Sot. Sci. Med. Vol. 35, No. 10, Pp. 1245-1257, 1992 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

0277-9536/92 $5.00 + 0.00 Copyright 0 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd

WEST INDIAN GENDER PROGRAMS

RELATIONS,

AND FERTILITY

FAMILY

PLANNING

DECLINE

W. PENN HANDWERKER Program

in Anthropology,

Humboldt

State University,

Arcata,

CA 95521, U.S.A.

Abstract-Nearly all West Indian islands initiated marked fertility declines sometime between 1960 and 1970. Family planning programs have not played an important role in these declines. Neither have other

variables that conventional social theory tells us should promote reduced family sizes, like education and rising standards of living. The historical experience of Barbados and Antigua, which reached replacementlevel fertility in the 1980s suggests that West Indian fertility declines reflect structural changes in national economies that created job opportunities for women. Family planning programs need to he evaluated with reference to the distinctive health and human rights goals other than fertility transition that they can effectively reach. Key words--West

Indies, family planning, fertility decline, development

Nearly every island in the Caribbean initiated sustained fertility decline between 1960 and 1970 [l].

METHODS

Barbados began fertility decline in 1960 and reached replacement-level fertility in 1980. Antigua began fertility decline about 1965 and reached replacementlevel fertility in the late 1980s. What lies behind their success? Here is the obvious answer-both islands developed dramatically and each had active, successful family planning programs. Barbados, one of the poorest islands in 1950, moved farthest (the World Bank no longer classifies Barbados as a Less Developed Country). But real wages doubled on both islands. On Barbados, infant mortality fell from around 150 in 1950 to around 30 by 1980. On Antigua, infant mortality fell from around 70 in 1953 to around 25 by 1988. On both islands, the proportion of women aged 2&24 who completed secondary school rose from around 3% to around 50%. The average level of completed schooling for these women rose from about 6 to 8 yr to nearly 12. In the 1950s women on both islands had as many children as their fecundity and sexual activity allowed. But the Barbados Family Planning Association (BFPA) opened its doors in 1955 and the Antigua Family Planning Association (AFPA) was organized soon after. Sustained fertility decline began on Barbados about 1960 and on Antigua about 1965. Barbadian period total fertility fell from a 1950s high of about 5.0 to a 1980 low of about 2.0 at or about replacement level. Antiguan period total fertility fell from a 1950s high of about 7.0 to a 1988 low of about 1.7. This paper shows that the obvious answer is not the right answer. High fertility existed when women were dependent on their children for their material welfare. Fertility transition occurred when job opportunities freed women from dependency on their children.

This paper reports one part of an ongoing comparative, historical study of gender relations on Barbados, Antigua, and St Lucia which looks particularly at reproductive and sexual behavior. Data reported here come primarily from field studies on Barbados in 1985,1986 and 1990 and Antigua in 1988 and 1989. Numerical analyses discussed below use micro-level data collected in island-wide random samples of women who belong to 5 yr cohorts from age 2&24 through 6&64, and macro-level data assembled from a variety of government sources. Ethnographic analyses presented below use data collected through informal conversations and both structured and semi-structured interviews. A detailed statement of methods appears elsewhere [2], and applies to all islands. FAMILY PLANNING AND POPULATION CARIBBEAN

IN THE

Caribbean family planning programs were created to help solve a perceived Malthusian population problem [3]. The Great Depression and the labor disturbances of the 1930s brought home to many people that Caribbean economies did not provide adequate employment to growing populations. Caribbean nations face much the same problem today. Mortality has fallen to very low levels but fertility generally has not. 40-50% of Caribbean populations are under age 15. Extremely high levels of emigration both follow from, and may exacerbate, the economic dependence of this region on North America and Europe. Even if fertility falls to replacement level next year, the proportion of young people on the islands promises dangerously high levels of unemployment within the next decade, especially as

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PENN HANDWERKER

opportunities for emigration contract. Islands like Barbados and Antigua face high teen pregnancy rates ]4,51. In the face of public apathy and opposition from the Church and other politically-influential organizations [3,6], family planning programs in the Caribbean originated primarily as local voluntary organizations. They grew with the help of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and donor organizations such as the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). U.S. government activities, which were criticized as an extension of U.S. imperialism two decades earlier [6], intensified during the 1980s. Privately-sponsored efforts to reduce the birth rate started in 1925 in Puerto Rico, 1939 in Jamaica, 1955 in Barbados, and 1962 in the Dominican Republic. Government population policies came more slowly. Official support for family planning was adopted by Barados in 1967, the Dominican Republic in 1968, Jamaica in 1966, Puerto Rico in 1970, and Trinidad and Tobago in 1967 [7]. Haiti under Francois Duvalier pointedly ignored family planning. Family planning was not made available until after he died in 1971, did not become an official government priority until 1979 [3], and service provision has remained limited. The St Lucia Family Planning Association was organized privately in 1965 and opened its doors in 1967. St Lucia formalized a population policy two decades later, in 1986, but only under pressure from international donor organizations. Ironically, Cuba, which rejects Malthusian interpretations of population, made family planning more readily available than any other country in the Caribbean [3, 81. Local Family Planning Associations (FPAs) function autonomously, and FPAs on Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago affiliate independently with IPPF. However, the Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation (CFPA) provides regional representation with IPPF for 21 other local FPAs, including those in Suriname, Guyana, the former Dutch island colonies, the French dipartements of Martinique and Guadeloupe, both the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, and all states in the Eastern Caribbean. CFPA also provides a regional center for data collection and for family planning training and educational materials from its headquarters in St John’s, Antigua. Currently, local FPAs provide three kinds of services. First, FPAs provide counseling and family life and sex education information at local branch offices. They also offer educational outreach services through schools, health clinics, and other outlets. Second, many FPAs provide clinical services. Nurses and affiliated physicians perform routine physical examinations and provide the expertise necessary for the prescribed use of pills, IUDs, and diaphragms. Many FPAs within the Eastern Caribbean have begun

