Nation and family : the Swedish experiment in democratic family and population policy / by Alva Myrdal.

  • Myrdal, Alva, 1902-1986.
Date:
[1945]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Nation and family : the Swedish experiment in democratic family and population policy / by Alva Myrdal. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    further be illustrated by reference to the large relief family. Extreme poverty tends to result in indifference and irresponsibility for the fate of oneself and one s family. Thus up to our time economically incapable families have lacked that self-reliance and social ambition that could induce them to restrict their families. Poverty of a static type also tends to be closely associated with an unquestioning obedience to authority and to social cliches. The so-called moral criticism of birth control voiced by public opinion tends to determine the actioris of these groups more than of others or at least to serve as an excuse for inaction, just as in olden times the authority of the church taught complacency and noninterference with nature. Poverty of an earlier period was much more generally of that hopeless static type, and it failed to result in social opposition or in family limitation because of the attitude of no-use which nowadays characterizes only a small residuum of the population. Neither theorists nor laymen have had the patience to outwait the period of unequal transmission of new family patterns and unequal sensitivity to changed social forces in order to note how the correlation between income and family size would work itself out in the end. Recently, however, some regions in the world have been so thoroughly permeated by the same cultural changes in the field of sex mores that they have begun to indicate a new relationship. Statistics tending to show a positive instead of a negative correlation between fertility and income have been presented for large cities in Europe and for selected groups. One of the most noted of these new correlations was published by Edin based on the marriage groups in Stockholm from 1920 to 1922. It shows that families tend to have children in direct rather than in inverse relation to their economic resources, [/oj] After the special census in Sweden in 1935-1936, a country-wide indication of such positive correlation was apparent for the first time. Fertility showed a recurrent, though slight, tendency to be higher in the highest income group (with 10,000 crs. 2 annually or above) than in the next highest groups. As higher incomes are associated with older age groups and thus a longer duration of marriage and fertility period, the figures were corrected for age, but they continued to show this slight excess in number of children over the lower income groups. As the same slight upturn repeats itself in all series, in different social and regional groups, greater significance may be attributed to it than the relatively small numbers might seem to warrant (Fig. II) . s Even so, the number of children in the highest income group is far from sufficient for population replacement. It is thus apparent that stabilization of fertility is taking place on a low reproduction level. The few additional 2 A Swedish crown (in Swedish krona, pi. kronor, abbreviated cm., pi. crs.) corresponds according to the exchange rate to about a quarter of an American dollar. Its actual purchasing power, before the rise in cost of living from the beginning of the war, should be reckoned some where between a third and a half of a dollar. 3 Unknown incomes are ordinarily incomes below the tax limit of 600 crs.