Susan Cotts Watkins
Biographic Data
| ID | 133131 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Cotts Watkins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan Cotts |
| FAMILY NAME | Watkins |
| SIGNATURE | WATKINS S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1620 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 22 |
Developmental Idealism, the International Population Movement, and the Transformation of Population Ideology in Kenya
The spread of developmental idealism's beliefs about how “modern” family practices help achieve a modern prosperous society did not happen spontaneously, especially in societies whose family systems bore little initial resemblance to the “modern” ideal. We examine how Kenya in the 1960s became the first sub-Saharan country to adopt a fertility reduction policy, even though Kenya's leaders and their Western advisers initially had very different po…
A Fraught Embrace
In the wake of the AIDS pandemic, legions of organizations and compassionate individuals descended on Africa from faraway places to offer their help and save lives. This book shows how the dreams of these altruists became entangled with complex institutional and human relationships. The book describes the often mismatched expectations and fantasies of those who seek to help, of the villagers who desperately seek help, and of the brokers on whom b…
A Fraught Embrace
Chapter 8. Regional Patterns of Nuptiality in Western Europe, 1870–1960
Fraught Embrace
Fraught Embrace
Chapter 11. Conclusions
Brokers’ Careers
This chapter considers how brokers perceive that merit, miracles, and malice structure their opportunities and thus their outcomes. It analyzes the ways that the career aspirations of brokers at all levels can suddenly be derailed by the death of a parent, salvaged with the help of a benefactor, or altered by any number of others who have the power to help or harm. Malawian brokers, particularly, tell their career histories by drawing on three na…
The Decline of Fertility in Europe
This volume summarizes the major findings of the Princeton European Fertility Project. The Project, begun in 1963, was a response to the realization that one of the great social revolutions of the last century, the remarkable decline in marital fertility in Europe, was still poorly understood. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books…
Men with Money and the “Vulnerable Women” Client Category in an Aids Epidemic
Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against Aids
The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is fertile ground for examining how moral evaluations evolve over time and across different settings. We compare the discourse on AIDS in Malawi as presented in the media with that of everyday conversations. Drawing on two sets of texts, newspaper articles and conversational journals, produced over a ten-year period from 1999 through 2008, we analyze their moral injunctions, or what individuals should or sh…
Working Misunderstandings
Outsourcing Social Transformation
The literature on development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) envisions an alternative form of social organization, one that is more altruistic, more cooperative, and less hierarchical than governments and for-profit organizations. We engage with the literature on quite different terms: NGOs and their donors are organizations, and much of what is distinctive about them as organizations derives from the special uncertainties they face due to …
Teach a Man to Fish”
The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange
Hearsay ethnography
Ties of Dependence
In sub-Saharan Africa, the exchange of sex for material support-labeled "transactional sex" by Western observers-is claimed by some to be a major driver of the AIDS pandemic. Transactional sex is described as akin to prostitution, a degraded form of sexual expression forced on vulnerable women by economic desperation. Using evidence from rural Malawi, we demonstrate that patron-client ties and a moral obligation to support the needy, which are fu…
Sex in Geneva, sex in Lilongwe, and sex in Balaka
The evolution of population policies in Kenya and Malawi
Assessing the Potential of Condom Use to Prevent the Spread of HIV
In this study, a microsimulation model is used to assess the potential impact of condom use on women's lifetime risk of acquiring HIV in rural southern Malawi. The model draws on survey data for information on sexual activity, marriage and divorce, and on the biomedical literature for input parameters governing the transmission and spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). We show that lifetime risk could be as high as 42 perc…
Navigating the Aids Epidemic in Rural Malawi
This article provides a perspective on rural Malawi during the unsettled times following the recognition by village residents that AIDS is a profound danger. The primary data are observational field journals in which local ethnographers wrote their recollections of conversations about AIDS that they overheard or participated in during the course of their daily lives. In their networks of friends, relatives, and neighbors, rural Malawians are publ…
Perceptions of risk and strategies for prevention
Social networks and changes in contraceptive use over time
The impacts of social networks on changes in contraception in rural Kenya are investigated using special data from a longitudinal household survey. An analytic model, informed by detailed knowledge of the setting, yielded estimates that indicate that (1) social networks have substantial effects even after unobserved factors (e.g., homophily) that may determine social networks are controlled; (2) controlling for these unobserved factors may substa…
Reactions of Developing-Country Elites to International Population Policy
The authors examine the global diffusion of international population policy, which they consider a cultural item. The process of cultural diffusion is often seen as spontaneous: items of Western culture are in demand because they are universally attractive. Yet cultural flows may also be directed, they may be unattractive to their intended recipients, and their acceptance may depend on persuasion and material incentives. The authors consider the …
Disobedient Distributors
The implementation of social welfare programs, including family planning programs, is strongly conditioned by the needs, desires, and agendas of those who carry them out, known as “street‐level bureaucrats.” In this study, the strategies of CBD agents in western Kenya are examined in order to understand how they use their job as a means to achieve their own personal goals. The concept of clientelism, borrowed from the field of political science, …