a process in which their services are becoming integrated into the standard set of maternal and child health services offered through government health clinics. Third, FPAs dispense contraceptives at no cost or for a minimum fee. They do so directly, occasionally through government health clinics, and increasingly through community-based distribution centers. As IPPF affiliates, Caribbean FPAs cannot advocate abortion, a policy dictated by current U.S. government funding policy. In any event, on most islands abortion remains a legal option only under highly restricted circumstances. Most people on most islands within the Caribbean would probably say ‘no’ if the they were asked if abortion was an acceptable method of family planning. Abortion services exist on all islands nonetheless, although it appears that only Cuba makes these services easily accessible. Public attitudes toward abortion appear to be changing, however, especially among younger people. Antigua and Barbados liberalized their abortion laws recently and Jamaica is considering similar changes. FAMILY

PLANNING

YIELDS AMBIGUOUS

RESULTS

However, wishful thinking rather than rigorous analysis led early reports [3, 91 to propose that family planning programs led to sustained fertility decline. In fact, Caribbean family planning efforts have not yielded clear successes. The problems of the Puerto Rican and Jamacian family planning programs in the 1950s were the subject of considerable research [lo, 1 I]. A detailed study of Jamaican fertility based on census data from 1946, 1960 and 1970, found that parish fertility was low where educational levels and contraceptive efforts were high. However, it accounted for a statistically insignificant 17% of the variance in parish fertility [12]. Despite private efforts dating to 1956 and government support since 1967, in 1980 Trinidad and Tobago’s total fertility still remained above 3.0 [13]. Until recently, the Antiguan government restrained the activities of the Antiguan Family Planning Association rather than promoted them. Activities the AFPA undertook on its own had only qualified success. For example, in 1973 the AFPA initiated a community-based contraception distribution project. An evaluation of the effectiveness of this program 1 yr after it began revealed that 60% of nonusers in the sample stopped using contraceptives after the program began [14]. The strongest evidence for family planning influence on fertility comes from Barbados, which often is held up to other islands as an example of what an effective family planning program can accomplish. Barbadian fertility decline began shortly after the Barbados Family Planning Association opened its doors. BFPA service extensions to government health clinics in 1966 and community-based distribution centers in 1975 coincided with further reductions in the island’s birth rate.

West Indian fertility decline But evidence supplied by the Barbados Family Planning Association makes it difficult to believe that BFPA activities reduced Barbadian fertility. An island-wide 198&1981 contraceptive prevalence survey of more than 2000 randomly selected women aged 1549 revealed that only about 31% had ever made use of BFPA services; less than half the women who had used contraceptive methods had ever made use of BFPA services [15]. Graham Dann’s more recent study of Barbadian men [ 161revealed that only 13.5% had received information on family planning from physicians, health care workers, or the BFPA; only 7.6% had ever made use of BFPA services. Indeed, survey data collected in 1985 revealed no relationship between the use of birth control technologies and completed fertility [2, pp. 175-1791. An extensive search for links between service extensions of the Barbados Family Planning Association and reductions in aggregated period total fertility showed that widely touted BFPA activities had no measureable influence on the island’s fertility decline [2, pp. 194-1981. This should not be surprising. We know that below-replacement fertility requires use of effective birth control technologies. But we also know that birth control can be used to maximize completed family size as well as to have small families. Close analysis of the influence of family planning programs on fertility usually discounts their ability to induce fertility decline [ 17, pp. 22-241. Nonetheless, findings, such as these raise fundamental questions about the efficacy of Caribbean family planning programs. These questions are now being addressed in the Eastern Caribbean by operations research teams funded by USAID which seek to design more efficient methods of extending the influence of existing family planning programs. These findings also raise the question of the conditions that create a demand for birth control services to sharply reduce fertility. IF NOT FAMILY

PLANNING,

THEN

WHAT?

