into
jobs, nor Methodist
sacriªcing their sexual enjoyment. Given that paid child labor was
increasingly contributing to household incomes in both old and
New England until 1830 or later, the fall in the latter’s birth rate
seems to have come in spite of expanding child employment, cer-
tainly not because of it.23
revivals enticed couples
religious
The solution to the paradox is undoubtedly more compli-
cated than assessments of the availability of land, the value of child
labor, or the opportunities for married women to earn cash at
home can explain, but information from two state surveys taken
just prior to 1820 facilitate further analysis. In Connecticut and
New Hampshire, the census takers enumerated meetinghouses,
schoolhouses, publichouses, stores, several kinds of mill, textile
22 Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States (New York, 1949; orig. pub.
1929), I, 539; Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New
England Shoe Industry (Urbana, 1988), 44–67. See also Blanche Hazard, The Organization of the
Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, Mass., 1921).
23
Jan De Vries called this period the “Industrious Revolution,” regarding it as a crucial
transitional stage that supplied the infrastructure necessary for the development of full-blown
industrial capitalism and helped to ease the break with tradition by encouraging all family
members to work smarter in return for access to new consumer goods (“The Industrial Revo-
lution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History, LIV [1994], 249–270).
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56 | GLORIA L. MAIN
factories,
tanneries, distilleries, printing establishments, banks,
academies (high schools), and libraries by town. To test the effect
that each of them had on marital fertility, a subset of couples in
these states was created from those who married between 1810
and 1824. It includes only those in which the wives married be-
tween the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, lived to age thirty,
and gave birth to a second child sixty months or less after their
ªrst. Setting these boundaries narrowed the already small sample
size to exactly 100 cases, 54 from Connecticut and 46 from New
Hampshire. In addition to the census counts, three more pieces of
information were collected: coding of town population size in
1810 and 1820 for each couple; the numbers of cotton factories
present in those towns, according to the 1832 Congressional man-
ufacturing survey known as the McLane Report; and the propor-
tion of the labor force employed in agriculture, commerce, and
manufacturing in the county where each couple lived, as reported
in the published summaries of the federal manufacturing census of
1820. These data make clear that the Connecticut and New
Hampshire couples in this sample lived in sharply contrasting eco-
nomic and demographic environments.24
The average population of sample towns in Connecticut was
3,247 compared to 1,622 for New Hampshire: The town popula-
tion densities were 88.6 people per square mile and 56.8, respec-
tively. The women in Connecticut married a little older, 21.3 ver-
sus 20.8, and died a little older, 70.1 versus 67.7. They also had
26 percent fewer children by age thirty, 2.94 compared to 3.70. As
a result of their greater population density, Connecticut towns had
more schools, commercial establishments, and the like, except saw
mills, but the degree of difference was not uniform across the cate-
gories: No New Hampshire couple lived in a town with a distill-
ery, whereas the towns in Connecticut averaged 1.57 distilleries
apiece. Only four out of the forty-six New Hampshire couples
lived in towns with printing establishments or banks, but dispari-
ties between the sample towns in these two states were greatest in
24 The child/woman ratios in these two states, calculated from their totals in federal cen-
suses of 1800 through 1850 posted on the University of Virginia website, show a gradual con-
vergence between the two states over the course of the half-century,
from 1,512 for
Connecticut and 1,848 for New Hampshire in 1800 to 928 for both states in 1850. A shift in
the age categories used by the federal census after 1830 required an estimate of the numbers of
females sixteen through nineteen and forty through forty-four in deriving these ratios.
