The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  When we think of the archetypal nineteenth-century family, it may be Queen Victoria and her brood which come to mind, the children posing regally or playfully around their adoring parents. But by the mid twentieth century, the action had moved west, both in terms of power and money, and when we think of the post-war baby boom, it is the United States which comes first to mind. The United States was now the demographic powerhouse of the Western world, a land noted since Malthus’s time for high fertility rates and strong population growth. Yet births per woman were already falling before the First World War and continued to do so in the interwar era–the Great Depression of the 1930s helping to discourage childbirth and family formation.2 Unemployed men on both sides of the Atlantic, struggling to support their families, either delayed marrying and planning for children or, if already married and with children, avoided adding to their family. Contraception was increasingly known about, affordable and starting to be practised even among the poorer members of society, for whom it had once been out of reach. (It was celebrated, somewhat jovially, as the epitome of modernity by the British novelist Evelyn Waugh in Black Mischief, a novel published in 1932; twenty years earlier, the topic would have been hard to imagine in print.)

  The most common form of contraception was some kind of sheath. Such devices had been known in ancient times and had certainly been in fairly widespread use in eighteenth-century London, as the diaries of James Boswell show. Rubber, which was used from the nineteenth century, became cheaper in the early twentieth century, making sheaths more affordable. Often distributed discreetly in the UK, condoms were supposedly offered to customers by barbers who would ask, ‘Anything for the weekend, sir?’ From immediately before the First World War onwards, IUDs or coils became available for women, and these too became increasingly available in the interwar years. For many people, however, especially the poor and the less educated, withdrawal, abstinence and primitive and illegal abortions continued to be the way in which family size was limited. Unreliable and (in the latter case) dangerous though these may have been, they worked with sufficient reliability to bring down fertility rates to a third of the level of the 1860s.

  Between the wars the fertility rate in the US fell from a little over three children per woman to a little over two.3 This fall has been attributed in particular to lower fertility among immigrants, a rise of the urban population (with its traditionally lower fertility rate) as people left the countryside to come to the towns, and finally to a convergence of rural and urban fertility rates. A smaller share of the population was living in the countryside, and increasingly behaving more like urban dwellers when it came to childbearing and family size.4 This meant the growth rate of the population declined, but it did not much bother commentators or policy makers; the population was still growing overall, pulling away in terms of size from potential rivals on the international stage. Much of the establishment in the US was generally more interested in reducing immigration and preserving America’s white Anglo-Saxon identity than it was with population growth.

  By the 1930s the population of the US was growing at less than 1% per annum, low by historical standards for the country. This was no longer the America of Emma Lazarus, whose poem adorns the Statue of Liberty, drawing to it the huddled masses: with the ever more stringent immigration controls ushered in during the 1920s, the US was making it clear that the huddled masses were no longer welcome. Nor was it any longer the America of Thomas Jefferson in which fertile young settlers with endless access to fresh lands (taken, of course, at the expense of indigenous Americans) could double their numbers every twenty-five years through fecundity alone.

  Then from 1945, against all expectation, everything changed. With the war behind them, US GIs returned wanting homes, brides and families. At first this might have been put down to an immediate post-war catch-up, with plans for marriage and family formation, postponed by the war, finally coming to fruition. However, the trend turned out to be more than short-lived. Total fertility in the United States, which had fallen to a little over two before the war, rose to well over three and a half by the late 1950s.5 Nothing in Frank Notestein’s demographic transition theory had prepared anyone for this near doubling of fertility once the transition to low mortality and low fertility had been achieved. With hindsight it is clear that Notestein’s model of demographic transition, while not exactly upturned, was in need of refining.

  The total number of births per annum in the latter part of the 1930s had been a little over 2 million across the US, but by the late 1950s it was twice this number.6 Annual population growth now, even in the continued absence of mass immigration, was double its 1930s level.7 By 1960 the United States had around 180 million citizens compared with a little over 100 million barely forty years earlier. Between the mid 1940s and mid 1960s it appeared that the America of Thomas Jefferson–in which large families fuelled population growth–had returned, even if the America of Emma Lazarus–in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of immigrants converged on the US–had not. The maternity wards opened even as the gates stayed more or less shut, at least for the time being.

  Population trends are the aggregate result of millions of private decisions taken by individuals and couples. Perfect knowledge of why they occur is never possible. Understanding the human tide, unlike the maritime tide, can never be an exact science. However, it is possible to speculate about the reasons for the post-war baby boom in the US. There was, as we have seen, the move to catch up after the war and to some extent the depression. As one commentator has written: ‘When the boys came home from “over there” they married, proceeded to get jobs, buy homes and have babies.’8 Yet this does not explain why the baby boom was still going–indeed reaching its peak–around fifteen years after the war ended, when those GIs yearning to settle down had long done so. To some extent trends like this gather their own momentum. Early marriage and larger family sizes become the norm, and people emulate what they see at the cinema and on television and observe among their friends.