Today’s conventional social wisdom tells us that the dramatic movement toward below-replacement fertility which began after the industrial revolution constitutes a shift from a situation of excess demand for children to a situation of an excess supply of children which is resolved by the application of family planning techniques [17, 181. An excess supply of children may reflect a reduction in demand, an increase in the potential supply of children, or both. Rising standards of living, new goods and services, reduced infant and child mortality, higher levels of education, urbanization, female labor participation rates, opportunity costs for women, and improved health facilities and services are supposed to reduce the real and psychic costs of using contraception and abortion and increase the motivation to use them. Unfortunately, the suppositions of modernization

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theory have never been confirmed by empirical observation [19,20]. The literature on Caribbean demography mirrors world-level ambiguities. For instance, de Albuquerque, Mader and Stinner [21] use aggregate regional data from Puerto Rico for three time periods (1950, 1960 and 1970) to show that fertility was low when measures of urbanization, industrialization, and women’s education were high. However, they also discovered that the explanatory power of the independent variables, both individually and in aggregate, changed over time. They found that urbanization did not directly determine fertility at all. Urbanization influenced fertility only by interacting with the other factors studied. Women’s education had no direct impact on fertility during the earliest period of Puerto Rican development (1950), but it had the major impact at the latest period of development (1970). They suggested there might be a threshold in educational attainment below which regional fertility levels remain unchanged. The possibility that an educational threshold level exists has also been suggested by Jamaican data [22]. In a later study of Puerto Rico, however, Mosher [23] pointed out that urban fertility declined markedly faster than rural fertility during the 1940s and 1960s. Moreover, if, as standard demographic transition theory stipulates, the amount of fertility decline should be directly related to the amount of modernization, then Puerto Rico’s fertility decline should have been greatest during the 1950s. In fact, Puerto Rico’s fertility decline in the 1940s was markedly faster than its fertility decline in the 1950s. Mosher felt that migration was an important determinant of fertility. He argued that Puerto Rico’s fertility did not decline as expected in the 1940s and 1950s because emigration to the U.S. provided a ready outlet that fully offset the island’s natural increase. Emigration thus made the adoption of fertility control unnecessary. Rindfuss [24] found that Puerto Rican migrants to the U.S. exhibited lower fertility than their island counterparts, and thus provided oblique support for Mosher’s claim. However, Rindfuss could not rule out the possibility that lower fertility made it easier to migrate because he conducted his analysis on cross-sectional census data. However, if Mosher’s migration hypothesis is correct for Puerto Rico in the 1950s-we do not know because he did not subject it to even the most elementary test-the hypothesis certainly cannot be correct for the rest of the Caribbean. As many as 1.7 million people may have emigrated from the region during the 1970s [1] when fertility declined on every island except Haiti. Mosher explained the marked decline of marital fertility during the 1960s as a direct consequence of increased industrialization alone. However, like his other speculations, this possibility was never tested. Several recent studies [25-291 show that fertility is low when female labor force participation is high. Unfortunately, no study determines whether work

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selects women with small families or whether women deliberately limit fertility so they can work. Moreover, in one Jamaican study [27], married women (with the highest fertility) had low labor force participation rates and women in visiting relationships (with the lowest fertility) had the highest labor participation rates. We cannot rule out the possibility that the inverse relationship between female labor force participation and fertility merely reflects the well-known inverse relationship between fertility and union stability. Denton’s [25] study of Jamaica shows that when the level of education is high, fertility is low-and that this trend applies only for couples who live together. She showed that early motherhood was significantly and inversely correlated with educational attainment, and she argued that educational attainment affected union status indirectly by determining early motherhood. Unfortunately, Denton did not discriminate between the delay in first pregnancies that educational experiences may create and the possibility that early motherhood was a deliberate life course choice made by women who saw little reason to pursue further education [4, pp. 42441. In their study of the relationships between fertility, migration status, and education in Puerto Rico, Macisco et al. [30] found that younger migrants had lower fertility than older migrants even when education was held constant-and thus uncovered another ambiguity in the supposed relationship between fertility and educational attainment. They offered ad hoc hypotheses deriving from standard social theory to account for this anomaly. Siems [3 l] conducted a comprehensive test of modernization theory with data from Barbados. But she accounted for only lO-27% of the variance in cohort fertility (depending on model specification). IF NOT MODERNIZATION, THEN WHAT FERTILITY?

LOWERS

Resource access theory offers a different view. It tells us we should expect high fertility when women’s welfare is dependent on children and low fertility when it is not. Resource access theory is a theory about what people will do under particular circumstances, so it is a theory about what choices people make. But is is not a theory based on rationality. In fact, it makes no assumptions about people’s propensity to make decisions rationally, arationally, or irrationally. It starts with the observation that ‘life’ is an open energy system and proceeds from the corollary that selection must favour any innovation which optimizes or improves resource access. Resource access theory applies to biological evolution, where the word ‘selection’ refers to the effects of differential reproduction on gene frequencies over one or more generations [32]. However, culture and social behavior can be passed from generation

