How the West "invented" Fertility Restriction

HOW THE WEST "INVENTED" FERTILITY RESTRICTION

In this paper, Black Death is shown to have contributed much to the rise of fertility restriction in Europe. It helped to aggravate the main effects of the European Marriage Pattern(EMP), namely later female marriages and a higher portion of women never marrying. This is shown via using the Malthusian model to model the growth of the economy on labour supply and marriage decisions after the Black Death and comparing its results with data obtained.

The first component of the Malthusian model  is on maximizing the female utility, which draws upon consumption and children. This will decide if a female will choose to work or have children. The second component is on maximizing the rental income that the landlord receives from renting out land in both grain and horn sectors. This will provide a maximum amount of utility available for both males and females from arable and pastoral productions. The third component is on the marginal product, or wage, received by each man and woman in both arable and pastoral production. This is to provide, in particular, the utility for female peasants. The fourth component models the fertility and female labour supply for various varying strengths of each female. This component is essential as varying strength of a female along with a presence of a female wage premium in horn will affect the utility that the female receives, which will be compared to the utility she receives from children. The fifth component is deriving the aggregate behaviour of females across all various strength types, which is modelled as a uniform distribution in the fourth component. This component shows that women of different strengths reach differently to rising land-labour ratios, which affect the utility that they receive. The last component models on the consumption preferences across grain and horn. This will affect the demand and supply of arable and pastoral production, which in turn affects the utility received by the peasants, particularly the female counterparts.

According to the Malthusian model, the first evidence shows that pastoral production leads to more employment opportunities for women, causing the female age at first marriage to rise. This is proven by establishing a significant and positive correlation between the drop in taxpayers with the share of pastoral land, where the former variable is used as a proxy for marriage behaviour. The second evidence shows that due to the population decrease after the Black Death, there is a major shift from arable to pastoral production and also from corn to horn in consumption patterns. Large landowners switched to pastoral farming  firstly to economize on labour, since pastoral production required fewer hands per acre compared to arable production. And secondly, females are cheaper labour than males. This increased the share of employed female peasants, causing the female age at first marriage to rise. The last evidence shows that the share of land used for livestock farming is a good estimate of the age at first marriage and that the transition into pastoral farming is correlated with it too. The former observation is shown from the marriage seasonality driven by pastoral land use, implying that this is a predictor of late marriage. The latter observation is shown from the large share of abandoned medieval villages, which indicated a strong shift towards pastoral production. These strongly suggest that fertility was reduced as there were more employment opportunities for female peasants in the pastoral agriculture.