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I
n 1798 English philosopher Thomas Malthus remarked that
the sudden population increase in the United States was
“probably without parallel in history.” This he attributed to
the “extreme cheapness of good land.” He reasoned that
while the cost of farmland in Europe obliged couples in
Europe to marry late and curb sexual desires, frontier couples
in the United States, who needed more hands to farm its vast
open spaces, married earlier and had many children.
The census of 1800 provided some statistical founda-
tion for Malthus’s assertions. It showed that the average
white woman had seven children. On the frontier, however,
women had even more. This geographic gradient—high fer-
tility in the western states, low in New England and the
Northeast—persisted during the nineteenth century.
The map “Fertility and Population Density, 1850” shows
that white women in the most densely populated states had
the lowest fertility levels while those in the western states
had the highest fertility levels. For example, women between
the ages of sixteen and forty-four in New England had, on
the average, fewer than one child under the age of ten; con-
versely, women in the Oregon Territory, as well as Texas,
Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and
Florida had two or three times more children than their New
England counterparts. (Comparable data are unavailable for
African American mothers.)
While this map seems to confirm a direct relationship
between frontier life and high fertility, a closer examination
of the census data suggests the importance of other fac-
tors, too. For example, Missouri and Wisconsin were sparsely
settled, and yet mothers in those states had fewer children
than their counterparts in Indiana, which was relatively
MAPPING THE PAST
Family Size: Northeast
vs. Frontier
1,8001,6001,4001,2001,0008006004002000
1800 1850 1900
YearNumber of children under 5 per 1,000 white women aged 20–44Fertility decrease, 1800–1900
United StatesIn 1900, white women of child-bearing age
had half as many children under five as
their counterparts 100 years earlier.Questions for Discussion
■Which states had the highest population density?
■Which two states had the lowest fertility rates?
■Which frontier areas do not support the thesis that low
population density yielded high fertility?
■Do economic or cultural factors best explain the varia-
tions in fertility rates?John Kleeb and his wife with their seven children in Custer County, Nebraska (1880s); all of the
children are young; more siblings will likely follow. All will be put to work on the vast farm.
well-developed. Frontier environments did not alwayslead
to higher fertility rates.
Many historians believe that the low-fertility rates in the
Northeast, and especially northeastern cities, were due to cul-
tural rather than economic factors. By the early nineteenth
century, an ideology of domesticity among the middle classes
confined women to the home even as it enshrined their role
as custodians of the young. Mothers intent on guiding each
child’s moral development, and fathers intent on saving
enough money to establish a foothold in the emerging mid-
dle class, together decided to limit their families by marrying
later, by abstaining from sexual relations for long periods, and
perhaps by practicing contraception.