Here’s something that caught my eye while reading up on the American Progressive movement near the turn of the twentieth century. The author, historian Michael McGerr, considers the agricultural economics of the period and says this about the “family farm”:
One [form of mutualism] was the stereotypical “family farm.” “There is a co-operative unity in the farm family that is rather striking,” an observer noted. “The whole family is engaged in work that is of common interest.” Other rural wives and mothers worked as hard as Belle Garland [one of McGerr’s case studies] did. Like her, they saw to the farmhands and sometimes in paying boarders. By tradition, farm wives also raised chickens and tended garden plots. The case these women earned from selling eggs, vegetables, and other products was often the only money a farm family saw before the harvest. Farm women frequently labored in the family’s fields. Sometimes, they worked for pay off the farm.[1]
McGerr then discusses children on the farm:
Children also played a critical role in the survival of American farms. “[E]very boy born into a farm family was,” one farmer observed, “worth a thousand dollars.” Girls were worth more than a little, too. That understanding helped to explain high rural fertility rates—the highest in the nation. On the frontier farms of South Dakota and the poor white farms of the South, families with eight, nine, or ten children were not uncommon. . . . Many did wage work. On Southern cotton farms, a nine- or ten-year-old was already reckoned a “halfhand,” able to pick half as much as an adult. As in working-class households, education often had to give way to work. The school year was typically shorter in the countryside than in the city. Farm parents were more likely to take their children out of school.[2]
McGerr covers American farmers because they end up playing a role in the “discontent” that motivates his study. As he explains several pages on, while American farmers were probably doing as well or better than decades before in absolute terms, compared to non-agricultural workers (especially in cities), agriculture had fallen behind amidst the Second Industrial Revolution. Where they had been a majority of the workforce even in the late 1870s, by 1900, they were only 38%. Prior to the Civil War, agriculture had constituted 40% of the total economy, but that had declined to 16%. At the turn of the century, non-agricultural workers earned about 2.5 times that of their agricultural counterparts.[3]
So what?
Well, for one, I think there are good reminders here for anyone intrigued by what I shall call the “Homesteading Discourse.” To wit, Americans largely abandoned that mode of living for concrete reasons, not least of which was the sense of falling behind in economic status.
More interesting still is the anecdote illustrating the value of children on the farm, which I think throws a sobering light on the “Natalism Discourse,” in which conservative Christians often like to participate—sometimes in conjunction with the aforementioned Homesteading Discourse.
A glance at several inflation calculators indicates that $1,000 number thrown out by the farmer in 1890 comes out to around $30,000 in today’s money, which got me thinking about antiquity. Now, caveat historicus: it’s obviously hazardous to bluntly equivocate one socio-economic system with another. Even so, I think it’s probably fair to say nineteenth-century American farmers were much closer to the outlook of the average person in the Roman empire (where upwards of 85% of the population lived and worked in the countryside) than to us today; I’d posit it’s closer to how most human beings have thought about family and offspring in general.
In short, there’s a radical difference between seeing children as economic assets as opposed to pricey psycho-relational accessories or even Veblen goods, which is a crass way of describing how our culture (hazily) sees them.
Or think about how dramatically the older arrangement alters incentives vis-à-vis contraception and family planning. If there were hovering over every act of conjugal relations the thought that a baby could be roughly worth the value of a new car instead of fears of cutting oneself out of the workforce or paying for college, I’d bet the rent that we’d see quite a lot more babies.
It’s also a reason I think many of the Church Fathers opposed contraception so emphatically: in their world, I suspect, avoiding offspring would have disproportionately appealed either to a certain narrow elite worried about splitting the inheritance or to non-elites who were up to no good anyway (e.g., prostitution). For the “average” person by comparison (particularly with spectacularly high infant and child mortality by contemporary standards) a child was financial asset, a retirement investment, and a line on the resume wrapped into one. There was no poignant reason not to have more children.
To be clear, this analysis is mostly descriptive rather than prescriptive. Even so, I think the theological and/or political programs and commentators most energized by the present decline in fertility have a much steeper climb than they usually appreciate. Sure, a few extra tax credits or cushier parental leave might be nice for prospective parents on the margins, but I doubt it even begins to bridge the socio-economic gap between today and eras with appreciably higher birth rates.