396 



CAROLINE H. ROBINSON 



THIS NON-FECUNDITY COMPARED TO OTHERS' 



Table 4 has been re-written, omitting 20 men and 21 women who were 

 deceased by the time of the inquiry concerning their offspring. The object 

 of this re-tabulation into table 6 is to get figures more comparable to the 

 United States and British census figures of the Milbank Memorial studies 13 

 and of the Fertility of Marriage, 13 which both deal only with couples of 

 which both partners survived. It is very interesting to see that the re- 

 tabulation for survivors only, reduces the childlessness of those married 

 at 20-24 years by one-fifth (men) and one-third (women), and the one- 

 child families of men by one-fourth. A further reduction for widowhood 



TABLE 5* 

 Children per marriage according to wedding age 



* Derived from Table 4, except as regards items "5 or more" children. 



has been estimated in my article in the Eugenical News, November 1933 

 to which the reader is referred. 14 



13 References in table 6. 



14 The operation of altering table 4 into table 6 hints at an answer to the following 

 problem in census figures such as those of the Milbank Memorial and the Fertility of 

 Marriage: To what extent do they fail of representing what really happened to all the original 

 members of the given generation which they appear to study (by social classes)? The un- 

 heard witnesses are the dead and the widowed. [For, splitting the living married up into 

 five-year age groups (for which birth rates are secured) does not solve the difficulty — for 

 it does not summon a single dead or widowed person to the witness stand on census day. ] 

 Small families were very frequent among the unheard witnesses and the mortality factor 

 is also of greater importance among the lower classes than among the upper. Does, then, 

 the omission of all dead and widowed and their small families inflate to any serious extent 

 the apparent birth rate of the lower classes? Comparison of table 4 with table 6 shows 

 that the reality (table 4) was two (percentile) points less favorable to families of three 

 and four as against families of one or none than was table 6 (survivors only) . The con- 

 tention is that in a tabulation for unskilled, for instance, the correction would have been 

 yet more extensive, on account of greater mortality. 



