The Motherhood Revolution

Of all the changes to sweep the west over the past 400 years, perhaps none have had a greater impact on women’s lives than the fall in family sizes. Sarah Knott tells the story of the great fertility decline, from the large broods of 17th-century America to the one-children families of postwar London

- Sarah Knott

How I shall get along when I have got half a dozen or 10 children, I can’t devise,” fretted the New Jersey colonist Esther Edwards Burr after her child’s birth in 1756. Narcissa Whitman, a pioneer in Oregon a century later, might have recognised these concerns. She knew first-hand the consequences of mothering a large brood. “My dear parents,” she wrote in a rare but affectionate missive back to New York in 1845, “I have now a family of 11 children. This makes me feel as if I could not write a letter.”

Modern demographers know that, over the past 400 years, fertility rates have changed significantly in Europe and North America. The numbers dropped dramatically from an average of seven or eight children among settlers in 17th and 18th-century North America, or four or five in Britain, to 2.2 or lower in both places in the 20th century. The demographers culled and amassed their numbers mainly from sources including local censuses, family histories, wills, church records, and then, since the 19th century, from national surveys. They call this remarkable historical transformation the fertility transition.

Of all the factors affecting women’s experiences of motherhood since the 17th century, surely none has had a greater impact than plunging fertility rates. If there is an overarching story to be told about mothering, the change from larger to smaller families is as close as we might get.

But understanding what these changes may have felt like is tricky. It wasn’t easy for a mother to keep a diary or to write a letter – thus leaving a record for us to read now – when there were “half a dozen or 10 children” on hand. Perhaps that is why the history of the fertility transition has, for the most part, faded from view.