Posts Tagged ‘demography’
Thursday, March 27th, 2025
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.
(more…)
Tags: birth attendants, childbirth, demography, doctors, infant mortality, maternal mortality, midwives, stillbirth
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, February 20th, 2025
Richard Smith
It is commonplace to assume that, traditionally, care for older adults has been the responsibility of family members, and was provided within the extended family – implying that elderly persons spent their declining years under the same roof as their married children. But work at Campop has shown that this residential arrangement was not actually the norm in the British past.
(more…)
Tags: demography, extended family, family size, households, old age, old people
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, January 30th, 2025
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.
(more…)
Tags: demography, illegitimacy, infant mortality, mortality, non-marital fertility
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, November 28th, 2024
Hannaliis Jaadla, Alice Reid, Eilidh Garrett
Concerns about low and declining fertility are common in the media and feature in public discussions around and South East Asia. The size of the future work force and 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.
(more…)
Tags: age at childbirth, birth rate, contraception, demography, fertility, marriage, total fertility rate
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, November 14th, 2024
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?
(more…)
Tags: death, demography, doctors, mortality, old age
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, October 10th, 2024
Richard Smith
Today those aged 60 and over make up slightly more than 1 in 5 of the UK population. It is tempting to believe that in the distant past, because there were fewer older people, they enjoyed a greater cachet. But how far is this view born out in the English case by the findings of historical demography? Is it correct to regard age structures over the deeper past as unvarying through time?
(more…)
Tags: age structure, ageing, demography, fertility, mortality, old people
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, October 3rd, 2024
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.
(more…)
Tags: courtship, demography, fertility, illegitimacy, marriage, non-marital fertility, pre-marital conception, sexual activity
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, September 19th, 2024
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.
(more…)
Tags: childbirth, demography, maternal mortality, mortality
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, August 15th, 2024
Romola Davenport & Jim Oeppen
Campop’s studies of mortality suggest that, in England, average life expectancy at birth varied between 35 and 40 years in the centuries between 1600 and 1800. It is a common misconception that, when life expectancy was so low, there must have been very few old people. In fact, the most common age for adult deaths was around 70 years, in line with the Biblical three score years and ten. So what does ‘life expectancy’ actually measure?
(more…)
Tags: demography, economic history, life expectancy, mortality, old age, social history
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure