Urbanization, Secularization, and Birth Spacing: A Case Study of an Historical Fertility Transition

This article presents an analysis of the effect that urban secularization of religious pronatalism had upon established birth-spacing behavior over the course of the fertility transition in the population of nineteenth-century Utah. First, a model of variance in birth intervals attributable to age at marriage, age of childbearing termination, and completed family size over the duration of childbearing thus defined, is presented. Second, this model is elaborated by incorporating five specific hypotheses concerning the effects of urbanism, secularization, and their interaction, upon interbirth intervals. Although a pattern of urban secularization is found, the uniformity of social and behavioral changes suggests that relatively homogeneous demographic behavior was produced on the frontier by the largely external locus of secularizing influences in the mainstream eastern American community.