Making Smaller Families

After many centuries of unabated and relentless childbearing, European women, as if by magic, began to limit the number of children they bore. This trend began in France in the late 18th century, where, by 1830 its birthrate had dropped to less than 3 births per family. From France this fertility decline spread, first along linguistic lines to Belgium and parts of Switzerland, before slowly diffusing eastward across the rest of Europe and westward to the British Isles and the United States. This demographic transition was nothing short of a social revolution, made even more remarkable by the lack of new innovations in birth control and in the face of strong opposition by religious, political, and medical authorities. This was a social movement without spokesmen or public leaders that spread through word of mouth among friends, relatives, and neighbors. Its effects on the lives of women and their families would be profound.

Much of our current understanding of this phenomenon in Europe has come from extensive data collected from 600 provinces across Europe by a two-decade long interdisciplinary research project known as the Princeton European Fertility Project (PEFP).  Drawing from over 100 years of records across Europe, the PEFP researchers compiled and analyzed the data to map a detailed description of the time course and nature of European fertility. This work remains the most comprehensive source of historical data on fertility across Europe.

A few general observations from the PEFP are notable. For example, most of the European fertility decline (excepting France) took place from the 1870s to the 1920s. Once the fertility level fell by 10% in a given district, its fertility decline continued rapidly and irreversibly. Within provinces, cities led these changes, with surrounding rural areas soon following.  The years 1890-1920 were a tipping point, when most (59%) European provinces began to experience declining fertility. Decreasing birth rates were predominantly due to limitation of births within, rather than outside of marriage; neither later age of marriage nor fewer marriages were significant contributors to the observed fertility declines.  Thus, this widespread European decline in birth rates was a result of altered reproductive behavior of married couples.   

The Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia fell within these parameters, but finer differences between individual Czech regions were unresolved by the PEFP (possibly because PEFP data was collected while Czechoslovakia was under Communist governance). Therefore, in the late 1980s, Czech researchers Ludmila Fialova, Zdenek Pavlik, and Pavel Veres refined the initial findings of the PEFP with their analysis of up to 218 districts (okres) within Czechoslovakia for each decade from 1800 to 1980. Publishing in 1990 (in Population Studies 44 (1), 89-106), they found that birth rates in the Czech lands began to fall as early as the 1870s, led first by Prague and several contiguous areas of northern and northeastern Bohemia as shown on the map.

In the next decades, additional districts saw significant and persistent reductions in birth rates. The tipping point for both Bohemia and Moravia came in the first decade of the 20th century (1900-1909), when the largest number of districts exhibited reduced fertility. After 1910, the few remaining districts in southern Bohemia and eastern Moravia completed the Czech fertility decline. Consistent with other European cities, Prague lead the way with fertility levels that began and ended lower than in surrounding areas. In Prague, an average of 5.9 children were born from couples marrying in 1860; 4.5 from those marrying in 1900; and 1.6 from those marrying in 1930. On the other hand, for Bohemia and Moravia as a whole, 7.2 children were born per couple who married in 1860; 6.6 children were born of those marrying in 1900, and 2.9 children were born from couples marrying in 1930. 

Thus, the idea that a couple should marry, have a desired number of children, and stop reproducing was at the heart of this fertility decline, and as such, was a relatively modern innovation. Research of the PEFP and others (e.g., Fialova et al., 1990) tells a story of a demographic transition that spread, in some ways, like an epidemic across Europe; by 1930 very few provinces remained untouched. Despite Europe’s diverse cultures, the millennia-old tradition of high marital fertility seems to have crumbled almost overnight. Social historians now regard fertility declines as an integral part of the larger process of modernization of a society.

Women's Work: Making Families

The Černovír miller’s wife was 23 when she gave birth to her first baby, a fine healthy girl named after herself. Almost every other year afterwards, Terezie Schromm (1779-1832) produced another baby until there were 13 in all. Although each began life as a healthy newborn, nine of her babies did not live to see their fifth year, many dying in their first year.  Thus, after 23 years of childbearing, the miller’s wife could only claim four living children in her family.

Although more prolific than some, Terezie was typical of her time, when a wife might spend some 20 years or more, producing children who would make up the family workforce and later, support their parents in old age. Depending on the age at which she married (mid-twenties being the norm among rural Czech women) and her reproductive health, a 19th century woman had the potential to produce quite a large family by modern standards. Terezie’s reproductive life can be put in the context of a larger population as shown by a cohort of 68 mothers in her local area. The majority (54%) of these women gave birth to 7-10 children each (blue bars), but with some of the highest infant and childhood mortality rates in Europe, this locality ensured that not all of children would survive. Indeed, these mothers lost a fair share of their children, i.e., on average of 3 children died per family. Most (58%) families could claim only 3-5 children who survived to adulthood (yellow bars), with most, like Terezie Shromm’s, dying before the age of five. In most years, children's deaths outnumbered those of adults.

