Whether and when: Women's work, birth spacing, and parity progression in late‐nineteenth‐century Derbyshire

Women's labour force participation features prominently in discussions of low birth rates and the Second Demographic Transition, and has also been hypothesized to have played a role in falling marital fertility during the First Demographic Transition. Historical data have been lacking, however, to assess these theories robustly and to distinguish between the effects of women's work on birth intervals and parity progression. This paper uses a split‐population cure model to analyse stopping and spacing by couples in late‐nineteenth‐century Derbyshire, using linked census data to demonstrate the association between women's occupations before marriage and subsequent marital fertility. Combining these linked census records and the 1911 census fertility survey, complete birth histories have been reconstructed for women who married from the 1880s onwards. The results suggest that couples in this period were controlling their fertility from the beginning of marriage via a combination of stopping and spacing, and that spacing births played a greater role in the low fertility of female textile workers than it did amongst some other occupational groups. These results provide more concrete evidence for the importance of women's labour force participation and birth spacing during the fertility transition in England and Wales.