Family Size: Northeast vs. Frontier

John Kleeb and his wife with their seven children in Custer County, Nebraska (1880s); all of the children are young; more siblings will likely follow. All will be put to work on the vast farm.

Fertility decrease, 1800-1900

United States

In 1798 English philosopher Thomas Malthus remarked that the sudden population increase in the United States was "probably without parallel in history."This he attributed to the "extreme cheapness of good land."He reasoned that while the cost of farmland in Europe obliged couples in Europe to marry late and curb sexual desires, frontier couples in the United States, who needed more hands to farm its vast open spaces, married earlier and had many children.

The census of 1800 provided some statistical foundation for Malthus's assertions. It showed that the average white woman had seven children. On the frontier, however, women had even more. This geographic gradient—high fertility in the western states, low in New England and the Northeast—persisted during the nineteenth century.

The map "Fertility and Population Density, 1850" shows that white women in the most densely populated states had the lowest fertility levels while those in the western states had the highest fertility levels. For example, women between the ages of sixteen and forty-four in New England had, on the average, fewer than one child under the age of ten; conversely, women in the Oregon Territory, as well as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida had two or three times more children than their New England counterparts. (Comparable data are unavailable for African American mothers.)

While this map seems to confirm a direct relationship between frontier life and high fertility, a closer examination of the census data suggests the importance of other factors, too. For example, Missouri and Wisconsin were sparsely settled, and yet mothers in those states had fewer children than their counterparts in Indiana, which was relatively

Well-developed. Frontier environments did not always lead to higher fertility rates.

Many historians believe that the low-fertility rates in the Northeast, and especially northeastern cities, were due to cultural rather than economic factors. By the early nineteenth century, an ideology of domesticity among the middle classes confined women to the home even as it enshrined their role as custodians of the young. Mothers intent on guiding each child's moral development, and fathers intent on saving enough money to establish a foothold in the emerging middle class, together decided to limit their families by marrying later, by abstaining from sexual relations for long periods, and perhaps by practicing contraception.