Marriage, Fertility and Women’s Lives in Twentieth‐Century Ireland ( c. 1900– c. 1970)

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22947482
AutoresMary E Daly (0000-0003-0278-3232, Moscow State University of Technologies and Management named after K.G. Razumovskiy, autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Volumen15
Número4
Páginas571-585
Fecha de publicación2006-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaWomen s History Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0961-2025 • E-ISSN: 1747-583X
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09612020500530638
OpenAlexW1986332696
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8

By the 1930s the marriage rate in Ireland was the lowest in what we would now term the developed world, but family size was among the highest. Yet while much has been written about Ireland’s low marriage rate and late age of marriage and the impact on the lives of women and men, much less attention has been devoted to marital fertility. The article begins with a brief description of marital fertility, by occupation, religion and social class, and how these variables changed during the period under study. It then examines the available evidence regarding family limitation in twentieth‐century Ireland before considering the impact of large family size on health, poverty and economic welfare, the burden that it imposed on parents, and on older siblings, and its consequential influence on the marriage rate and age of marriage. It goes on to discuss the reluctance on the part of the Irish state or the Irish Catholic Church to address the consequences of large families. This appears to have been a taboo subject: it attracted little attention in the debate over children’s allowances, and it proved to be the most divisive topic addressed (or rather not addressed) by the Commission on Emigration (1948–54). The final topic addressed is what the slow decline in family size, and the slow adoption of family limitation within marriage might indicate about the relationship between Irish husbands and wives. Although this article draws on quite an extensive range of evidence, many parts of the analysis are necessarily speculative, raising more questions than are answered.

Birth rate · Demographic economics · Economics · Emigration · Family planning · Fertility · Irish · Political science · Population · Poverty · Remarriage · Sociology · Taboo · Total fertility rate · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law