- Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States
Edmund Ramsden, Wellcome Research Fellow, Center for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and Wellcome Unit, University of Manchester This article explores the relationship between eugenics and demography in the United States in the interwar era. In focusing on the founding of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems and the Population Association of America, it shows how early population scientists contested and negotiated the boundaries of the population field. The article maps the shifting focus away from biological interpretations of population dynamics toward the social, in part as a reaction to the rise of Fascist population research and policy. However, it also shows how social demography was closely intertwined with a "social eugenics" that attempted to ensure human betterment through methods more consistent with New Deal policymaking. This, the article argues, contributed critical intellectual and material resources to the development of social surveys of fertility behavior and contraceptive use, surveys that are more commonly perceived as having undermined eugenics through challenging the biologically deterministic assumptions upon which it was based. [29, no. 4 (Dec 03): 547-593]
Rachel Murphy, Research Fellow, Institute for Chinese Studies and Pembroke College, University of Oxford This article explores how gender bias in population policies interacts with local culture to reinforce distortions in sex ratios among infants and young children in rural China. It argues that population policies introduce new sources of inequality into local culture while, conversely, gender inequalities embedded in local culture influence formal population policy and practice. Applying an institutional approach to the study of an agricultural county in Jiangxi province, southeast China, the analysis identifies four ways in which an interplay between gender bias in policy and culture produces gendered fertility outcomes: (1) the creation of gendered official categories such as "daughter-only households"; (2) a male bias embedded in local government; (3) the use of local gender norms in state pedagogy; and (4) the reworking or subverting of official norms in ways that reinforce gender inequalities in local reproductive culture. The article concludes that despite indications of contestation of village patriarchy, discrimination against daughters is likely to persist. [29, no. 4 (Dec 03): 595-626]
- Conflicting Preferences: A Reason Fertility Tends to Be Too High or Too Low
David Voas, Simon Research Fellow, Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester Fertility has often seemed to be too high or too low, relative not only to social and economic goals, but also to reproductive preferences. In developing countries actual fertility has often been higher than desired family size, while in developed societies fertility tends to be below replacement level even though people generally say that they want at least two children. In explanations of fertility extremes, or of the discrepancies between desired and actual fertility, the effect of partners' holding different preferences has tended to be overlooked. Individual preferences expected to lead to replacement-level reproduction may in combination generate substantially higher or lower fertility. In explaining such outcomes, a crucial question is what happens when spousal preferences diverge. Given that personal practices or social norms may systematically favor high or low preferences in the event of disagreement, chance alone will ensure that desired and actual fertility do not coincide. [29, no. 4 (Dec 03): 627-646]
- Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations
Marc Luy, Research Scientist, Federal Institute for Population Research (Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung), Wiesbaden, Germany The degree to which biological factors contribute to the existence and the widening of mortality differences by sex remains unclear. To address this question, a mortality analysis for the years 1890 to 1995 was performed comparing mortality data on more than 11,000 Catholic nuns and monks in Bavarian communities living in very nearly identical behavioral and environmental conditions with life table data for the general German population. While the mortality differences between women and men in the general German population increased considerably after World War II, they remained almost constant among the members of Bavarian religious orders during the entire observation period, with slight advantages for nuns. Thus, the higher differences observable in the general population cannot be attributed to biological factors. The different trends in sex-specific mortality between the general and the cloistered populations are caused exclusively by men in the general population who were unable to follow the trend in mortality reduction of women, nuns, and especially monks. Under the special environmental conditions of nuns and monks, biological factors appear to confer a maximum survival advantage for women of no more than one year in remaining life expectancy at young adult ages. [29, no. 4 (Dec 03): 647-676]
Notes and Commentary John Knodel, Professor of Sociology, Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Mary Beth Ofstedal, Associate Research Scientist, Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor In recent years, both population aging and gender issues have gained prominence in international forums concerned with population. It is frequently asserted or implied that older women are universally more vulnerable to social, economic, and health disadvantages than older men. The most significant manifestation of this exclusive concern with women when considering gender and aging is the Plan of Action adopted by the Second World Assembly on Aging in 2002. The assumed relative disadvantage of elderly women is commonly attributed to gender differences in earlier life experiences. But are older women truly disadvantaged globally with respect to all or most essential aspects of well-being? The authors provide empirical evidence that clearly shows that older women are not invariably disadvantaged vis-à-vis men. In particular, they call into question the wisdom and equity of a virtually exclusive emphasis on the needs of women when incorporating gender concerns into policies and programs related to aging. A more balanced perspective that recognizes gender as a potential, but not necessarily central, marker of vulnerability for various aspects of well-being in specific settings and times, and that allows for male as well as female disadvantage, would serve the current and future elderly generations far better. [29, no. 4 (Dec 03): 677-698]
Data and Perspectives Joshua Goldstein, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Faculty Associate, Office of Population Research, Princeton University Wolfgang Lutz, Director, Vienna Institute of Demography, and leader of the World Population Project, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria
Sergei Scherbov, Group Leader, Population Dynamics and Forecasting Research Group, Vienna Institute of Demography It has recently been suggested that an end to further increases in the mean age of childbearing in Europe (ending the negative tempo effect on fertility) would have a substantial effect on population dynamics in terms of slowing population aging and decline and weakening the negative momentum affecting population size over the coming decades. On the other hand, stable population theory suggests that under subreplacement fertility conditions, a longer mean length of generations implies slower shrinking, and thus a relatively larger population in the very long run. This note compares the relative importance of the two effects analytically and with data for the 15-country European Union. It also considers whether an increase in the mean age of childbearing will decrease the quantum of fertility. This question is highly relevant in the context of the effects of possible policies aiming to influence the tempo of fertility rather than the quantum directly. The results show that for the coming 200 years the effect of tempo changes clearly dominates, with the effect of a shorter mean length of generation only becoming visible thereafter. Even small tempo-quantum interactions can overwhelm the generation-length effect. [29, no. 4 (Dec 03): 699-707]
Archives - Edward Alsworth Ross on Western Civilization and the Birth Rate
- When Numbers Began to Count for Health Policy: A Review Essay on Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France, by Sheila Ryan Johansson
- Jack M. Hollander, The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy, reviewed by Joel Darmstadter
- Glenn Firebaugh, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality, reviewed by John Isbister
- Nancy E. Riley and James McCarthy, Demography in the Age of the Postmodern, reviewed by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks
- Catherine Campbell, 'Letting Them Die': Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail , reviewed by Susan Cotts Watkins
- Konstantinos Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World , reviewed by Etienne van de Walle
Short Reviews Leonore Loeb Adler and Uwe P. Gielen (eds.), Migration: Immigration and Emigration in International Perspective Samuel Agyei-Mensah and John B. Casterline (eds.), Reproduction and Social Context in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Collection of Micro-Demographic Studies Francesco C. Billari and Alexia Prskawetz (eds.), Agent-Based Computational Demography: Using Simulation to Improve Our Understanding of Demographic Behaviour Siew-Ean Khoo and Peter McDonald (eds.), The Transformation of Australia's Population: 1970-2030 James P. Lynch and Rita J. Simon, Immigration the World Over: Statutes, Policies, and Practices C. Ford Runge, Benjamin Senauer, Philip G. Pardey, and Mark W. Rosegrant, Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: Food Security and Globalization Sheldon J. Segal, Under the Banyan Tree: A Population Scientist's Odyssey Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Dynamics of Fertility and Partnership in Europe: Insights and Lessons from Comparative Research
Documents - The President's Council on Bioethics: Choosing Sex of Children
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