Binghamton University historian sifts census data to understand fertility decline

By Susan E. Barker
June 5, 2008

Something extraordinary began happening in the United States in the mid- to late 1800s. Cradles began to go empty, and an unaccustomed hush fell over nurseries.

In almost every community, family size began to deflate and a social revolution began to swell up. This phenomenon, which began more than a century before the advent of the birth control pill, saw the average number of live births per woman drop from seven or eight in 1800 to slightly more than two today.

This decline changed the fabric of society throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and remains key to important social, economic, political and policy issues facing the United States.

Using uniquely processed census data and his own specialized skills, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian at Binghamton University, is revisiting and studying the early origins of this societal sea change. As he attempts to tease out the repercussions of this trend, he is also rewriting some important pages of history by helping to clarify the forces that fueled it.

Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, says Hacker’s work is causing historians “to rethink early American historical demography from the ground up.”

Hacker was tapped in 2006 for a five-year $674,000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “In some ways I was the ideal candidate,” Hacker said. “They were looking for people interested in population topics including fertility decline, who perhaps came out of other disciplines, without formal training. I’m mostly self-trained and have a strong background in statistics and quantitative methods.”

Fertility decline is of interest from a historian’s standpoint for what it says about historical actors.

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