{"id":2264,"date":"2017-05-30T11:09:28","date_gmt":"2017-05-30T15:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/?p=2264"},"modified":"2017-07-30T19:42:29","modified_gmt":"2017-07-30T23:42:29","slug":"antebellum-u-s-fertility-and-childbearing-the-south-and-the-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/2017\/05\/30\/antebellum-u-s-fertility-and-childbearing-the-south-and-the-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"Antebellum U.S. Fertility and Childbearing: The South and the Frontier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much of the historiography on U.S. fertility suggests that there was a general “decline” in national fertility rates in the early half of the nineteenth century, before the Civil War <\/span>[1]. Amidst our four weeks of research however, Professor Edwards and I uncovered novel fertility trends contrary to this generalization, characterized by regional differences throughout the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the past three years, Professor Edwards and her students have been collecting data on American families from nineteenth-century U.S. census and genealogical records, as part of a larger project investigating the reproductive role of women in U.S. politics and the construction of a continental empire. Using the data that had been collected, this summer, as part of my research, I conducted several statistical analyses to examine how fertility and family structure varied in different\u00a0regions of the antebellum United States\u00a0<\/span>\u2014<\/span>\u00a0particularly, the South and the\u00a0Frontier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fertility<\/strong>\u00a0In her research, Professor Edwards defines fertility as the total number of children born to a woman. Unlike previous studies, which have calculated fertility rates as a ratio of the number of children living to the number of women of childbearing age, we calculated fertility rates based on the number of children individual women reported having in the 1900 U.S. census. This census was particularly useful because it was the first time in history when women were asked how many children they had borne, for official records. The data collected from this census allowed\u00a0me to work with massive files, oftentimes containing thousands of observations, with detailed information on each mother, including her race, marital status, year of birth, occupation, literacy, and even her husband\u2019s profile.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Data on mothers\u00a0born before 1860, from the following counties, was used to run a series of t-tests in the coding program Rstudio:<\/span><\/p>\n