Social Interactions and Contemporary Fertility Transitions
This analysis of fertility transition is conducted among 69 developing countries during 1960-90. It is argued that the relationship between socioeconomic development and the timing and pace of fertility decline is related to level of development regional progress in fertility decline and social interaction. The empirical test is based on the theoretical framework of Notestein and successors. Analysis is based on the UN human development index (HD…
The Decline of Fertility in Europe
This volume summarizes the major findings of the Princeton European Fertility Project. The Project, begun in 1963, was a response to the realization that one of the great social revolutions of the last century, the remarkable decline in marital fertility in Europe, was still poorly understood. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books…
Outsourcing Social Transformation
The literature on development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) envisions an alternative form of social organization, one that is more altruistic, more cooperative, and less hierarchical than governments and for-profit organizations. We engage with the literature on quite different terms: NGOs and their donors are organizations, and much of what is distinctive about them as organizations derives from the special uncertainties they face due to …
Teach a Man to Fish”
Ties of Dependence
In sub-Saharan Africa, the exchange of sex for material support-labeled "transactional sex" by Western observers-is claimed by some to be a major driver of the AIDS pandemic. Transactional sex is described as akin to prostitution, a degraded form of sexual expression forced on vulnerable women by economic desperation. Using evidence from rural Malawi, we demonstrate that patron-client ties and a moral obligation to support the needy, which are fu…
Navigating the Aids Epidemic in Rural Malawi
This article provides a perspective on rural Malawi during the unsettled times following the recognition by village residents that AIDS is a profound danger. The primary data are observational field journals in which local ethnographers wrote their recollections of conversations about AIDS that they overheard or participated in during the course of their daily lives. In their networks of friends, relatives, and neighbors, rural Malawians are publ…
Demographic Foundations of Family Change
As a result of the decline in mortality current cohorts have the theoretical potential to spend more time in the conjugal family statuses of parent child and spouse. To determine the extent to which this potential has been realized in the US a model was developed to simulate demographic conditions in 1800 1900 1960 and 1980 and then calculate how long women remained in the various family statuses in each historical period. Despite declines in fer…
The Buzz Outside the Clinics
When women talk with each other about family planning outside the clinic, are they really only spreading myths and rumors? If nurses give good information about family planning, why do women go and talk with other women? Why would a woman instructed by a nurse at a workshop want to talk to the workshop cleaner as well? To answer these questions, findings are used from a household survey and in-depth interviews that examine the role of informal so…
Cultural and Economic Approaches to Fertility
fertility ; economic models
Perceptions of risk and strategies for prevention
Social networks and changes in contraceptive use over time
The impacts of social networks on changes in contraception in rural Kenya are investigated using special data from a longitudinal household survey. An analytic model, informed by detailed knowledge of the setting, yielded estimates that indicate that (1) social networks have substantial effects even after unobserved factors (e.g., homophily) that may determine social networks are controlled; (2) controlling for these unobserved factors may substa…
The fertility transition
Working Misunderstandings
Local and Foreign Models of Reproduction in Nyanza Province, Kenya
This article uses colonial archival records, surveys conducted in the 1960s, and surveys and focus group discussions in the 1990s to describe three distinct but temporally overlapping cultural models of reproduction in a rural community in Kenya between the 1930s and the present. The first model, "large families are rich," was slowly undermined by developments brought about by the integration of Kenya into the British empire. This provoked the co…
From Local to National Communities
The view that individual choice is fundamental to the analysis of modern reproductive behavior has been largely unchallenged. This article proposes that certain characteristics of demographic change in Western Europe between 1870 and 1960 suggest a significant role for others--kin friends and neighbors--in accounting for demographic behavior. Moreover demographic as well as linguistic patterns suggest that while in the past the relevant others we…
Hearsay ethnography
If All We Knew About Women Was What We Read in Demography , What Would We Know
Feminists and Neo-Malthusians
This article examines a century of interactions between American feminists and American social movements seeking to influence population trends. The historical analysis focuses on relations between feminists and neo-Malthusians and attempts to determine when they are likely to enter into alliances. The two movements are found to be neither natural allies nor natural enemies. Sturdy alliances arise when both movements agree on certain ideological …
Sex in Geneva, sex in Lilongwe, and sex in Balaka
Famines in Historical Perspective
This paper presents a challenge to the Malthusian view that historically famines have been a consequence of overpopulation relative to available resources. The Malthusian paradigm has been used to explain periods of population stability in the past and to account for modern population growth once subsistence crises were no longer a threat. Using premodern Asian populations as a model the sequence of demographic changes that could be expected to h…
Disobedient Distributors
The implementation of social welfare programs, including family planning programs, is strongly conditioned by the needs, desires, and agendas of those who carry them out, known as “street‐level bureaucrats.” In this study, the strategies of CBD agents in western Kenya are examined in order to understand how they use their job as a means to achieve their own personal goals. The concept of clientelism, borrowed from the field of political science, …
Husband—Wife Survey Responses in Malawi
