This research seeks to understand the role of cultural values in the decline of marital fertility in the northern United States in the period from 1825 to 1920. It focuses on the impact on fertility of four important characteristics--ethnicity, economic status, political affiliation, and religious denomination--that also bound individuals to groups. The cultural values of the groups on the leading edge of the transition to lower fertility within marriage quite possibly caused this innovative demographic behavior. This hypothesis, if correct, has significant implications for population policy. The effect of these social characteristics on fertility will be statistically analyzed for five settings in two distinct sub-periods. Data from both individuals and small geographic areas will be used. Variations in fertility in the latter will be related to quantitative indicators of cultural values provided by referenda votes and election returns. For a large sample of ever-married Iowa women 1910/1915, the effects on fertility of schooling, religious denomination, and income will be analyzed. The family- related values and attitudes of religious groups will be directly investigated for the era before the Civil War and for the 1890- 1914 period. This inquiry will provide much better documentation of the magnitude of nineteenth-century fertility differentials than is presently available. It will also isolate the sources of these differences and interpret them.