  A more compelling reason for the long duration of the baby boom is economic. Population growth and economic boom become self-reinforcing under the right circumstances. More marriages and more children meant a need for more homes and for more of the goods which were increasingly expected in or around the home–the fridge, the washing machine, the telephone, the television and above all the motor car. Providing for this demand in an era when the US still manufactured most of its own consumer goods fed back into the climate of optimism, further encouraging family formation and births. It was the golden era of the American corporation, of rising wages and job security, exactly the circumstances under which young couples were prepared to take the plunge, get married and start a family, or feel confident enough to have that extra child. To some extent, it was a final throwing off of the Malthusian constraint. In a more chaste society than ours, delaying marriage often meant sexual abstinence and frustration. As economic opportunity opened up to young men, many felt they could risk getting married and having children earlier than their fathers had during the depression years. (As a relation of mine told me of the 1940s: ‘In my day, marriage was the only way you could have sex with a nice girl.’) Home ownership among those in their late twenties and early thirties in the US had, by 1960, risen to twice the level at the start of the century, and the average age at which women had their first child fell.9 Whereas in an earlier era restraint, late marriage and small families had been typical of those pulling themselves up, now early marriage and larger families were a sign of financial success.

  The baby boom was no more limited to the United States than was the post-war economic boom; rather, it was widespread across the West. In Canada, where the trend was stronger than in the US, by the early 1960s fertility rates were not far short of four children per woman, making Queen Elizabeth more typical of her Canadian subjects than her British ones. In part, this was due to continuing high fertility rates among the French-speaking Quebecois, whose fidelity to Catholic teachi
ng on birth control persisted longer than elsewhere (and–by the evidence of the birth rate–much longer than in their home country of France). Australia and New Zealand more or less tracked the American experience, while the UK, which had experienced fertility rates of barely two by the late 1930s, saw a rise to nearly three by the early 1960s–the peak was reached in 1964, the year of Prince Edward’s birth. Germany, too, saw a rise, although never above two and a half children per woman, accompanying the country’s post-war economic miracle and reconstruction from the ashes of 1945. Finally, northern Europe was to some extent an echo of the American phenomenon; here fertility rates certainly went up above their pre-war levels, but not to quite the same heights.

  Southern Europe differed from North America and northern Europe as, before the Second World War, it was still relatively unindustrialised, had a much larger rural population and a higher although falling fertility rate, and was still in the process of completing its demographic transition. In Spain, under the authoritarian rule of Franco and the domination of the Catholic Church, fertility rates rose from two and a half to three, while in Italy they remained more or less flat at two and a half. Irish women remained Europe’s champion childbearers, with around four children per woman by the early 1960s, another late triumph for the Catholic Church, but Ireland remained a small country in population terms; its continuing struggle to develop much beyond the agrarian stage meant that high birth rates continued to translate into high emigration, much as it had done a century earlier. Ireland’s children continued to spread from Boston, Massachusetts, to Birmingham, England, and Brisbane, Australia, following the now well-travelled pathways of exile in search of economic opportunity. By 1970 the population of the Irish Republic, despite its high birth rate, had hardly grown since the end of the Second World War.

  The baby boom had a big impact on societies, which were now flooded with young people. Nineteen fifties North America and Western Europe saw the dawning of the era of the teenager (the term ‘teenager’ may have its origins in the interwar years, but was properly born in the decades following the Second World War), the era of rock and roll, the era when, for the first time, there was something that could meaningfully be called mass youth culture. The countries of the West were young, with large cohorts of children rising to young adults outnumbering the cohorts that went before, and able to influence social practices and conventions.

  At the climax of the baby boom in the 1960s, the children born immediately after the war were coming of age while the last boomers were being born, and teenagers displayed a blend of adolescent rebelliousness and consumerist conformity; it was the period of student rebellions from California to Paris, of blue jeans, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This was a confident and influential generation because it was a large generation. When the young are much more numerous than the old, it is not surprising that conventions are increasingly questioned, challenged and in some cases overturned. The ongoing popularity of the culture of the 1960s testifies to the size of that cohort and to its continued impact, although today its members are less likely to be protesting for free love and against the Vietnam War and more likely to be protesting against a cut in pensions or a rise in the retirement age.

  ‘Rock and Roll is Dead’, the Lenny Kravitz song of 1995 proclaims. The timing is perhaps no coincidence, for at this point the cohort of baby boom Americans reaching teenage was at its nadir, the fertility rate having bottomed out about a decade and a half earlier; and it can certainly be argued that there has been a general retreat in youth culture and assertiveness since then, based on deep changes in society’s age structure. Whereas in 1965 under twenty-fives represented not much short of half the population of the US, by 2015 they constituted less than a third. The late 1950s and 1960s were the height of the era in which youth predominated.