to generation, or from one person to another, only metaphorically. Resource access theory applied to culture and social relations uses the word ‘selection’ to refer to what happens in the minds and behavior of particular people. People are ‘intelligent’ beings, and thus must use their imaginations to understand their sensory environment [32]. Resource access theory posits that individuals generate a steady stream of conceptual innovations as they wrestle with the problem of understanding a steady stream of material stimuli that have no necessary meaning or relationship to each other. Individual life trajectories thus must take the form of an error-checking process which concentrates conceptual and behavioral innovations that improve or optimize resource access [see 33 for a similar view]. Individuals choose to believe one thing or another, and to act one way or another. Sometimes they make conscious choices; most choices probably are not made consciously. Sometimes they make choices rationally; most choices probably are not made rationally. However they occur, sequences of choices should display a pattern in which future choices correct errors which occur as effects of earlier choices. When alternative choices have the same effect on resource access, no one alternative is an ‘error’. Selection cannot operate. When selection cannot operate, cultural and behavioral diversity emerges. Cultural and behavioral diversity reflects the random intellectual process that generates the pool of diversity on which selection works-it appears arational and whimsical. Cultural and behavioral patterns should emerge around ideas or ways of acting that improve resource access. Alternative ideas and ways of acting that detract from optimum resource access constitute ‘errors’. Selection should act on ‘errors’ to eliminate ideas and behavior that conflict and concentrate ideas and behavior that support each other. Thus, behavioral patterns that optimize or improve resource access should generate cultural norms that rationalize and justify them. Similarly, new ideas that optimize or improve resource access should generate consistent behavioral patterns. One line of reasoning from these beginnings leads to these conclusions [2, pp. 29401:

(1) all patterned social relationships exhibit some degree of cooperation construed in terms of moral obligations and based on material reciprocities; (2) the equality of this two-way flow of material rewards is a function of the power of the people who are interacting; (3) powerful people use the belief that people without power owe more to them than they owe in return to construe unbalanced exchanges (i.e. coercion and exploitation) as acceptable;

West Indian fertility decline (4) people without power act consistently with this belief until increases in the number of gatekeepers creates opportunities to by-pass gatekeepers; (5) increases in the number of gatekeepers or resource access channels can come about in a variety of ways, the effect of outside forces or of a new way to think about the existing set of resources and social actors. People without power look for ways to by-pass existing gatekeepers all the time and use them when they show up. (6) the existence of these opportunities gives power to the people who did not have it and takes power away from the people who did; (7) shifts in power relationships creates moral ambiguity and conflicting moral precepts; (8) if the people without power become the people with power and the people with power become the people without power, the balance of obligations and the flow of material rewards reverses itself. These deductions tell us, first, that social relationships and their attendant moral obligations do not regulate behavior mechanically. Social relations are by nature ambiguous and flexible. They are subject to the processes through which particular social actors clarify ambiguity in their relationship at particular times and places. These deductions tell us, further, that social actors clarify ambiguity in their relationship through a process of negotiation which reflects their ability to control access to, and so function as a gatekeeper for a specific set of resources. The importance of the resources involved, the number of alternative gatekeepers and resource access channels, and the number of potentially competitive resource seekers all combine to determine the relative power of social actors. The relative power of actors generates both the social properties that emerge from their interaction and the moral precepts they use to construe behavior in acceptable ways. By observation, we know that certain biological variables (like a history of sexually-transmitted diseases) influence the ability to conceive and carry a fetus to term, certain social variables (like the proportion of women who are married) influence the probability of conception, and resource availability variables (like nutrition, land scarcities, or real wage rates) influence the ability to conceive and the probability of live births (fertility goes up when resources are abundant and down when they are not) [34]. For example, fertility should fall in a population which experiences a high level of gonorrhea or chlamydia and rise when the incidence of these sexually-transmitted diseases is reduced [35]. Fertility may fall over several decades to very low levels, but fertility should rise to previous levels once the incidence of sexuallytransmitted diseases falls, ceteris paribus. Fertility should also fall as the proportion of married women

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falls, and as the age at marriage (more exactly, the age sexual activity begins) rises. Fertility should rise as the proportion of married women rises, and as the age at marriage falls. Similarly, fertility should fall (or infant mortalities should rise, if infanticide is used to control family size) in a population which experiences resource scarcities. Many eastern European countries experienced fertility declines in the late 1800s and early 1900s due to increased land scarcity [e.g. 361, Japan experienced a similar contraction during the mid 1700s through the mid 1800s [37], and Bangladesh may be experiencing a decline in births due primarily to resource scarcities today [38]. Like fluctuations generated by sexually-transmitted diseases, fertility may fall over several decades to very low levels. But fertility should rise to previous levels once resource scarcities abate, ceteris paribus. Fertility also should vary with the length of time women spend in sexual relationships in which they have strong commitments of support from their partners. In the West Indies, for example, previous studies show that women married legally have the highest fertility, women in common law marriages have slightly lower fertility, and women in visiting unions have the lowest fertility. Previous evaluations treat these fertility differentials as arising from differential coltal frequencies. More likely, as Rose Jones argues [39], they arise from differential resource availability. Visiting unions entail minimal commitments of support from women’s partners. Legal marriages entail significant commitments of support. Oral historical data from Barbados, Antigua, and St Lucia indicate that abortion has most often been used by women in visiting unions. Close observations on St Lucia suggest that women in visiting unions have sex no less frequently than women in other marital unions, but use contraception and (probably) abortion to restrict their fertility [39]. Preliminary observations from Barbados (in 1990) support this conclusion. Thus, we expect fertility to rise as the number of women who spend time in unions which entail significant commitments of support from their partners (i.e. legal marriages) rises. We expect fertility to fall as the number of women who spend time in unions which entail minimal commitements of support from their partners (i.e. visiting unions) rises. Resource access theory tells us that the influence of the first three sets of variables should be offset or intensified by women’s view of the moral economy of childbearing [see 401. Women who view childbearing as an investment activity should have many children relative to constraints and opportunities established by the first three sets of variables. Women who view childbearing as a consumption activity should have few. Resource access theory also tells use that this variable is a function of women’s power relative to their children. Parental power over their children should grow to the extent that they monopolize the channels by

