From 1878 both the crude birth rate and the fertility rate entered upon their prolonged decline, and by 1901 were down to 28.5 and 114 in England (remaining slightly higher in Scotland), a drop of about 25 per cent from the peak rates. The start of the twentieth century did not, of course, mark any particular milestone in these trends, which continued on their downward course until more or less stabilized at new low levels reflecting the reproductive behaviour of late industrial or post-industrial society in the second half of the twentieth century. The social mechanisms producing these trends did, however, undergo a radical reversal, if not immediately after 1901 then after 1914, and this subsequent change was sufficiently radical to mark off the years between 1878 and 1914 (or, as these were the nearest census dates, between 1881 and 1911) as a highly distinctive phase in the marital behaviour of a fully industrialized society.
It is frequently thought that the fall in fertility from the 1880s was the result of a general and growing adoption of birth-control practices amongst most classes in the community, and there is indeed plenty of evidence that contraception became more openly talked about and knowledge of methods became more widespread from this time. More traditional mechanisms were at work, however, although in non-traditional directions. The age of women at marriage began to rise from its low point in 1871 and by 1901 was over twenty-six years, the increase of a full year in the average age signifying a major shift comparable in magnitude to any pre-nineteenth-century changes within a similar period of time. At the same time marriage became less frequent, the proportion of women who never married rising to nearly 14 per cent by 1901 and 16 per cent by 1911 in England, and 20 per cent in Scotland. Such tendencies were perverse, in the sense that real incomes were rising fast for most of this period, and that the overall sex ratio in the population was moving in women’s favour with the numbers of males per thousand females rising, circumstances which in earlier times would have led to earlier and more frequent marriages. They were, moreover, peculiar to the late Victorian and Edwardian world, for since 1914 there has been a striking increase in the amount of marriage, as marriage rates have risen and marriages have become more and more youthful. The marital posture of the country at large in this late Victorian period was, therefore, decidedly odd in the light of the normal habits and preferences of earlier and later times. Granted that Britain only gradually matured into an industrial society, a process scarcely completed before the 1880s, and granted that it generally took a generation for patterns of individual behaviour to adjust to broad shifts in economic circumstances, it may well be that this apparent peculiarity of later marriages and increasing celibacy was society’s collective response to industrialization.
This is distinctly paradoxical, when it is considered that Irish society responded with more emphatic versions of the same marital trends to the precisely opposite situation, the absence of industrialization. When Famine signalled that the population had gravely outrun the resources available to sustain it, a balance was restored in predominantly agricultural Ireland, first by the grim check of starvation, and subsequently in part by mass emigration, and in part by a steep fall in the marriage rate and rise in the age at marriage, with the numbers of children within families restrained only by this last factor. Emigration plus the swelling ranks of unmarried Irish abruptly halved the total population of Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, and stabilized it at a new, low, level more suited to the capacities of its non-industrial economy. The Irish logic was the traditional logic of making marriages and families fit the available means of subsistence. The British logic was a new logic of rising material expectations and of a society in which only a small minority was directly dependent on producing food; delayed marriage or no marriage at all were the end results of individual pursuit of better conditions and larger shares of goods and services, a strategy well suited to a time when the technical means of controlling births, and thus enlarging personal freedom and choice in making families, were still extremely limited.
This interpretation of the great tidal waves in family history which are expressed in the ups and downs of marriage will acquire many qualifications as the analysis develops. But insofar as decisions whether and when to marry were rational, and matters of calculation, it made sense to pursue the maintenance and improvement of standards of living by postponing marriage, reducing the number of children to be supported, and reducing the rate at which new families and households were formed. The development and widespread dissemination of reliable contraceptive techniques in the twentieth century, it can be argued, liberated people from dependence on these preventive checks and enabled them to pursue the same ends of improving their lot while indulging in as much marriage at as early stages as individuals happened to prefer. Confirmation of the technologically intermediate basis of the late Victorian behaviour is provided by the observation that delayed marriages and rising celibacy were sufficient to account for approximately half of the decline in fertility between 1871 and 1911; the other half was the result of birth control. More and earlier marriages in the half century after 1911, by contrast, would have raised fertility by at least 50 per cent if even the already shrunken family sizes of the early 1900s had remained normal; instead, fertility actually declined by half, a decline entirely attributable to the increasing efficiency and popularity of family limitation.
The late Victorians were, therefore, practising family limitation on a scale that made a marked, although not an exclusive, impression on the figures of births. They were not doing it, however, through a wholesale donning of rubber sheaths. The condom, generally made from animal intestines on the sausage-skin principle, had indeed been known since at least the early eighteenth century, the ‘English overcoat’ or ‘armour’ being used by upper-class men as a prophylactic against venereal disease rather than as a contraceptive. The successful substitution of rubber for skin was accomplished in the 1870s, by the 1890s there were several firms supplying the market, with the makers of Durex already well established, and barbers’ shops had emerged as the main retail outlets. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear from contemporary accounts that the limitation of conceptions within working-class marriages, whatever may have been the case among the upper classes, was not achieved by sheathing, although the slight fall in illegitimacy at this period may have owed something to this. Still less were the variety of sponges, douches, syringes, and pessaries responsible for the result, although they were fairly widely, if surreptitiously, advertised and were certainly available commercially. It was the First World War which familiarized almost an entire generation of young men with rubber sheaths, as they were used, or at least distributed, on a massive scale by the army in an effort to check venereal disease; hence perhaps the entry of French letters into common usage. Before this the great majority of married couples, even if they had information about contraceptives, found them either too expensive or too complicated. They relied on withdrawal, abstinence, or possibly prolonged breastfeeding which was thought to inhibit conception. The concept of the safe period was also current in rather restricted circles, but since the medical men were disastrously mistaken in the advice which they gave, pinpointing quite the wrong time in the menstrual cycle, it made no difference if this information was not widely disseminated.
The trouble with natural methods, apart from that of protracted suckling, was that they depended on male decisions and male self-discipline and control at the moment of maximum sexual excitement, and were inherently accident-prone. Despite the well-attested prevalence of coitus interruptus as the most widely practised form of birth control it is, therefore, a shade unlikely that it was sufficient to account for the extent of family limitation which was actually attained, with family size declining from about six for couples married in the decade of the 1860s to about four for the 1900 cohort. It seems highly likely that abstinence as well as withdrawal had been at work, and although the bedroom is a largely unrecorded area, the inference is that there was less sexual activity within late Victorian marriages than within earlier ones, which is odd if prudery and inhibition are thought of as essentially mid-Victorian attitudes. The trouble with coitus interruptus, for the social historian, is that it was not some newly discovered technique of the late nineteenth century but was a highly traditional method of attempting to limit pregnancies or control birth intervals, which had been used by some couples at all levels of society virtually from time immemorial. The