sterilization and other measures to limit population. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, approximately one‐third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico were sterilized, many of them without their consent. In China after 1979, families that had more than one child were penalized with fines and the loss of access to opportunities, and millions of women were required to have IUDs surgically installed after their first child.
Limiting the number of their children was also a choice made by people around the world. Despite high costs and opposition from conservatives at home and abroad, by 2000 roughly two‐thirds of the world’s population appeared to have been practicing some kind of birth control. Fertility rates remain high in the world’s poorest countries – in 2018, Niger had the highest fertility rate (7.2) – but within the last decade birth rates in richer nations have fallen below replacement levels. In China, the one‐child policy was so effective that officials became worried about too low a birth rate and ended it in 2015. The expenses of a second child and a shortage of housing mean that few urban couples choose to have a second, however. The Chinese population is still expanding because a large share of the population is in its childbearing years, but in Japan, birth rates are so low that the population is declining. In India, middle‐class urban families with access to contraception have smaller families, while those in villages remain large; demographers predict that as of 2050 India will pass China as the world’s most populous country, with 1.5 billion people.
Today the world’s lowest fertility rates are in the wealthy, heavily urbanized, and crowded states of East Asia, including Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao as well as Japan, and in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states, where what sociologists term “partner instability” and other uncertainties have led women to decide not to have children. France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, and Singapore, among others, have adopted policies to encourage couples to have more children, but the increased cost of living, especially in cities where most of the world’s population now lives, women’s participation in the paid labor force, and the social acceptability of small families has meant that low birth rates in industrialized societies will no doubt continue.
Households today are less likely to consist only of a married couple and their children than they were fifty years ago. Effective contraception has meant that sexual activity is separated from its reproductive consequences, enabling sex before marriage with a variety of partners. Since 1970, marriage rates have steadily fallen in most of the world, as the increasing social acceptability of cohabitation and childbearing outside of marriage has led many people not to marry until late in life or never to marry at all. Because divorce rates have also risen, many families include the children from several different relationships, thus returning to an earlier pattern when spousal death and remarriage had created similar “blended” families. To this variety are added households in which children are being raised by grandparents, by gay, lesbian, and transsexual individuals and couples, by adoptive parents, by single parents (most often the mother), and by unmarried couples who have no intention of marrying. Statistics from the US provide evidence of all these trends: in 2013, 15 percent of new marriages were mixed race, 19 percent of households consisted of a married couple and their children, 51 percent of adults were married (down from 72 percent in 1960), and 41 percent of children were born to unmarried women.
Thus the question “what is a family?” has many answers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
1 Allen Nicolas J. et al., eds. (2008) Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction. Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell.
2 Blumberg, Rae Lesser, ed. (1991) Gender, Family and Economy: The Triple Overlap. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
3 Brown, Kathleen (1996) Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
4 Burguière, André, et al., eds. (1996) A History of the Family: Volume One – Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds and A History of the Family: Volume Two – The Impact of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5 Casey, James (1989) The History of the Family. London: Basil Blackwell.
6 Cole, Jennifer and Durham, Deborah Lynn, eds. (2007) Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
7 Davison, Jean (1997) Gender, Lineage, and Ethnicity in Southern Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
8 Dore, Elizabeth (2006) Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
9 Forster, Marc and Kaplan, Benjamin J., eds. (2005) Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe. Basingstoke: Ashgate.
10 Ghosh, Durba (2008) Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11 Gillis, John R. (1996) A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values. New York: Basic Books.
12 Goody, Jack (2000) The European Family: An Historico‐Anthropological Essay. Oxford: Blackwell.
13 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer (2009) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
14 Jelin, Elizabeth, ed. (1991) Family, Household, and Gender Relations in Latin America. London: Routledge.
15 Johnson, Allen and Earle, Timothy (2000) The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
16 Jolly, Margaret and Macintyre, Martha, eds. (1989) Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
17 Kertzer, David I. and Barbagli, Marzio, eds. (2001) Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789 (The History of the European Family, vol. 1). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
18 Laslett, Peter and Wall, Richard, eds. (1983) Household and Family in Past Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
19 Lavrin, Asunción, ed. (1989) Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
20 Mangan, Jane E. (2016) Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest‐era Peru and Spain. New York: Oxford University Press.
21 Maynes, Mary Jo, Waltner, Ann, Soland, Birgitte, and Strassereds, Ulrike (1996) Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History. New York: Routledge.
22 Maynes, Mary Jo and Waltner, Ann (2012) The Family: A World History. New York: Oxford.
23 Meriwether, Margaret and Tucker, Judith, eds. (1999) A Social History of Women and the Family in the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
24 Mintz, Steven and Kellogg, Susan (1988) Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press.
25 Quale, G. Robina (1992) Families in Context: A World History of Population. New York: Greenwood.
26 Palmer, Jennifer L. (2016) Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
27 Phillips, Roderick (1988) Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
28 Pomeroy, Sarah (1997) Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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