Averages however, are inadequate to describe the losses for individual families; rather, they seem to be randomly assigned. Some families lost all their children, while remarkably, about 11% of mothers had the good fortune to see all of their children grow up. These lucky few shared no obvious common characteristics; they were the mothers of few or many children and came from all walks of life:  from the farmer’s wife to the farm servant. One, a farm worker and unwed mother, Barbora Wondra raised five of her babies to adulthood, an example that belies the common stereotype that poverty is the inevitable precursor of childhood mortality. Although it was the poor who preferentially experienced malnutrition, exposure to infectious disease and bad drinking water was shared by all, whether rich or poor. Even for the well-to-do, in a pre-antibiotic and pre-vaccine world, there was little in the way of effective medical treatments.

With the inevitable loss of children, it was the mothers who carried the burden of bearing excess children and the attendant dangers of childbirth.  Although maternal deaths in childbirth were more frequent than today, in the past, they represented only a few percent of total women’s deaths. More commonly, frequent pregnancies led to a general erosion of a woman’s health and a greater susceptibility to infectious disease.  Death records bear witness to the price that mothers paid for producing families.

The Flax Harvest

If you had ancestors from the border region of Bohemia, there is a good chance that one or more worked in the pre-industrial textile industry. In 1800, two-thirds of the inhabitants of the Chrudim province of East Bohemia worked as spinners, weavers, dyers, traders, or in other aspects of the cloth trade. This figure does not count the many farmers who grew flax and converted the harvest into fibers suitable for spinning. While Lanškroun flax was some of the best quality in Bohemia, high quality linen was not made without careful attention to the early steps of fiber extraction.

Wikipedia tells us that “dyed flax fibers found in a cave in … present-day Georgia suggest that use of woven linen fabrics from wild flax may date back over 30,000 years.” This is a remarkable statement to my mind. How would anyone have imagined that this stringy blue-flowered plant had the makings of wearing apparel? Even as seen under a microscope, a cross-section of the stem shows small bundles of flax fibers in the inner bark of the plant stem, which make up 20% at most, of the plant stem. Thus, removing the 80% of extraneous plant material by hand would seem to require a complex and time-consuming process. Yet, these ancient Georgians found a way, which evolved into the manual process described below.

Pulling: After a 3-month growing season, flax is harvested by hand pulling the plant up by the roots to preserve the length of the fibers.

Rippling: The seeds are removed Removing the seeds by running the harvested flax through a rippling comb, which consists of a single row of blunt iron nails attached to a wooden base.

Retting is a process that breaks down the plant pectin that cements the fibers to the woody parts of the stem. This step involves submerging the harvested flax in water for up to two weeks during which anaerobic degradation takes place. Alternatively, dew retting can be performed, in which the harvested flax is laid on the grass; dew and rain exert a similar effect, but this takes longer. When dry, the flax stems are brittle.

Breaking: Once dried, the flax is crushed in a flax brake, which shatters the brittle stalk and releases the flax fibers. The flax brake is a simple implement consisting of two wooden knives attached by a hinge to a wooden slot. The retted flax is crushed between the knives and the slot. At this point most of the woody material is removed.

Scutching removes the last bits of woody material clinging to the flax fibers. This step involves scraping the flax fibers against a (scutching) board with a blunt wooden knife. The amount of effort put into this time-consuming step is vital for producing quality flax thread.

Hackling: The scutched fibers are then brushed out by running them through a series of hackling combs each with more closely spaced teeth to de-tangle the fine flax fibers and separate out any fibers that are too short to make high quality linen. These shorter fibers were called tow and could be recombed to make thread for burlap, used to stuff pillows or scrub pots and pans. It is from these short fibers that the term tow-headed comes to describe someone with flaxen-colored curly hair. Hackling combs were made of several rows of sharp iron nails inserted into a wooden base. In 19th century parish records, it is not uncommon to find men in textile towns who were described by occupation as comb-makers.

At this point, the prepared flax fibers are now ready for the same processing steps as any other garment fiber, be it wool, cotton, or hemp, for spinning, weaving, and finishing. Perhaps the finished linen is worth the trouble. It is a superior product in many ways, being more breathable, absorbent and stronger than cotton. Unlike wool, it is stronger when wet than dry, and is resistant to moths and dirt.