Domestic servants and diffusion of fertility control in Flanders, 1830–1930

Abstract

This article uses a mixed method approach to analyse whether urban domestic service functioned as a diffusion channel in the fertility decline. The central hypothesis is that nineteenth century female, rural-born domestic servants were influenced by the reproductive habits of their middle and upper-class employers, who were vanguards in the adoption of family size limitation within marriage. This happened via a process of social learning, a mechanism of social influence in heterogeneous social networks. Female domestic servants are an excellent research population to study reproductive ideas and behaviour because they were large in number and had a particular social position in between the working and upper classes and in between rural and urban environments. This paper is unique in its use of qualitative information to analyse social fertility diffusion and in the incorporation of geographical mobility in the statistical part.

Keywords::

• fertility decline
• social diffusion
• female work
• migration
• nineteenth and early twentieth century

Acknowledgements

The authors wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as professors Isabelle Devos (Ghent University), Eric Vanhaute (Ghent University), Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux (EHESS), Michel Oris (University of Geneva), Hilde Bras (Radboud University Nijmegen), and Angélique Janssens (Radboud University Nijmegen) for their useful comments.

Notes

^1. Eine-Heurne-Mullem in fact consists of the three villages Eine, Heurne and Mullem, which formed a historical and socio-economic unit (Matthys, 2012).

^2. For example, in 1909 cardinal Mercier published a pastoral letter in French about the duties of married life in which contraception was severely condemned. One year later, it was translated into Dutch and published as Mercier, D. (1910). Herderlijke brief voor den Vasten over de plichten van het huwelijksleven. Mechelen.

^3. Of course, for the twentieth century, I used only the testimonial evidence here that was published, which means that I used secondary sources. Although I am convinced that the main outcomes would be similar, the complete interviews might sketch a more nuanced picture.

^4. Based on the following information: urban servants = 1901.67 person years (171 women); non-servants = 8080.02 person years (645 women). For reasons of clarity, the rather small number of rural servants (1024.55 person years or 98 women) was omitted.

^5. Alternatively, the models were run with age at marriage as a categorical variable. This did not affect the outcomes.

^6. Presentations at for instance Population Association of America 2007; Economic History Workshop 2010.

^7. The number of observations here is higher than that in the multivariate models displayed in Table 3. This is because some records with missing information for covariates, were dropped from the statistical model.