610Chapter 30
in 1990, a remarkable 60 percent fall in the birthrate. In
England, the rate fell from 28.6 per thousand in 1900 to
12.9 per thousand in 1994, a fall of 55 percent. The
Russian birthrate fell by more than 71 percent between
1910 and 1990.
By the late twentieth century, the birthrate in most
of western Europe had fallen below the level needed to
sustain population. Demographers estimate that an un-
changing population requires 2.1 children born per
woman in the population. (The global rate has fallen
sharply, from 5.0 in the early 1950s to 2.8 in 1997.) In
the late 1980s only two states (Ireland and Spain) in the
European Union reached 2.1; Germany had the extra-
ordinarily low rate of 1.3 children per woman. By the
1990s the European Union average had fallen again, to
1.4, and Catholic Italy had the lowest rate in the world
for 1997, 1.2. Birthrates so low raise the strong possibil-
ity that, despite greater longevity and immigration
pressures, Europe could lose population in the twenty-
first century. Demographers—who have called this
striking new development the “baby bust” (in contrast
to the post–World War II period of high birthrates,
known as the “baby boom”)—have recently calculated
that, if Europe could restore a rate of 2.1, the continent
would still have lost 24 percent of its current popula-
tion by 2060.
One natural consequence of the low birthrate was
that family size became much smaller during the twen-
tieth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the average family size in western and central
Europe had been close to five persons. This remained
true in Victorian Britain during the industrial revolu-
tion, when family size had averaged 4.75 members. Sig-
nificant regional variation was evident in family size,
with larger families being typical of rural communities
and smaller families found in towns. The falling
birthrates of the twentieth century rapidly reduced av-
erage family size. In Vienna, family size fell from 4.7 in
1890 to 4.1 in 1910, then to 3.2 in 1934, and down to
2.3 in 1961. Berlin and Hamburg both had averages of
1.9 in 1993, whereas communities of fewer than five
thousand people held average families of 2.6 members.
In Italy, average family size remained 4.3 members as
late as 1951, when one-third of all Italian families con-
tained five or more members. By 1980 the average
Italian family had 2.8 members in the prosperous
north and 3.3 members in more rural south; less than
15 percent of Italian families had five or more members.
By the 1990s Italy had become the state most likely
to experience a population decline in the twenty-first
century.
The decline in twentieth-century birthrates and
family size happened despite changing sexual attitudes
that tolerated illegitimate births. In 1990 more than
one-fourth of all births in Great Britain were illegiti-
mate and 44.7 percent of births in Denmark were out-
side of marriage; a century earlier, Victorian Britain had
low social tolerance of illegitimacy and the rate had
been 5 percent. Even in Catholic countries, the stigma
previously attached to having children outside of mar-
riage has diminished. In conservative Ireland, 12 per-
cent of 1990 births were illegitimate. In France, the
number reached 26.3 percent in 1990 and passed one-
third in 1995. The French showed the new social ac-
ceptability of unmarried childbirth in 1996 when the
nation celebrated with President Jacques Chirac the il-
legitimate birth of his first grandchild. Although some
parts of Europe maintained strict attitudes toward ille-
gitimacy in the 1990s—such as Greece, where the rate
was 2.1 percent—traditional sexual morality did not
keep the birthrate low in Europe.
The most important explanation of falling birthrates
has been the widespread practice of birth control. Infor-
mation about contraception, and contraceptive devices,
remained illegal in most of Europe well into the twenti-
eth century. In the 1920s some countries (led by France)
adopted stiff new prohibitions to recover population
losses during World War I, but champions of women’sCountry Birth rates per 1,000 population
1910 1930 1960 1990
England 24.2 15.3 17.9 13.9
France 18.8 17.0 18.0 13.5
Germany 28.2 16.3 18.0 11.4
Italy 32.0 24.5 18.6 9.8
Russia 44.2 43.4 22.4 12.7
Spain 31.3 27.6 21. 410.2
Sweden 23.7 14.4 14.5 14.5
Source: B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970
(London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 127–32; B. R. Mitchell, The Fontana
Economic History of Europe: Statistical Appendix, 1920–1970(London:
Collins, 1974), pp. 28–34; The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1995
(Mahwah, N.J.: World Almanac Books, 1994), pp. 740–839, 959;
Information Please Almanac, Atlas, and Yearbook 1994(Boston, Mass.:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 135; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical
Statistics of the United States(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1960), p. 23.TABLE 30.11The Decline in European Birthrates,
1910–90