The Determinants of the Fertility Transition in Antebellum Ohio

Abstract

The cross-sectional and secular variations in the fertility of the white population in pre-Civil War Ohio are analyzed with special regard to the role of population pressure in conditioning these patterns and trends. Other factors, such as urbanization, education, cultural heritage, and the sex ratio, all of which are often cited as major explanatory variables during the demographic transition are also introduced. Although each of these variables is shown to have some impact, none can account for more than a minor proportion of the Variance in human fertility. It appears that the major force affecting both inter-county fertility and the secular trend for the state was the Variation in the degree of population pressure as measured by the average assessed value of an acre of non-urban land.

"Early" Fertility Decline in America: a Problem in Family History

“…While ecological analyses of counties within states (Leet, 1976(Leet, , 1977Vinovskis, 1976b;Laidig et al, 1981) (Easterlin et al, 1978) have shown that not only were wives younger in more newly settled areas, but that women in their thirties were more likely to have children under age five in their households than farm women in counties in which more of the available farm land had been improved. This is the only study indicating that the fertility difference between the East and West in the antebellum United States involved differences in marital fertility as well as in patterns of nuptiality.…”

Land Use and Family Formation in the Settlement of the US Great Plains

“…Yasuba (1962) linked fertility to the availability of arable land, suggesting that the secular decline in fertility was a product of increasing land scarcity. While subsequent scholars have refined Yasuba’s measures and methods of analysis, few have produced results that challenged the association between fertility and land availability (Easterlin 1971, 1976a, b; Forster and Tucker 1972; Leet 1976; Schapiro 1982; for an exception, see Vinovskis 1976). Easterlin (1976a, b) further specified inheritance as the mechanism through which this relationship worked: parents had only as many children as they could reasonably expect to endow with their own livelihood, so the availability of land to purchase for or bequeath to children constrained fertility.…”

“…These works suggest both temporal and spatial components to the fertility-land availability relationship: over time, as land becomes more densely settled and hence more expensive, parents have fewer children; at any given time, couples in more recently and less densely settled areas will have more children than couples in older and more densely settled areas, as more land is available for their children (Easterlin 1971; Leet 1976). In the United States, agricultural settlement has mainly followed an east-west trajectory, with states farther west having more-recently and less-densely settled populations than those to the east.…”

Land Use and Family Formation in the Settlement of the US Great Plains

“…Yasuba (1962) linked fertility to the availability of arable land, suggesting that the secular decline in fertility was a product of increasing land scarcity. While subsequent scholars have refined Yasuba's measures and methods of analysis, few have produced results that challenged the association between fertility and land availability (Easterlin 1971(Easterlin , 1976aForster and Tucker 1972;Leet 1976;Schapiro 1982; for an exception, see Vinovskis 1976). Easterlin (1976a, b) further specified inheritance as the mechanism through which this relationship worked: parents had only as many children as they could reasonably expect to endow with their own livelihood, so the availability of land to purchase for or bequeath to children constrained fertility.…”