Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877-1930

Richard A. Soloway

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807897836, 9780807815045
• eBook ISBN: 9781469640006
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Soloway examines the origins of the modern birth control movement in England in the wider context of the dramatic decline in fertility that first became apparent in the 1880s. He concludes that the response of individuals and organizations drawn into the debate over birth control and the consequences of diminished fertility mirrored their attitudes toward the profound social, economic, moral, political, and cultural changes altering Great Britain and its influential position in the world.

Originally published 1982.

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Part I
Neo-Malthusianism, Eugenics, and Demographic Change, 1877–1914

CHAPTER 1
The Declining Birthrate

Although the English clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was the most famous proponent of population restraint in the nineteenth century, his countrymen, however fascinated by his arguments, paid little attention to his recommendations. Despite Malthus’s portentous calculations of the populace expanding geometrically while the means of its support increased only arithmetically, men and women throughout much of the century continued to marry and reproduce at an unprecedented rate.¹ They had already begun to do so a generation before Malthus revealed his demographic laws in 1798 and were unwilling or unable to dampen their pro-creative instinct significantly until the closing decades of Queen Victoria’s long reign. By then the nearly nine million people enumerated in England and Wales in the first census of 1801 had increased almost fourfold. The average decennial rate of growth was 13.8 percent. It never fell below 11.6 percent during the century and soared as high as 18.06 from 1811 to 1821. Although the pace moderated somewhat in the middle decades of the century, it rose again sharply to nearly 14.4 percent in the 1870s before gradually tapering off in the last years of the Victorian era.²

The decline was not overly precipitous after the queen’s death in 1901, and, during the nine-year reign of her son, Edward VII, the population of nearly thirty-three million grew by another 10.89 percent. Although this was a rate of increase somewhat below the decennial average obtained in the previous century, it was not compelling evidence that Great Britain was tottering on the edge of demographic catastrophe. Nevertheless, a great many people were uneasy with recent population trends. But in contrast to the issues raised during the first Malthusian debate, the population question, as it was posed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, focused much more on the causes and implications of precipitous decline rather than on unchecked growth. Furthermore, traditional demographic considerations were increasingly complicated by more elaborate statistical information about regional and socioeconomic class differentials in fertility. Under the pervasive impact of Social Darwinism and its ancillary new science of human heredity, eugenics, the problem of “race quality” became as important as that of “race quantity” as late Victorian and Edwardian Englishmen pondered the anticipated challenges to British civilization in the new century.

Basic to their deliberations and prognostications was a growing awareness that after more than a century of expansively high fertility the national birthrate had, since the mid-1870s, been steadily declining. For decades the crude rate had hovered around 34.3 births per thousand of the population. It reached a recorded peak of 36.3 in 1876, but by 1901 had fallen to 28.5, the lowest figure since vital statistics were first reported in 1838. The downward trend continued unabated and the decline of more than 21 percent at the turn of the century exceeded 33 percent in the months preceding the outbreak of World War I when fertility slid to around 24/ 1,000.³ In spite of the diminishing birthrate the population since the 1870s continued to expand by more than 50 percent, from approximately twenty-four to thirty-seven million people, but this was often overlooked by analysts of the population question who riveted their attention on the accumulating evidence of decline.

Shortly after Edward VII ascended the throne the popular Daily Mail claimed that statesmen and publicists were no longer listening to the old Malthusian lamentations about the “devastating torrent of children” whose numbers assured the perpetuation of poverty. Instead of worrying about arresting the birthrate, the nation’s leaders were trying to stop a decline that had “set in with ominous steadiness, and which is now beginning to menace the predominance of the race.” Looking ahead to the challenges of the twentieth century the paper predicted that victory would belong “to the large unit; the full nursery spells national and race predominance.”⁴ J. A. Spender, editor of the Liberal Westminster Gazette, commented in 1907 on the revival of such arguments long after Malthus and his generation of political economists purportedly demolished that error and educated the nation to the dangers of overpopulation. Fertility had finally been checked, as the recent decline in the birthrate indicated, Spender wrote, but public opinion had again swung to the opposite pole. “What in 1830 and 1840 was regarded as the special aim of statesmanship is now regarded as a sign of decay.” It was ironic that although the population had nearly quadrupled in the last century, “in these days we find most of the newspapers and all the preachers in a state of despair about the slightest check in the percentage of increase.”⁵