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which their children gain access to resources. Childbearing is an investment activity if children also serve as resource channel gatekeepers for their parents. Indeed, when children are resources, parents can improve or maintain their material wellbeing only if they maximize fertility or completed family size. Under these circumstances, parents can seek resources through a potentially large number of children. Children can seek resources only through one or two parents. Thus, well into their children’s adulthood parents have more power over children than their children have over them. Although parents and children should have mutual obligations, the obligations children have to their parents should take precedence over the obligations parents have to their children. The varied interests of men and women may overlap, but they never constitute identical sets. Women always function as gatekeepers for the resource of children. Women’s power relative to men can be expected to rise when children function as important resources for both men and women, as historically in most African societies. Women’s power relative to men falls when children function as important resource channel gatekeepers only for women, as in historical England [see 21. Childbearing constitutes an investment activity for women when their material wellbeing is dependent either directly or indirectly on their children. Thus, high fertility is one effect of resource access cost structure and the means that women (not men) can use to gain access to resources. Conversely, childbearing becomes a consumption activity when children do not function as important resource channel gatekeepers. Children cannot function as resource channel gatekeepers when resource access opportunities increase and become a function of technical skills and competences. Children should use these new resource access channels to escape the power of their parents. As adults, they find that their own children detract from, rather than improve, their resource access. Under these circumstances, parents can optimize or improve their resource access only if they sharply restrict their childbearing. Parents and children still should have mutual obligations. Because the number of resource access channels increases for children, however, parental power diminishes. Even as young adults, children’s power over their parents may exceed that of their parents over them. Parental expectations of their children should fall, and adults should come to believe that their obligations to their children take precedence over the obligations their children have to them. Both parents and their children (when they reach reproductive age) can be expected to believe that childbearing should not take precedence over other goals and activities. Historically, fertility appears to have fluctuated little as a function of women’s power relations with their children, for women have rarely been able

to access resources independently of their children. Women’s ability to do so appears to be an historically-recent phenomenon, a function of implications of the industrial revolution. Women’s ability to access resources independently of their children thus appears to distinguish the historically-recent and dramatic declines to below-replacement fertility of the last 100 yr from fertility fluctuations documented from earlier time periods. Thus, fertility transition should be characterized by reproductive behavioral changes that reflect a shift from the view that childbearing is an investment activity to the view that childbearing is a consumption activity. Fertility transition should occur where, when, and to the extent that women are empowered to pursue goals independently of their childbearing capacity.

EXPECTATIONS

AND EVIDENCE

These conclusions differ extensively from those of standard demographic transition theory. Resource access theory says that rising standards of living should increase fertility, not lower it. Moreover, large families may increase access to new goods and services. High rates of infant and child mortality may support high fertility, but one should expect that mortality dissociates from fertility among women who come to look on childbearing as a consumption activity. Urbanization should have no independent effect on fertility because it is unrelated to the criterion (how women look at childbearing) that selects for large or small families. Education should have no bearing no fertility unless women use it to bypass the resources accessible directly or indirectly through children. The same qualification applies to working women. Female labor participation rates are highest, and approximate loo%, in preindustrial and protoindustrial populations that have the highest fertility. Rising opportunity costs for women come into being only after women have been empowered to pursue goals independently of their childbearing capacity. Fertility transition presupposes the existence and use of effective means of contraception and abortion. But women can use contraception, abortion, or other means (like abstinence, which is used so commonly in Africa to space births) either to maximize completed family size or to keep family size to a desired minimum. Family planning programs cannot bring about fertility transition because they cannot create the well-paying employment accessible on the basis of individual skill and competence that empowers women to pursue goals independently of their childbearing capacity. Which view, modernization or resource access theory, best fits the data? Recent historical studies of fertility transition in England Sicily, Sweden, and Japan support resource access theory [2,35,41G44].

