Birth, Death, and Religious Faith in an English Dissenting Community by Urdank Albion M.;

Author:Urdank, Albion M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Figure 4.9 Premarital & Postmarital Conversions: Baptist Husbands.

In sum, if one considers total effects alone for all four premarital conversion models, the explanatory variables for both husbands and wives, on both dependent variables, proved inconsequential, with the partial exception of Baptist wives in Figure 4.5a. When considered individually, in terms of their direct effects alone, husbands’ marriage and conversion ages had decisive impacts on the ages at which their wives gave birth for the last time; and in this sense husbands’ spirituality outperformed that of their wives. This outcome did not hold true for the four postmarital conversion models considered collectively. The spirituality of wives in the postmarital models estimating family size trumped soundly that of their husbands, while remaining equally significant (if a tad more robust) with respect to the effects of marriage-age. Wives also trumped husbands in terms of the combined predictive power of their conversion ages and marriage ages in estimating female age-at-last-birth. On balance, a rough parity prevailed overall between Baptist husbands and wives, with wives exercising, it seems, a marginally stronger influence.

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The mean age-at-last-birth of women in both pre- and postmarital conversion sub-samples remained the same at 38 years.5 The tapering off of reproduction at what seems a comparatively early age was due most likely to declining fecundity than to any effort at fertility control, despite the formal limit used in this analysis of age 52.99.6 Family limitation by the stopping of births was not yet practiced systematically nor on any significant scale, though fertility control, in the form of the spacing of births, may have occurred to some degree. The spacing of births in some of the sample’s observations implies that this indirect method of restricting fertility may have taken place; yet, the observations in question, which are few in number, often contain large numbers of births (however much the larger intervals between births would have technically reduced the fertility rate).

If the tapering off of births can be ascribed to this form of fertility control, rather than declining fecundity, then both pre- and postmarital conversion may have contributed to this curious development though in different ways. The frisson of the moment of conversion may have enhanced reproduction initially, particularly among male Baptist premarital converts, leading to higher fecund fertility rates, but for postmarital converts, who often received baptism at older ages, conversion may have delayed the complete onset of the end of fertility, in so far as the older couples at the moment of female conversion especially may have made a last effort at conception, since, as we have seen, the probability of another birth occurring tended to rise following conversion. It becomes necessary, therefore, to distinguish the effects of declining fecundity from the potential impact of religious sensibility.

III. FECUND FERTILITY RATES

One way to gain insight into this problem would be to examine fecund-fertility rates, based on birth intervals, by the timing of female conversion in relation to the woman’s age-at-marriage across the length of fecund years during marriage.7 This would differ from the

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