Press and pulpit were only the more obvious oracles of gloom predicting, like the medical journal, the Lancet, “a national calamity seriously threatening the future welfare of our race.”⁶ In 1906 the Radical-Liberal journalist and M.P. for Tyneside, John Mackinnon Robertson, denounced these sentiments as “lugubrious humbug” while acknowledging the growing hold they had on the public mind. An old Malthusian and classical liberal economist, Robertson deplored the “deliberately insincere rhetoric about decay of national energy, the approaching extinction of the Anglo-Saxon, the fall in the vitality of the higher races, and all the rest of it,” muddying discussions of the declining birthrate.⁷ Although he welcomed the trend toward smaller families, Robertson recognized that many of his contemporaries were seriously disturbed by the racial, political, and economic implications of an apparent loss of vital procreative energy. They thrashed about in search of explanations and prognoses, fearful that a diminution of reproductive capacity was but another manifestation of the decline of Britain’s imperial civilization.

It was eventually conceded that the decline in the birthrate, whether a menacing or salutary trend, was not a consequence of Darwinian evolution, cyclical dietary fluctuations, radical alterations in the age and frequency of marriage, or the sterilizing effects of industrialization and urbanization. On the contrary it was, as Robertson and countless others knew full well, a direct result of the rapid adoption of family limitation, or birth control, as it was later described. The increasingly sophisticated interpretation of governmental and private statistical inquiries in the decade and a half preceding the war gave decisive scientific credibility to that conclusion.

Although the crude, or uncorrected, fertility statistics provided in the quarterly and annual reports of the registrar-general as well as in the decennial censuses were widely quoted by the myriad analysts of the population question, the more astute stressed the importance of corrected fertility as a more precise measurement. By comparing the number of children born annually to married women of child-bearing age (fifteen to forty-five) it was, they reasoned, possible to demonstrate changes in fertility even more graphically. The registrar-general emphasized this point in his 1903 report, noting that corrected fertility, which had averaged 288 children per thousand women in this fecund category until the 1870s, had, after soaring to 304.1 in 1876, steadily fallen to 234.2 by the end of 1901. The Lancet analyzed the returns and calculated that more than 300,000 fewer children were being born to married couples each year than would have been the case if the corrected birthrate had remained the same as in the 1870s.⁸

Arthur Newsholme, medical officer of health for Brighton, and T. H. C. Stevenson, medical officer for the London County Council, played a major role in educating their contemporaries in the intricacies of corrected fertility. In a much-quoted paper, “The Decline of Human Fertility,” presented to the Royal Statistical Society in 1905, they emphasized that, irrespective of changes in the overall composition of the British population, women of childbearing age were having less children with each passing year, whatever their marital status. Illegitimacy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they reported, had also dropped an astonishing 40 percent, indicating that some effective check to conception was clearly at work.⁹ By 1914 corrected marital fertility was at 191.6/1,000, a decline of 37 percent since the prolific 1870s.¹⁰

Since nearly 80 percent of the population lived in and around cities by the end of the nineteenth century, it was often assumed that urbanization was in some way responsible for the declining birthrate. The number of towns with more than fifty thousand residents had doubled in the last thirty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, and like observers of the urban scene from earlier times, many of her subjects complained of the sterilizing effects of crowded city life. It was frequently contended that no London family could survive more than three generations in the enervating atmosphere of the metropolis, and extensive rural migration to the great towns since the 1870s provoked much concern about the dilution of healthy British stock.

Although the birthrate declined in nearly all population centers, investigators quickly discovered that diminished fertility was by no means limited to townspeople. Newsholme wrote to the Times in 1906 that those who believed that the trend was an urban phenomenon were much mistaken. On the contrary, his studies revealed that since 1881 the fall in the rural birthrate actually exceeded the loss in the towns, compounding the recent depopulation of agricultural areas. No rural county since the 1870s had increased its birthrate, he reported; most had experienced a decline of around 20 percent compared with a drop of only 15 percent in urban districts.¹¹ Newsholme’s general conclusion was confirmed the following year by Sidney Webb in his Fabian Society tract, The Decline in the Birth-Rate. Concentrating upon corrected fertility in such towns as Northampton, Halifax, Burnley, and Blackburn, he found that births had diminished by 32 percent between 1881 and 1901. Although the decline was not as sharp in the selected rural counties of Cornwall, Rutland, Sussex, Devonshire, and Westmoreland, it still ranged between 23 and 29 percent.¹²

