How did the family planning revolution come about in the Anglo world ?

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we tend to simply put it down to technology such as the pill, which was merely the most convenient and reliable method, which became widespread un the early sixties (i just escaped)

But census and bmd records show that in britain at least, families in the first decade of the 1900s were considerably smaller than fifty years earlier, meaning the motive and the means were both present to have smaller families. Probably about four children not nine or more

The govenment and social commentators of the time did notice this, as they controversialy added questions in the 1911 census to try to find out what was happening. They still believed england needed to continue to expand its empire, and an essential part of that was the production of soldiers and emigrants to maintain the empire.
They could hardly have prediced the carnage and population loss of the great war a few years later, along other social upheavals of the 20th century.

Its very difficult to find information as to how ordinary people changed their habits in a few decades, before the great social upheavals from the great war onwards.
Theres plenty of documentation showing the outcomes. Also bear in mind improved sanitary conditions would have meant less infant deaths than fifty years earlier, so it must have been family planning of some kind.
 

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Chicks get educated and s**t, or get work, decide they don't want to be barefoot, pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink.

It was heaps better in ye olde days when chick knew their place and that, up until when you died of plague at 23.
 

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30k Posts 10k Posts HBF's Milk Crate - 70k Posts TheBrownDog
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The more I research this, the more I se the information was dissemminated through organised labour, the union movement etc.

But the driver seems to have been the fact that legislation and industrial technology meant kids became a unit costing money as opposed to a labour resource for the family to exploit

We think people were ignorant about how to plan a family, they werent, its just it wasnt economically favourable to do that until the late 1800s

The pill in the sixties meant that the same outcome could be achieved, but there was no need to abstain from sex so much

We tend to conflate the sexual revolution with the family planning revolution in the sixtiess, but the family planning revolution happened decades before
 

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30k Posts 10k Posts HBF's Milk Crate - 70k Posts TheBrownDog
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It seems the improvements in mortality started several decades before health and sanitation discoveries and breakthroughs.

People seem to have self educated through their peers
 

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30k Posts 10k Posts HBF's Milk Crate - 70k Posts TheBrownDog
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Consumerism is how it came about.

True

1. Child labour laws made it less profitable for familis to have lots of kids to exploit. In factrequirement for better skills and threfore trainin turne a child into a loss unit not a profit one

2 factories preference for female workers: cheaper and more skilled in fine work

3 peers seeing that the key to generations being upwardly mobile was small families


This is my suspiclion, but its hard to find a lot of evidence in literature. The methods became widely known decades before officialdom saw the need to find and discover techniques for restricting family size
 

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30k Posts 10k Posts HBF's Milk Crate - 70k Posts TheBrownDog
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Education, education, education for women. Still happening today in the developing world.

Thats right, but theres little evidence that it was happening officially. In fact, review the documents arount the 1911 census and the govt was worried anout the falling birthrate and whether there would be enough population to maintain the empire. Ironically, those in power walted into the great war with eyes wide open, which managed to severely reduce an entire generation of population
 

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Increased urbanisation would've played a part but that was happening in Britain generations before 1900.
 

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Increased urbanisation would've played a part but that was happening in Britain generations before 1900.
This. Shift from agricultural societies to industrial ones meant that producing your own personal fleet of labour became much less of an imperative for families.
 

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This. Shift from agricultural societies to industrial ones meant that producing your own personal fleet of labour became much less of an imperative for families.

That is the key I think.

But how did the knowledge of techniques get promulgated. People obviously talked to each other in the pre radio/tv era

Maybe the techniques were well known, and had been known for centuries, there just wasnt the motivation to limit family size
 

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There are a number of incentives to have large families in poor societies, which still hold true today. First, a large proportion of children died either in childbirth or when they were young and secondly, children were there to help provide for their elders.

The advent of social welfare was a contributing factor to children no longer needing to play this role, but more importantly the increase in wealth of the population (driven by access to new kinds of work and education to rise in society) meant that families were better able to look after themselves rather than existing on a subsistence level.
 

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Your last point is true, but I'm not sure it would have been foremost in the populations mind in the 1900s.

That's the interesting thing, how these trends started in the population a few decades before advances in official attitudes, medical , sanitary and education improvements.

I'm also seeing pointers to the organized labour movement being a key educator for better living standards
 

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That is the key I think.

But how did the knowledge of techniques get promulgated. People obviously talked to each other in the pre radio/tv era

Maybe the techniques were well known, and had been known for centuries, there just wasnt the motivation to limit family size

People had worked out the link between insemination and babies a few thousand years earlier....
 

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