West Indian fertility decline So do two panel studies which use national aggregated data. One [43] studies changes in fertility between 1960 and 1980 in more than 100 countries around the world. The other [44] replicates the first with data on changes in period total fertility between 1980 and 1987 in African and Caribbean countries. FERTILITY AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY GENDER ON BARBADOS AND ANTIGUA

OF

The historical experience of Barbados and Antigua also supports resource access theory. West Indian family relations historically exemplify an extreme in the political economy of gender relations. Fathers often are not husbands and even when they are, frequently do not live with the mother and her children. Even when they do, they may contribute little to domestic life. What they contribute, other than a house and money, all too often is violence directed at the mother and children. Sexual activity usually begins early with a series of girlfriends who trade sex for economic support and children (called ‘visiting’ or ‘keeper’ relationships). Visiting unions may give way to common law marriages which, when a couple is older, a church ceremony may legitimate. However, young people are not the only ones who have visiting relationships. Historically, West Indian islands have been job-poor. Men left the islands in large numbers looking for work, which left significantly more women than men at nearly all ages. So, many women cannot legally marry. Lower class men may never marry. Moreover, no relationship implies men’s sexual fidelity. Lower class men commonly drift from one temporary sexual partner to another. Married men in the middle and upper classes commonly engage in a series of visiting relationships with ‘outside’ women. Men and many women thus have many sexual partners. Married women usually have very few partners (perhaps only one). They are, nonetheless, nearly always part of a sweeping network of sexual relationships. Historically, they also had as many children as their fecundity and sexual activities allowed. Prior to 1960, the Barbadian economy was characterized by an uncompetitive and oligopolistic resource structure the primary effect of which was to allocate opportunities largely on the basis of personal relationships, and these on the basis of sex, class, and color [see 2 for greater detail]. Prior to ca 1965, resource structure on Antigua was similarly oligarchic [45,46]. Sugar dominated the economy of both islands. A small number of employers controlled the private sector, so they were not subject to significant levels of competition. Consistent employment and advancement opportunities, especially prestigeous civil service or bank positions, were conditional on personal contacts and personal recommendations. These, in turn, were conditional on sex, class, and color, roughly in that order of importance. In these

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sharply stratified and mostly lower class societies, women constituted an underclass. Men’s choices dictated the opportunites available for their partners and daughters. Women worked in large numbers on both islands, but almost solely in the most menial occupations for wages far lower than men’s. Some women became teachers, nurses, or clerks-more so on Antigua than on Barbados (on Barbados, nearly everyone belonged to the lower class). But most women worked as domestic servants, seamstresses, hucksters, road gang workers, or field laborers. Parents expected sons to support themselves by the time they were in the late teens or early 20s. Lower class families, especially, expected sons to contribute to the family income. By contrast, parents hoped that someone would marry their daughter so they no longer had to feed, house, and clothe her. A woman’s material welfare thus was conditional on liens she held on mens’s wages. These she gained through sexual relationships. Such relationships, however, were unstable for most women. Relationships were rarely satisfactory in fundamental ways even when they were stable. Women looked for a good man who would marry them legally. Women from middle and upper middle class homes almost always married, as did many women from lower class homes. But even stable relationships required a women’s subservience, for men controlled women’s opportunities. For example, legal marriage was a particularly important means to improve women’s material welfare and that of their children. It legitimized the inheritance rights of a woman and her children, made it possible for her children to take advantage of educational and occupational opportunities that were closed to children born to couples who were not married, and made it possible for her to pursue middle class career ladders (nursing, teaching) which were closed to unmarried women who became pregant. Marriage gave men rewards, too. But it was their choice to marry or not, not women’s Also, marriage rarely constrained men’s freedom. Women often traded one form of servitude (poverty) for another (for some, a form of slavery) when they married. As adults, men of all classes spent little time in their houses. They rose early, left for work, returned in the evening to wash and clean up, eat dinner, discipline the children if it was appropriate, and left again to spend time with friends. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that men did not exert sweeping control over household affairs merely because they were not active, daily participants in those affairs. Women catered to men and their preferences. It was a man’s prerogative to mete out physical or mental abuse when his partner did not meet his wishes. On both islands, women commented: “Some men acted as if they wanted a slave or something”. Wives and girlfriends had little recourse, other than to find shelter in the home of a female friend or relative.

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W. PENN HANDWERKER

Women without sexual partners did not have these constraints, of course. But they were also likely to be poor. One of two principal exceptions was (primarily Antiguan) women from the middle and upper middle classes who had not found a suitable partner from among the men of her own social class and who had independent employment-and support from their family. The other, encompassing women from both Antigua and Barbados, was middle-aged and older women who had sons to support them. But maternal support conflicted with spousal support. In their teens and early 20s young men were heavily dependent on the cooking, washing, ironing, and other services provided by their mothers, even if they had moved out of their mother’s house to live alone or with friends. Mothers, in turn, expected financial support from their sons. Visiting relationships threatened a mother’s finanical well-being directly, unless her son had an unusually good income. Her son’s girlfriend soon learned how much he earned and how much of this that he gave his mother. The girl argued that the boy now had new responsibilities. These were primarily to her and the child that usually accompanied the union. The boy needed to cut the apron strings. In short, he had to reduce the pay he shared with his mother. So, mothers in poor circumstances, the majority, frequently tried to break up early relationships. Mothers were not always subtle. Persistent and severe maternal criticism often succeeded. A girl’s financial support stopped when her boyfriend broke off the relationship. Some men continued to provide some support for their child. Over time, however, child support usually dwindled and eventually ceased. On Antigua, mothers could ask the court to award child support if their baby’s father ceased providing it. However, providing evidence in court was embarrassing, men commonly denied paternity, paternity might be difficult to show conclusively, and, even if the court’s decision ruled in favor of the woman, the man might be out of a job. Courts could send a man who refused child support to prison for a spell, but that did not help the young mother. A number of men found a month in prison attractive when they had to choose between that and long-term child support. Women found that repeated requests and visits often were necessary to elicit support from men who would help. A good operational assumption was that men provided only as much support as they had to. So, a single woman with children often had to struggle along primarily on meager wages or with parental assistance until she could establish a new visiting relationship. A new relationship, however, did not mean economic security. This was true for married women, as it was for women in visiting relationships. Often, the time men spent away from the house in the evening with friends was time with girlfriends. Nearly all women younger than about 40 needed a man. But extensive migration off these islands for work meant

