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Abstract
This paper provides the sketch of a new mechanism explaining the delay of Catholic fertility, namely the changing norms of masculinity and fatherhood, through a comparative study of the first fertility transition in Switzerland (1880–1930).
Comparative analysis of religious discourse attests to striking differences in norms of respectable masculinity. In the Protestant canton, men were especially targeted and strongly incited to change their sexual behaviour and limit their offspring in order to comply with a new model of the good husband and father. The religious teachings had an impact due to the social position of the persons enouncing the norms, to the efficient diffusion reaching the majority of men, and to the effective sanctioning, as the example of pastoral enquiries demonstrates. In the Catholic canton by contrast, men were not specifically addressed; the religious discourse supported the husband's rights to frequent sexual intercourse and encouraged him to trust Providence to bring up many children, thus sustaining high levels of fertility. The political repression of public discourse on sexuality defeated every attempt of contesting the husband's marital rights and the Catholic doctrine of procreation. Sexual taboos were particularly severe for women and their total ignorance of sexual matters weakened their bargaining power in fertility decisions.
In the last part of the paper, using quantitative methods, we tried to demonstrate that these norms and mechanisms did indeed influence men's behaviour in the Protestant sample. For this purpose, we measured comparatively the results of some indicators introduced to capture the impact of the norms of respectable masculinity, regarding men's responsibility in contraception and men's ability to maintain dependent children. We hope thus to strengthen the position of a growing number of scholars who state that historical demographers cannot avoid incorporating gender into their explanations of historical trends of fertility and who foster the bridging of qualitative and quantitative methods.
☆ This text is a revised version of a paper presented in April 2008 at Umeå University Sweden, during the international workshop “The Practice of Birth Control and Historical Fertility Change”. The author wishes to thank the organizers and participants, in particular Dr Simon Szreter, for their helpful remarks. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and to the copy-editors of The History of the Family for improvements of language.
Notes
☆ This text is a revised version of a paper presented in April 2008 at Umeå University Sweden, during the international workshop “The Practice of Birth Control and Historical Fertility Change”. The author wishes to thank the organizers and participants, in particular Dr Simon Szreter, for their helpful remarks. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and to the copy-editors of The History of the Family for improvements of language.
1 The parochial and civil registers provide the basis of our family reconstitution covering marriages celebrated between 1860 and 1930; data collection has been extended after this date, in order to collect all the data on children of marriages celebrated till 1930. To overcome the selectivity and loss of data in family reconstitution studies, and to supplement and check these sources of information, other sources have been consulted (local population registers and censuses). Event history analysis and its more flexible rules of data selection (migrant families and other incomplete families can be used) permit us to conserve 86% of the sample (5381 legitimate births for 1848 married and fecund women under observation).
2 For technical details on the event history approach to fertility: George Alter (Alter, Citation1988, p. 175 and 1998, pp. 25–35), George Alter and Myron P. Gutmann (Alter & Gutmann, Citation1993, pp. 160–163), Georges Alter and Michel Oris (Alter & Oris, Citation1999, pp. 12–14).
3 In the text, the letters in parentheses refers to the sources listed at the end of the article.
4 Josephine Butler founded the International Abolitionist Federation in 1875 in Geneva, thanks to the support of local Protestant leaders. Like many English in 19th century, she often travelled to health resorts in the canton of Vaud (Montreux, Clarens, Leysin) and stayed regularly on the Riviera where her sister Harriet, married to a Swiss, owned a summer residence.
5 This vision of female passivity in sexuality is rarely contested during this period; only a few socialist feminists marginalised both by so called bourgeois feminists and by socialist men, dared to claim women's rights to sexual information and access to contraception (Praz, Citation2007a,Citationb, p. 294).