The most ambitious of the unofficial investigations into regional fertility undertaken before World War I was Ethel Elderton’s detailed study of the nine English counties north of the Humber. A research scholar in the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at the University of London, Elderton supplemented vital statistics with questionnaires and interviews. Her Report on the English Birth Rate, which appeared in late 1914, clearly illustrated the striking decline in births apparent in every one of the diverse counties since the mid-1870s. Between 1851 and 1875, she reported, fertility rose in every county but one, although, with the exception of Northumberland and Durham, the increase was not particularly large. Since then, however, all nine counties showed a substantial loss, ranging in 1901 from 9.6 children per thousand in rural Westmoreland to 5.3 in coal-rich Durham. In recent years the decline had accelerated and actually doubled in the traditionally fecund mining counties of Durham and Northumberland. Elderton calculated that if the 1901-11 rate of decrease was extended back to 1876 the birthrate in nearly every area north of the Humber would be half the current figure.¹³ The outbreak of the war prevented an extension of the investigation to other regions of the country, but by then it was clear that the overall pattern was similar throughout the nation. English families were on the average much smaller than they had been, and there was no indication that the trend, underway for at least three decades, was about to be reversed.

Lamentations about the demise of the large Victorian family and recurrent images of empty cradles became commonplace in the years before World War I. The royal family itself had once been a monument to the domestic fecundity of the age. If Queen Victoria was less than exhilarated by the experience of bearing nine children in eighteen years she at least understood her natural responsibilities. Nine children, while not uncommon, were nevertheless somewhat above the mid-Victorian average of approximately six, which prevailed until the 1880s. Although Edward VII, with his five offspring, and his heir, George V, with six, met the older norm, a great many of their subjects were markedly less prolific. Average family size dropped substantially to 3.4 children in Edward’s reign and to under three by the outbreak of the war.¹⁴

The young statistician, Karl Pearson, Goldsmid Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, London, had called attention to the trend in the mid-1890s. His growing interest in statistical probability, human heredity, and evolution had led him to plot a number of frequency curves extracted from fertility data contained in the reports of the registrar-general. They showed a distinct tendency toward a decrease in the number of families of five and six children, he reported, and a corresponding increase of those with two, three, and four offspring. The pattern was already well established in the 1890s, he noted, though it had not yet become a subject of national concern.¹⁵ It did so rapidly in the next decade as professional and amateur statisticians alike ruminated in the popular press as well as in specialized journals upon the reduced incidence of childbirth recorded for each passing year. The registrar-general’s quarterly and annual tabulations now became a subject of running commentary, frequently inspiring the most pessimistic visions of the future. They were often haunted by Britain’s doubtful performance during the Boer War and the official and unofficial inquiries it provoked into the possibilities of advanced racial deterioration.¹⁶ In the context of mounting worries about “national efficiency” preached by Darwinistically inspired imperialists, the extinction of the large family was to many another nail in the coffin of British hegemony.¹⁷

Although Balfour’s Conservative government had rejected several appeals to appoint a royal commission to investigate the diminished birthrate, its Liberal successor was persuaded to sanction a national Fertility of Marriage Census in conjunction with the decennial census of 1911.¹⁸ Its author, T. H. C. Stevenson, who had become superintendent of statistics in the General Register Office, was specifically concerned with trying to resolve the numerous controversies that surrounded the declining birthrate by gathering data on childbirth to an extent never before attempted. By surveying the fertility experience of married women at all levels of society since the mid-nineteenth century Stevenson anticipated that the true cause of the rapid move to smaller families would be conclusively revealed. The coming of the war delayed the publication of the tabulated statistics until 1917 and the report until 1923, but it was well known years before the volumes appeared that the returns proved emphatically that whatever domestic legacies the Victorians passed on to their successors large families were not among them. A second survey, less comprehensive, but based upon improved sampling techniques, was taken in 1946. When combined with the 1911 data this Family Census also makes it possible to trace the completed fertility experience of women who married in the two decades preceding World War I as well as in the years immedia...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Neo-Malthusianism, Eugenics, and Demographic Change, 1877-1914
• PART II War, Reconstruction, and Birth Control, 1914-1930
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index