Previous efforts by demographers to describe and explain spousal differences in reporting about family planning behavior liave focused on individual attributes that are assumed to be related to the practice of contraception. This study extends that research by documenting spousal disagreement on a range of issues—household items, livestock, children, and spousal communication about fertility, family planning, and AIDS. Using data from a 1998 stud…
Women's Gossip and Social Change
Between 1920 and 1940, increasing proportions of urban Italian and Jewish women gave birth under the supervision of doctors in clinics and hospitals and limited the number of children they bore. We examine the role of women's informal conversation in accounting for the differences between Jewish and Italian women in the timing of these social changes. Women in both groups drew on relatives, friends, and neighbors for information and social suppor…
Reactions of Developing-Country Elites to International Population Policy
The authors examine the global diffusion of international population policy, which they consider a cultural item. The process of cultural diffusion is often seen as spontaneous: items of Western culture are in demand because they are universally attractive. Yet cultural flows may also be directed, they may be unattractive to their intended recipients, and their acceptance may depend on persuasion and material incentives. The authors consider the …
Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa
Two much-needed contributions to the literature BL an analysis of the dynamics of marriage and partnership-formation in Africa This is a perennially lively and interesting subject in Africa, the most complex of continents. Many of the studies are based on careful field research, making this a rich and original source of information on this diverse and rapidly changing area. BL a combination of anthropological theorizing with demographic case stud…
On Measuring Transitions And Turning Points
(1980). On Measuring Transitions And Turning Points. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 181-187
The Female Life Cycle in a Belgian Commune
Regional patterns of nuptiality in Europe, 1870–1960
This paper is a study of changes in nuptiality by province in Europe between 1870 and 1960: nuptiality is measured by I(m) a summary measure of the proportions married among women of childbearing age. In each of the approximately 500 provinces of Europe the level of nuptiality increased between 1870 and 1960. In addition, in most countries the differences among provinces diminished over the period, so that the countries were more homogeneous with…
Regional Patterns of Nuptiality in Europe, 1870-1960
Methodological Issues in the Use of Population Registers for Fertility Analysis
Some problems encountered in using population registers to study the process of fertility decline are described using the example of La Hulpe Belgium during the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid to potential biases introduced into both traditional and nontraditional demographic measures by the characteristics of the population register. Consideration is given to when the exposure to risk of pregnancy begins and ends to problems of …
Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past
Nutrition, Mortality, and Population Size
Susan Cotts Watkins, Etienne van de Walle, Nutrition, Mortality, and Population Size: Malthus' Court of Last Resort, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 14, No. 2, Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Autumn, 1983), pp. 205-226
Spinsters
This article is an introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Family History devoted to spinsters, who are defined as women who have not married by age 35 and are thus unlikely ever to marry. Relatively high propor tions of spinsters in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries raise questions for the history of marriage, the family, and women. After in troducing the articles in this issue, the author discusses difference…
Family Forms in Historic Europe
Graphics in Demography
The use of graphics in demography is explored. The use of graphs to illustrate regularities and differences in mortality and age composition is first considered. Next their use in the investigation of regularities and differences in marital fertility and marriage is reviewed. Sections are also included on differentials in general and on computer graphics. The author concludes that graphs have played an important role both in the presentation or i…
Famines in Historical Perspective
This paper presents a challenge to the Malthusian view that historically famines have been a consequence of overpopulation relative to available resources. The Malthusian paradigm has been used to explain periods of population stability in the past and to account for modern population growth once subsistence crises were no longer a threat. Using premodern Asian populations as a model the sequence of demographic changes that could be expected to h…
The Decline of Fertility in Europe
The fertility transition
The Decline of Fertility in Europe
Demographic Foundations of Family Change
As a result of the decline in mortality current cohorts have the theoretical potential to spend more time in the conjugal family statuses of parent child and spouse. To determine the extent to which this potential has been realized in the US a model was developed to simulate demographic conditions in 1800 1900 1960 and 1980 and then calculate how long women remained in the various family statuses in each historical period. Despite declines in fer…
Reproductive Rituals.Angus McLaren
On the Role of Crises in Historical Perspective
Voting and Social Structure
Africa, Asia, and Latin America
Demographic Behavior in the Past
The Great War and the British People
Socio-economic differences in fertility control. Is there an early warning system at the village level
From Local to National Communities
The view that individual choice is fundamental to the analysis of modern reproductive behavior has been largely unchallenged. This article proposes that certain characteristics of demographic change in Western Europe between 1870 and 1960 suggest a significant role for others--kin friends and neighbors--in accounting for demographic behavior. Moreover demographic as well as linguistic patterns suggest that while in the past the relevant others we…
The Demographic History of the Philadelphia Region 1600-1860
Albion's Seed
Sociology (55 works) · Political science (34 works) · Geography (31 works) · Demography (30 works) · Economics (29 works) · Population (25 works) · History (16 works) · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences (14 works) · Economic growth (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works)