that, from the 1950s through the 198Os, there were few men relative to women in the age range 20-50. These circumstances created intense competition among women. Thus, on both Antigua an Barbados, men were both gatekeepers and scarce. Women were resource seekers with little to exchange for material support other than their sexuality and childbearing capacities. Men exploited women’s economic dependence. Women turned childbearing into a singularly effective means to escape subservience to unsatisfactory partners. Bearing children was essential for receiving help from men during a woman’s youth. In middle age, grown children who supported their mother provided a means to escape dependence on unsatisfying relationships with men. Later, remittances from children made the difference between abject poverty and a reasonable, or even a comfortable old age. Because childbearing entailed only investment expenditures, women experienced fertility levels limited only by constraints on their fecundity and by constraints on sexual activity implicit in their spousal unions. Between 1955 and 1965, the Barbadian economy underwent a major structural discontinuity marked by decline in the importance of sugar and the ascendancy of industrial manufacturing and tourism. The economic well-being of these sectors was subject to selection on the basis of quality and cost factors set in international markets. Consequently, employment and upward mobility in these sectors, and in sectors supporting manufacturing and tourism, came to be subject to selection on the basis of performance rather than personal relationships with employers. New and competitive resource access channels opened. Young men, unlike their fathers and grandfathers, were not placed in a position in which they had to exploit their women and alienate their children to respond rationally to the resource structure. Young women, unlike their mothers and grandmothers, could find work that permitted them an independence from men and childbearing. Women stayed in school longer and used their education to find jobs with wages and working conditions vastly better than those available to their mothers and grandmothers. By the 1980s Barbadian women were able to control their own lives in ways that had been denied their mothers and grandmothers. Children could no longer serve effectively as resource access channels. Children thus became consumer durables-albeit very special ones-and bearing children became a consumption activity in which parents had to choose between children or television sets and videos. Because parents have special obligations to their children-once they are born-that can and do take precedence over many (and perhaps all) other consumer choices, it became morally wrong for bearing children to take precedence over a woman’s personal

West Indian fertility decline goals and dreams. Moral obligations to mothers that used to be taken for granted-‘giving was like breathing’ an older woman observed-became a major source of conflict between mothers who believed that their children should support them and children who believed that they owed their mothers nothing. It also became a major source of conflict among adult siblings, who began to quarrel about who should help support their mother, and in what amounts. Period total fertility declined as more and more women came to believe that childbearing was a consumption activity. Antiguan women found equivalent opportunities to escape dependence on men and childbearing beginning in the mid 1960s after the Antiguan economy underwent a structural change marked by a shift from plantation agriculture to tourism and light industry. In many respects, the Antiguan economy is still oligarchic-far more so, for example, than Barbados, although less so than St Lucia. Whereas expanding job opportunities for women on Barbados arose largely from an increasingly competitive economic system, expanding job opportunities on Antigua arose primarily from very rapid growth in tourism and state capitalism [47]. Women had new job opportunities because there were not the men to fill them. However, most of the new job opportunities have required high levels of educational and technical skills. Women have had increasing access to formal schooling and technical training. They, too, stayed in school longer than their mothers and grandmothers and used their education to take advantage of new employment opportunities in increasing numbers. Since the mid 1960s consequently, increasing numbers of Antiguan women, like their Barbadian peers, have looked at childbearing as a consumption rather than an investment activity. Total fertility levels fell accordingly. Analyses reported elsewhere [2,44] show that the fertility of individual women on both Barbados and Antigua can be explained by the same model (see Table 1). Variation in fertility is due to biological constraints on fecundity, variation in the probability of conception inherent to different forms of sexual unions (legal marriage, common law marriage, and visiting unions), and the degree to which women view childbearing as an investment or consumption activity. The interaction of these variables accounts for >60% of the variability in fertility among both Barbadian and Antiguan women. Parameter estimates show that one would expect Antiguan women to have an average of 6.755 children by age 35 if they had no education, no sign of early sterility, spent 15 yr in a legal marriage prior to age 35 and no time in any other union, and believed childbearing was an investment activity. Antiguan women who differ only in believing that childbearing was a consumption activity would be expected to have only 2.135 children, on average. This is the difference between the high fertility of the 1950s and the replacement-level

1253

Table 1. Determinants of individual childbearing trajectories, bados and Antigua, West Indies Estimated by age 30 (Barbados)

Bar-

live births by age 35 (Antigua)

Constant (f-statistic) Interaction of biological constraints, duration of legal marriage, and moral economy index (t-statistic)

