Offspring Sex Preference in Frontier America.

Parents in the United States often attempt to choose the sex of their children. Numerous current websites and publications devoted to information and techniques about offspring sex selection bear witness to that fact. Recent research confirms that Americans in the second half of the twentieth century made fertility decisions based upon a preference for a mixed set of children. This article analyzes whether and how sex preferences evolved along with the enormous changes in fertility behavior, family size, and economic activities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving particular attention to American frontier populations before and after the demographic transition. This study utilizes fertility histories of women born between 1850 and 1900 from the Utah Population Database (UPDB) to evaluate the effects of both the number and sex composition of previous children born on birth-stopping and birth-spacing decisions. In addition to revealing general fertility trends within the American frontier population, the richness of the UPDB allows for an investigation of differential spacing behaviors among agricultural and Mormon households--two sub-populations that may have placed different values on male and female children for economic, social, and/or cultural reasons. Given findings in the contemporary United States that privilege, if anything, a balanced sex mix--through both birth-spacing and birth-stopping behaviors--we do not expect to find any apparent preference for children of one sex over the other within the general sample. Nor would previous research on the contributions of both male and female children to agricultural households lead us to believe that agricultural households favored one sex over the other at any time during the period. Furthermore, since the Mormons gradually became more and more secular in orientation, acquiring a socioeconomic profile similar to that of non-Mormons, we do not assume Mormons to have had offspring sex preferences that differed from those of the non-Mormon population. Finally, any offspring sex preference discovered in any of the groups in this study would seem likely to be at its strongest in the later cohorts, who had access to effective contraceptives after the fertility transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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