  Baby Bust

  In their prime the baby boomers were accused of undermining the fabric of Western civilisation. In their approaching dotage, they are accused of milking the economy, feathering their own nests and undermining the welfare state through a sense of entitlement.10 These accusations may be justified and often have political ramifications. The UK general election of 2017 provides an example. The middle class, once heavily Tory, split almost evenly between Labour and the Conservatives. No longer was class the great predictor of voting behaviour; now it was age which determined the likelihood of voting one way or the other. The Conservatives were thirty points ahead among the over sixty-fives and fifty points behind among the under twenty-fours disillusioned by high house prices, diminishing economic prospects and Brexit.

  Around 1965, the contraceptive Pill, which came to be known universally as ‘the Pill’, was made generally available. It arrived just as fertility was starting to fall and it undoubtedly contributed to that fall. If one wants to suggest father figures for the Pill, they would have to be Carl Djerassi and Gregory Pincus. Djerassi had fled Europe in his teens, arriving in the US on the eve of the Second World War, and eventually became a Stanford professor. Pincus was the scion of an earlier and larger group of Jewish refugees to America, his parents having been part of the great wave of eastern and southern Europeans who reached America’s shores in the decades before the Second World War. Pincus ended up at Harvard, Djerassi at Stanford. Djerassi’s motivations were clear:

  The overwhelming fact is that at my birth there were 1.9 billion people in the world. Now there are 5.8 billion and at my 100th birthday, there are likely to be 8.5 billions. That has never happened in world history before that during a person’s lifetime, the world population more than quadrupled. That can never happen again.11

  In turn, it’s possible to suggest two mothers of the Pill: Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer who organised, coordinated and inspired the effort, and Katharine Dexter McCormick, the biologist and agricultural equipment heiress who funded it.

  Their work bore fruit when the US Federal Drugs Agency approved the Pill’s use in 1960. The following year it was introduced into the UK–initially for married women only–and its use spread rapidly across the West except where the Catholic Church managed to hold it at bay (until the mid 1970s in Spain and until the 1980s in Ireland, for example). Other forms of contraception such as condoms and IUDs had by the 1960s been generally available for some time, otherwise the low fertility rates of the 1930s would never have been achievable on a mass scale. Even nineteenth-century French peasants had managed to curtail their fertility, presumably not by entirely curtailing their sex lives. Yet the Pill’s sheer simplicity, reliability and cheapness (often, along with other forms of contraception, provided free by the welfare state) meant that the link between sex and birth was finally and irrevocably broken. At least sex without the risk of conception was now universal.

  The unexpectedly high post-war US fertility rate, which had peaked in the late 1950s, thereafter began to tail off. At first the fall was relatively modest, from just under three and two-thirds of a child per woman in the second half of the 1950s to a little under three and a half in the early 1960s. The fall was then more rapid, to barely one and three-quarters in the late 1970s. Thus, in the twenty years from the late 1950s to the late 1970s the total fertility rate of the United States more or less halved from nearly four to fewer than two children per woman. Thereafter, it flattened out and recovered somewhat, hovering at or slightly above two children per woman from the early 1990s, close to if not quite at what is generally considered to be replacement level and thus only a little below its pre-war level, and most recently there appears to have been a reversal down to somewhat below two. Speaking generally, then, the United States can be seen as having reverted to the norm of the final stage of the (first) demographic transition, and is now somewhat beyond this point.

  Against this backdrop, the post-war baby boom can be seen in retrospect as an aberration–a kink–in the demographic transition, rather than a reversal. The virtuous cycle (virtuous at least to some) of new families creating demand for new goods, boosting the economy
, boosting economic prospects and encouraging the formation of new and larger families could not go on forever. New social forces and norms came into play, among them feminism, as a generation of women who themselves had been born in the baby boom more commonly aspired to higher education and careers rather than simply to marriage and motherhood. Smaller and later families accompanied the changing attitudes of and towards women, their broadening horizons and rising educational opportunities; this turned out to be the case almost everywhere in the West. Of all women in the US in their early twenties, those who were college-educated rose from 20% to nearly 60% between the 1960s and 1990s.12

  The Pill made contraception massively more convenient and simple and it changed sexual practices and attitudes profoundly, but demographically it was not transformational, for although the forms of contraception used before the war–the condom and IUDs–were less convenient and at that stage less accessible and affordable, they still managed to facilitate a fall in fertility rates across many Western countries to replacement level. So it turned out that you did not need to educate women in order to lower the fertility rate, although lower fertility would almost certainly be the outcome if you did. Female education and families of six or eight children may go together in individual cases, but not at the level of a whole society. A more negative attitude to marriage and childbirth, probably always around but never articulated on so wide a scale, was expressed by Marilyn French in her 1977 feminist classic, The Women’s Room: