Alice Reid & Romola Davenport
The world’s population has exploded since the 18th century, from perhaps 1 billion in 1800 to over 8 billion today. The usual story is that this extraordinary growth was caused by dramatic falls in mortality. But research at Campop has shown that, at least in England, fertility has actually played a larger role than mortality in regulating population growth.
Alice Reid
Both my grandmothers lost children during or shortly after birth, and laid at least some of the blame on their care during that period. My maternal grandmother, a trained midwife, was worried about being allowed to go well beyond her due date less than two years after a previous caesarean birth. When she finally went into labour the doctor delayed his attendance because he was reluctant to leave his game of bridge, and the baby was stillborn. My paternal grandmother blamed a bombing raid for precipitating early labour, and her baby only lived three days. As a premature infant the baby would have been very vulnerable, but my grandmother felt she would have lived had the midwife not insisted on bathing her so frequently.
Alice Reid
A previous blog charted trends in non-marital conceptions and births in England from 1550 to the present. It argued that although many couples engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage, in most cases when a woman fell pregnant she and her partner married swiftly, so that the majority of extra-marital conceptions were born within marriage. Not all pregnant women were able to marry however, giving rise to extra-marital births, or ‘illegitimate’ children.
Alice Reid
For the last 11 years there have been fewer births on Boxing Day than on any other day of the year, with Christmas Day and New Year’s Day also having very low numbers. In contrast, there were more babies born on 28 September than any other day, and late September to early October has been the most popular time to be born over the last 30 years or so. The lack of births on festive season holidays is due to fewer inductions and planned caesareans over the Christmas bank holidays, while the late September peak has been attributed to Christmas and New Year conceptions.
Hannaliis Jaadla, Alice Reid, & Eilidh Garrett
Concerns about low and declining fertility are common in the media and feature in public discussions around much of Europe and South East Asia. The size of the future work force and the sustainability of pension systems in years to come both depend on the number of children born today. In England and Wales, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) fell to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, and 2023 was the first year in nearly half a century – and only the second in the last 250 years – when there were fewer births than deaths.
Alice Reid
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died on 8th September 2022. Aged 96, her death certificate gave her cause of death as simply ‘Old Age’. It’s undeniable that she was old when she died, but how common is old age as a cause of death now and in the past, and what can the history of death from old age tell us?
Alice Reid, Eilidh Garrett, & Hanna Jaadla
It is generally accepted that the context of marriage was seen as the proper place for childbearing in historic Britain, and levels of non-marital fertility, or ‘illegitimacy’, were relatively low. Depictions in literature suggest that unmarried mothers were predominantly servant girls ‘taken advantage of’ by their unscrupulous employers or, as was the case for the eponymous Tess of the D’Urbervilles, their sons. Even some historians espouse this view.
But was this really the case? And what do levels and patterns of unmarried motherhood tell us about sexual activity outside marriage? This blog describes what demography can tell us about who was having sex before marriage in the past, who ended up as unmarried mothers, and how these were likely viewed by society.
Alice Reid
It is not unreasonable to believe that childbirth in the past was terribly dangerous. This view is common among popular history blogs and even some academic articles. Several internet sources, when discussing maternal mortality, state that in medieval or early modern times, as many as one in three women died during their childbearing years.
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The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure