The changing demography of single motherhood: a study of southern Sweden, 1905–2015

Single motherhood has long been a feature of European family systems, but its meaning and determinants have changed substantially over time. Using longitudinal individual-level data from the Scanian Economic and Demographic Database (SEDD), covering southern Sweden between 1905 and 2015, we examine the changing demography of single motherhood from a long-term life course perspective. We analyze how the relative importance of different routes into single motherhood (i.e. non-marital childbearing, divorce, and widowhood) changed over time and how single motherhood was structured by socioeconomic status (SES), age, migration experience, and place of residence. The results show marked changes across periods in both the composition and selectivity of single motherhood. Although unmarried mothers made up most single mothers throughout the period, divorce and widowhood were more strongly associated with single motherhood than unmarried status, net of other factors, until 1974. Socioeconomic status, age, migration experience, and urban residence were important predictors of single motherhood, but their associations varied across periods, not least around 1974–1994. Over the twentieth century, net of other factors, single motherhood in Sweden shifted from being linked to marital dissolution, migration experience and low SES to being less stratified and increasingly reflecting transformations in union formation and family norms as Sweden had returned to high levels of non-marital fertility.