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PostprintThis is the accepted version of a paper published in The History of the Family. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination. Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Junkka, J., Edvinsson, S. (2016) Gender and fertility within the free churches in the Sundsvall region, Sweden, 1860-1921.The History of the Family, 21(2): 243-266 http://dx. AbstractThe role of secularization in the European fertility decline has been of interest to demographers, who often explore the relationship on a macro-level or by identifying religious affiliation by proxy. However, the relationship has not been thoroughly studied on an individual level utilizing indicators of personal religious conviction and affiliation. The aim of the present article is to examine reproductive practices by religious affiliation in order to understand the impact of secularization on fertility decline. This is accomplished using event history analysis of longitudinal parish register data from Sundsvall (1860 -1921) where religious affiliation is identified on a family level. Reproductive practices are analysed using cohort TFR, descriptive statistics and Cox proportional hazard regressions. Free-church affiliates had, overall, a higher probability of having another child than did affiliates to the state church. However, these differences decreased over time, and as fertility dropped throughout society free-church affiliates showed the strongest significant reduction in probability of another birth. This indicates that over time, within the free churches, ideas about respectability and restraint came to mean that birth control, in the form of abstinence within marriage, became an important practice in the formation of gendered religious identities -leading to a relatively early decrease in fertility.

The aim of this study was to analyse the association between season of birth, temperature and neonatal mortality according to socioeconomic status in northern Sweden from 1880 to 1950. The source material for this study comprised digitised parish records combined with local weather data. The association between temperature, seasonality, socioeconomic status and neonatal mortality was modelled using survival analysis. We can summarise our findings according to three time periods. During the first period (1880–1899), temperature and seasonality had the greatest association with high neonatal mortality, and the socioeconomic differences in vulnerability were small. The second period (1900–1929) was associated with a decline in seasonal and temperature-related vulnerabilities among all socioeconomic groups. For the last period (1930–1950), a new regime evolved with rapidly declining neonatal mortality rates involving class-specific temperature vulnerabilities, and there was a particular effect of high temperature among workers. We conclude that the effect of season of birth on neonatal mortality was declining for all socioeconomic groups (1880–1950), whereas weather vulnerability was pronounced either when the socioeconomic disparities in neonatal mortality were large (1880–1899) or during transformations from high to low neonatal rates in the course of industrialisation and urbanisation.

This study investigates the role of changing social relations for fertility decline during the European fertility transition. The growth of voluntary associations at the end of the nineteenth century entailed a radical shift in the landscape of social relations in Sweden. By combining micro-census data from 1890 to 1900 with local-level membership data for three voluntary association groups, this article assesses the effect of parish-level voluntary association size on net fertility in Sweden using mixed-effects Poisson regression models. The results show that the adoption of fertility limitation during the transition period was associated with the creation and diffusion of the idea of respectability within large social network organisations, an idea that has previously been shown to be connected to fertility limitation. Furthermore, by applying a social network perspective, the results show that the strength of the effect was dependent on the structure of the social networks in terms of size, density, and homogeneity. Voluntary association size had the strongest effect for the free churches, which created dense heterogeneous networks through systems of social control, while the size of the temperance association showed no effect on fertility because the connections between nodes were sparse.

During the recent decades, social inequalities in mental health have increased and are now one of the most persistent features of contemporary society. There is limited knowledge about when this pattern emerged or whether it has been a historically fixed feature. The objective of this study was to assess whether socioeconomic and gender gaps in mental health changed during the period 1900-1959 in Sweden. We used historical micro data which report all necessary information on individuals' demographic characteristics, occupational attainment and mental disorders (N = 2,450) in a Swedish population of 193,893. Changes over time was tested using multilevel Cox proportional hazard models. We tested how gender-specific risks of mental disorder changed and how gender-specific socioeconomic status was related to risks of mental disorder later in life. We found a reversal in gender gaps in mental health during the study period. Women had a lower risk than men in 1900 and higher risks in 1959. For men, we found a negative gradient in SES risks in 1900 and a positive gradient in 1959. For women, we found no clear SES gradient in the risk of mental disorder. These findings suggest that the contemporary patterns in socioeconomic and gender gaps in mental disorder emerged during the 1940s and 1950s and have since then persisted.