The vast social transformation generally referred to as the demographic transition may well be the most important social change for women in the last century and a half. Over the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century, Western women's life chances changed dramatically as fertility and mortality plummeted. Yet while there has been substantial mapping of the patterns of fertility decline there has been remarkably little progress in understanding that massive change.Late twentieth-century sociology, social psychology and popular culture resound with the joys and anguish of women and men in contemporary Western society coming to terms with an historically new set of social relations. Similar soul searching characterized much of the culture of the last fin de siecle. Yet the central place of changing relations between the sexes in the fertility decline has rarely been acknowledged. While feminist historians chart the momentous changes in women's lives over this period, historical demographers search for meta-explanations grounded in such concepts as modernization, urbanization and rational choice theory. Disciplinary boundaries, technical vocabularies and epistemological orthodoxies constitute seemingly insurmountable barriers between those beavering away in the archives of everyday life and those attempting to explain and predict reproductive change through the manipulation of aggregate data on computer screens.The barriers can be breached, however. Some convergence appears to be occurring in the field of development studies. At the recent Cairo Conference on Population and Development, raising the status of women was proposed as a major strand of any effective prescription for population control in the 'developing world'. Why has the impact of the changing status of women been overlooked in European or 'first world' historical demography? Why has there been a repression by historical demographers of the sexual conflicts underlying reproductive change in all known historical contexts? In part the explanation lies in the highjacking of population

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