The family : an ethnographical and historical outline with descriptive notes, planned as a text-book for the use of college lecturers and of directors of home-reading clubs / by Elsie Crews Parsons.

  • Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews, 1874-1941.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The family : an ethnographical and historical outline with descriptive notes, planned as a text-book for the use of college lecturers and of directors of home-reading clubs / by Elsie Crews Parsons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    50 The Family Additional direct social checks on births per family Sexual restraint during lactation Prolonged lac¬ tation Economic hard¬ ship Indirect social checks on birth¬ rate Economic crises conception. In infanticide and foeticide these benefits were only partially gained, if gained at all. Fre¬ quently, as we have seen, existing offspring are pro¬ tected through infanticide and fœticide, but the mother and through the mother future offspring are in most cases injured. (Infanticide, in so far as it may relieve the mother of the strain of suckling two children at the same time, is of benefit to her.) Accurate information on this subject in general is unfortunately not at present obtainable. There are additional direct, although non-pur¬ posive, checks on the number of births per family which we should note. The custom of requiring sexual restraint during the period of lactation is a check upon the birth-rate. It is also probable, although the evidence on this point is somewhat con¬ flicting, that where no such restriction exists nursing mothers are less apt to conceive during the lactation period and that prolonged periods of lactation per¬ manently decrease the power to conceive. Economic hardship is an important factor in this connection. Women upon whom heavy home or field labours fall are less fertile than those living under easier economic conditions. Here we may also briefly note certain social factors indirectly affecting the general birth-rate ^ by post¬ poning the age of marriage or limiting the number of potential parents. » The occurrence of unusual economic distress is a ' Hitherto we have been considering only data useful in estimating the number of births and child-deaths per family or married woman. In statisti¬ cal terminology this is called a refined birth-rate. The facts we are now to note are useful in an analysis of the proportion of births to the population or in a consideration of the crude birth-rate.