6 These changes in Protestant cantons were reappraised with the elaboration of a centralized Swiss Civil Code (SCC), which came into power just before the war. In an ongoing investigation, we examine this national debate, so as to verify whether or not the religious affiliation of deputies influenced their positions on the rights of married women; we will also examine to what extent the SCC application law, which confers a wide autonomy to the cantons, allowed this reform to be maintained in Protestant cantons.
7 Protestant women in the canton of Vaud already obtained the right to vote in parish assemblies in 1909. The question of the eligibility of women for parish councils had been discussed since the beginning of the century but rejected by a parish consultation in the beginning of the 1920s. The principal argument was not the incapacity of women to assume such a role, but the risk that men no longer felt committed in parish responsibilities.
8 These rules prescribe that engaged couples always see each other in the presence of their parents or some other trustworthy person.
9 This finding is in line with other research in Catholic French-speaking countries around 1900, attesting that the Catholic Church preferred not to recall the faithful to the paths of sexual morality, in order to avoid conflicts that might have initiated or accelerated the secularization process (Sevegrand, Citation1995; Servais, Citation2001).
10 Dr. Forel's La Question sexuelle was banned from sale in Fribourg. Even writings apparently inoffensive were concerned such as the popular medical publication entitled La Femme, médecin du foyer, seized and banned from sale in 1922 because of some engravings presenting sexual organs and a few pages in which the spacing of births was advised so as to avoid overtiredness of the wife.
11 Some priests welcomed a text which safeguarded them from “many critiques; as it is not their doctrine but the word of the bishop that they read to their parishioners”.
12 A similar logic is still present at the end of the 1930s when the bishop disapproved of the Ogino method as this practice “exposes he who finds the period of abstinence too difficult to find his fortune elsewhere.” Bulletin du clergé, Nr 18 et 22, 15 janvier 1937 et Paques 1940.
13 Bulletin du clergé, Nr 19, 1937. We have not examined this source systematically as it did not constitute a vector of diffusion to the faithful.
14 We consulted about fifty parochial reports; half of them however give very few insights. As the collection of reports in the archives incurred some losses, we decided to limit the sample to our villages and to the parishes of the same district and we examined the Quaesitae of all Catholic cantonal parishes, excluding the urban ones. For the same reason, we could not limit ourselves to the reports of the year 1926 – the same as the Protestant enquiry mentioned above – but widened the period (1921–1929).
15 Beside the necessary control of the biological factors influencing fertility, the variable mother's age permits to detect the adoption of stopping behaviour. The likelihood of another birth is naturally reduced when the mother become older, but the phenomenon is more pronounced when married couples control their fertility and concentrate births in the first years of marriage. For this reason, we decided to include it in the model, preferring it to other variables likely to capture the biological factors, as marriage duration or number of children ever born. Anyway, we had to choose between these variables as it is not possible to use them together in the same model, because of co-linearity problems. Moreover, the variable marriage duration is less pertinent for our sample and period, as the mortality risk during reproductive life is low and as women's age at marriage (average and standard deviation) is the same in both sub-samples (cf. ).
16 The dummy variable previous child dead is set to one during the first 2 years of a birth interval if the preceding child died in infancy; if the preceding child survived to its first birthday or if the time since the last birth is greater than two years, this covariates is set to zero. An infant death should be associated with higher fertility, as the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding is reduced (Alter & Oris, Citation1999); the death of the previous child could also induce a replacement effect, parents being inclined to replace the lost child.
17 This change is not explained by an increase of illegitimate births (decreasing from 14 to 4% of the first births during the same period) or by a shortening of the engagement period (mostly 5–6 months).
18 The data give only rough indications whether or not kinships leave nearby.
19 In the same analysis, applied for the period 1860–1898 (Praz, Citation2006b, p. 157), the variable bridal pregnancy is not significant at all (p > |z| = 0.5) in the Catholic sample. As this variable obtains positive results that increased in significance in the period 1899–1930, we can assume that the diffusion of contraceptive techniques set in and that a growing albeit still small number of husbands were motivated to use them within marriage.