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ROCKING THE CRADLE | 57
their numbers of woolen factories, academies, and libraries. The
Connecticut towns had twice as many cotton factories as those in
New Hampshire before 1820. By the time of the survey for the
McLane Report, ªve times as many of them were in Connecticut
as in New Hampshire.25
The small number of couples in the subsample makes it
difªcult to determine which of the differences visible in the cen-
suses related signiªcantly to marital fertility as measured by the
number of births by mother’s age thirty. Pearson correlation
coefªcients proved signiªcant only for town population size (and a
few of the related co-variants, such as grist mills, tanneries, meet-
inghouses, and schoolhouses) but not for printers, banks, acade-
mies, libraries, nor textile-related manufacturers. Yet the number
of births by mother’s age thirty correlated positively with the pro-
portion of the county’s labor force employed in agriculture (R (cid:1)
(cid:2).432) and negatively with manufacturing (R(cid:1) (cid:3).420) and com-
merce (R(cid:1) (cid:3).328). In other words, the greater the nonagricul-
tural sector of the county economy in the federal census of 1820,
the lower was the number of babies born to young mothers.
Perhaps if the subset were much larger, more subtle connec-
tions might appear between the local economy and culture. How-
ever, an experiment that groups the census categories into three
composite sets—producers, services, and amenities (the value of
each being the arithmetic sum of its components)—might prove
fruitful. School houses, pubs, stores, banks, and printers are de-
nominated as services in the experiment; meetinghouses, acade-
mies, and libraries are amenities; and all others are producers. How
well do any of these three composite sets predict marital fertility
among couples in the subsample as measured by the number of
births to mothers by age thirty? Pearson correlation coefªcients
and their degree of statistical signiªcance are for amenities, R(cid:1)
(cid:3).246 (signiªcance (cid:1) .014); producers, R(cid:1) (cid:3).231 (signiªcance
(cid:1).021); services, R(cid:1) (cid:3).132 (signiªcance (cid:1) .192). Residents’ fer-
tility rates varied inversely with the number of each in their town,
though services were not a signiªcant factor. Note, however, that
25
John C. Pease and John M. Niles, A Gazetteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode-Island
(Hartford, 1819); John Farmer and Jacob B. Moore, A Gazetteer of the State of New-Hampshire
(Concord, 1823); [Louis McLane, Secretary of the Treasury], Documents Relative to the Manu-
factures in the United States (New York, 1969; orig. pub. 1833), 2 v.
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58 | GLORIA L. MAIN
amenities were slightly more important to marital fertility than
producers.
The results of this exercise with town data and sample fami-
lies, limited as they are, support both kinds of explanations for the
onset of the fertility transition in New England—the cultural as
well as the land/inheritance/old-age-security model. There were
more meetinghouses and libraries available in towns with low
birth rates than population size or density, alone, would predict.
Since women outnumbered men in church membership in early
New England and were better educated and more politically
aware than ever before, rising female status within the family may
explain the greater willingness of men to cooperate in helping
their wives avoid pregnancy.
Whatever the reasons for declining premarital pregnancy and fer-
tility, young people in New England had a choice that their coun-
terparts in old England did not: They could move far away from
home, work hard, and build a farm, or they could stay, seize the
new opportunities afforded by expanding markets, and, by con-
trolling costs through sexual restraint, still hope to enjoy the high,
and interesting, standard of living enjoyed by their elders. Both
economic and cultural change began well before Independence;
the pace was gradual but cumulative. By the time the great trans-
portation and industrial revolutions were underway, the fertility
transition in southern New England was already under full throt-
tle, and the intimate lives of the people had already transformed.
Who would have guessed that the need for sexual restraint would
become patriarchy’s gentle solvent?26
In their discussion of alternative schemes for explaining the fertility transition in the
26
United States, Susan B. Carter, Roger L. Ransom, and Richard Sutch note that, “Even in
southern New England, which by all accounts was the locus of manufacturing and commer-
cial development in the early decades of the century, it is difªcult to relate the decline in rural
fertility between 1810 and 1830 to the expansion of nonagricultural opportunities for young
adults” (“Family Matters: The Life-Cycle Transition and the Antebellum American Fertility
Decline,” in Timothy W. Guinnane, William A. Sundstrom, and Warren Whatley [eds.], His-
tory Matters: Essays on Economic Growth, Technology, and Demographic Change [Stanford, 2004],
292). Their own life-cycle model for the fertility transition could apply to southern New Eng-
land as early as 1750.
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