Revolution in the Bedroom

When I first encountered the history of the family while in graduate school in the 1980s, it seemed to come in two flavors: the vanilla of family structures, shading into historical demography, and the Rocky Road of affect and relationships. Vanilla was plain, well-made, the basis for every other flavor, and largely white. The rocky-road history of emotional relationships within the family was full of delectable nuggets and mushy bits, but sometimes seemed difficult to pull together into a united whole. Susan Klepp's recent book Revolutionary Conceptions shows us just how far we have come. I won't stretch the ice cream metaphor much farther, but Klepp's is a very rich and satisfying piece of work; I enjoyed every bite.

The analytic power of the book comes from its combination of these two strands of the history of the family. Klepp has fully mastered the demographic history, the numbers and the many ambiguities that underlie them. But she also brings a cultural historian's sensibility to frame questions about the meanings of countless individual choices and actions, the outcomes of which are captured, in the aggregate, in the numbers. Klepp uses an extremely broad range of sources to recover attitudes and practices around fertility. The book is perhaps at its most powerful when it frames arguments that can only ever be suggestive, when it struggles to capture values and feelings that historical actors might themselves never have fully articulated.

Klepp's central argument is that middle- and upper-class married women actively reduced their fertility in America around the time of the Revolution, making America the first country to undergo a fertility transition. France followed a few decades later. Her story is focused on the mid-Atlantic, especially Philadelphia, which she argues spearheaded the reduction in family size. Later marriages, longer intervals between the births of children, and ceasing to have children after a certain number had been born were all strategies used by women to limit family size. Klepp tells us that there was no simple equation between political liberty and the limitation of fertility, but there was indeed an important connection. As revolutionaries argued about life, liberty, and happiness, Klepp suggests, women pondered these concepts and came to reconsider pregnancy and childbearing as hindrances or burdens.

The book is particularly attentive to the experiences of various smaller groups whose fertility might have differed from overall trends, such as Quakers, Jews, and free blacks. Overall, a white urban population saw fertility declining from the 1760s while their rural sisters echoed the decline but much more slowly. Free blacks also began limiting fertility, but slaves never had fertility rates high enough to even ensure the reproduction of their own population. The decline in the 1760s is even more striking because the previous two decades had been characterized by the kinds of very high fertility rates for which colonial America is known.

Klepp sketches for us some of the social, cultural, and economic underpinnings of the earlier high-fertility regime in order to explain how changes in these fundamentals could produce a fertility decline. Before mid-century, America was a fruitful new land in every way; Klepp shows us plenty of sources boasting about America's fertility both in terms of land and women's bodies. However, in this largely patriarchal society, sons were valued more highly than daughters and children were seen as an economic advantage— free labor—rather than as sentimental darlings. But from mid-century, this emphasis on high fertility was challenged by a new value attached to smaller families. Klepp suggests that cultural and social changes as varied as the Great Awakening and the consumer revolution helped shape these new attitudes.

Chapter three shows us most clearly how Klepp thinks the Revolution shaped attitudes and practices about fertility. She shows us how startled revolutionary men...