20 



Sharp: 



to the center, 

 gentle type. 



We got Keyfitz who was a much milder, more 



The great man in the scholarly side of population 

 studies at that time was Ansley Coale at Princeton who was 

 an economist. He had been developing a big research project 

 to study the history of population growth and population 

 control, family planning or whatever, in all the provinces 

 of Europe, trying to get some information about each of the 

 European provinces. 



It was an interesting concept in that the provinces 

 were more important than the countries . The countries were 

 relatively modern inventions, but the provinces had been 

 there for a thousand years, like Provence, for example, and 

 Touraine and Languedoc and so forth in France. Germany is a 

 more obvious exanple. All the little kingdoms of Germany 

 were each essentially little provinces. 



This was a very productive project. What they found 

 was that in different parts of Europe, essentially birth 

 control had been prevalent in some and not in others, and it 

 spread from those that adopted it to nearby provinces . So 

 it was sort of a contiguous geographical spread. 



So there was that kind of influence that it was spreading 

 out? 



Revelle: Yes. Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries some 

 parts of Europe had practiced birth control. Others had 

 not. There was no semblance of birth control in Brittany, 

 for example, no semblance of birth control within marriage, 

 but the women married quite late. They had something called 

 the European marriage pattern. 



Sharp: Late into their twenties? 



Revelle: Yes, very late into their twenties. Twenty-six, 



twenty-seven. That's how the Bretons limited their 

 population, by late marriage. 



All over western Europe there was this so-called 

 European marriage pattern which was late marriage of women. 

 In fact, the women were often older than their husbands, 

 which was clearly a device for birth control. But not so 

 much contraception. In Europe coitus interruptus has always 

 been the method of choice, next to an abortion. It's only 

 recently that these much more satisfactory methods have been 

 introduced, like the pill, for example. 



The name of the man in North Carolina, by the way, was 

 Frieman. He'd been in India working for the Ford 

 Foundation. In the late 1950s and most of the 1960s, 

 the Ford Foundation had a kind of a minor empire in India. 



Sharp: 



India, Ford, AID and "Underdevelopment " 



Just from the correspondence that I could see even in your 

 papers, it looked like the Ford Foundation had quite a lot 



