Fertility, Wealth, and Politics in Three Southwest German Villages, 1650-1900

The book traces the precocious diffusion of family limitation in Grafenhausen bei Lahr, Kappel am Rhein, and Rust, using thousands of reconstituted family histories in local genealogies (Ortssippenbucher), as well as economic and political data from municipal and provincial archives. Graphs, tables, and maps document the fertility transition on the densely populated Rhine plain. A new measure of the percentage of couples practising family limitation is applied. The account highlights the roles of women as landholders under traditional partible inheritance and as workers in the cigar factories of the late 1800s. Both circumstances increased fertility, even as contraception spread along the networks of solidarity forged by economic and political independence.