Rethinking the 'Early' Decline of Marital Fertility in the United States: New Evidence from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series

J. David Hacker, University of Minnesota

Although the United States is believed to have experienced a sustained decline in marital fertility beginning circa 1800, the only systematic fertility estimates for the period before 1880 are based on the age structure of the population reported in the federal census. This paper relies on new IPUMS samples of the 1850-1880 censuses, new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality, and "own-child" methods of fertility estimation to reexamine the evidence of "early" fertility decline in the United States. The results suggest that that most of the observed change in the nation's age structure before 1840 resulted from increasing mortality, although declining nuptiality likely played a role as well. More importantly, own-child methods of fertility estimation, which allow age-specific marital fertility rates to be constructed for the first time, indicate that parity-dependent control of marital fertility cannot be detected in the United States until after 1850, and then only in the Northeast.