1.284 (3.6)

2.135 (6.6)

0.131 (16.3)

0.077 (16.2)

Interaction of biological constraints, duration of common law marriage, and moral economy index (r-statistic)

0.126 (13.9)

0.089 (12.1)

Interaction of biological constraints, duration of visiting union, and moral economy index (f-statistic)

0.107 (16.5)

0.076 (16.7)

Educational (r-statistic) Adjusted N

r2

attainment

by age 20

-0.107 (-3.0) 0.618 436

-0.120 (-4.0) 0.686 428

Source: [44].

fertility of the 1980s. The findings for Barbados show the same effect [2, pp. 165-1661. Modernization theory suggests that the fertility of individual women should be influenced by urbanization, westernization, and eduction. But tests [2,44] show that neither urbanization nor westernization influenced the fertility of either Barbadian or Antiguan women. Education reduced individual-level fertility. But it did so directly only in minor ways. Education did not alter individual childbearing trajectories. Education reduced the number of children individual women bore, but only because women delayed childbearing while they were in school and, thus, not by very much. For example, Barbadian data show that women experienced a reduction of only about 1 live birth, on average, solely from a completed college education. By contrast, women who believed that childbearing was a consumption activity could be expected to have about 4.6 fewer children at each educational level than women who believed that childbearing was an investment activity. Antiguan data reveal the same. In Antigua, a completed college degree reduced expected fertility by only 1.92 children on average. Antiguan women with college degrees spending 15 yr in a legal marriage would be expected to have an average of 4.835 children, if they believed childbearing was an investment activity. Antiguan women who differed only in believing that childbearing was a consumption activity would be expected to have only 0.215 children, on average. Detailed analyses of macro-level data for Barbados [2] show that fertility transition occurred independently of changes in the level of women’s education, rising standards of living, and infant mortality. The level of women’s educational attainments was important, but only as it was linked with growth in

1254

W. PENN HANDWERKER Table 2. Time series models of Antigua”

Estimated TFR Constant (f-statistic) Infant mortality (r-statistic) Women’s educational attainment (t-statistic) Gross domestic product (f-statistic) Index of real wages (r-statistic) Percentage of wmen who look at childbearing (r-statistic) Adjusted r2 F-ratio

as an investment

Maximum condition index First order autocorrelation Standard

period total fertility,

err”r of the estimate

jobs requiring higher levels of education. Period total fertility rose with increases in real income. Thus, the doubling of real income on Barbados actually reduced the rate at which fertility fell. Macro-level data for Antigua do not perfectly match those for Barbados, but they reveal much the same findings. For example, Table 2 shows the results of linear regression tests for the effects of education, infant mortality, and rising standards of living on Antiguan period total fertility over the period 1953-1988 [47]. Period total fertility is estimated as it was for Barbados with retrospective birth histories collected from an island-wide random sample of Antiguan women stratified by 5 yr age cohorts. Infant mortality, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the index of real wages were constructed with data reported by the Government of Antigua. Women’s average level of educational attainment at age 20 and the proportion of women who viewed childbearing as an investiment activity were constructed from sample data. These variables were measured for each sample age group and assigned to the year in which women of that age group turned 20. Missing values were inputed with LOWESS smoothing. The first model tests for effects of five independent variables. If modernizaton theory is correct, we expect fertility to fall with increases in education, decreases in infant mortality, and increases in the standard of living (as measured by the index of real wages). If resource access theory is correct, we expect fertility to rise with increases in real wage rates, and fall with decreases in the proportion of women who view childbearing as an investment activity. GDP may capture effects posited by both theories, so its effects are not theoretically significant. Model I explains about 76% of the variance in period total fertility between 1953-1988. But infant mortality and educational attainment have very low t-statistics-neither variable either raises or lowers fertility. Increases in the standard of living as measured by real wage rates do not lower fertility.

1953-1988

Model I

Model II

Model III

- 19.614 (-1.85) -0.001 ( - 0.06) + 1.780 (+1.86) -0.008 (-2.50) + 1.766 (+ 2.40) f0.167 (+3.23) 0.764 21.766 P < 0.001 171.763 -0.113 (SE = 0.174) 0.893

- 19.614 (- 1.81)

0.337 (0.34)

+ 1.795 (+ 1.81) -0.008 ( - 2.48) + 1.767 ( + 2.46) +0.167 (+3.29) 0.777 28.213 P < 0.001 142.706 -0.114 (SE = 0.174) 0.877

-0.004 (-2.14) + I.684 (+2.35) +0.066 (+5.52) 0.732 30.183 P < 0.001 27.261 + 0.068 (SE = 0.174) 0.952

They raise it. Increases in GDP lowered Antiguan period total fertility, as did reductions in the proportion of Antiguan women who viewed childbearing as a consumption activity. Model II results show what happens when we eliminate the infant mortality variable. The model explains about 77% of the variance in period total fertility, but educational attainment still has a low t-statistic. Increases in real wages still raise fertility. Increases in GDP still lower Antiguan period total fertility, as do reductions in the proportion of Antiguan women who viewed childbearing as a consumption activity. Model III results show what happens when we eliminate the education variable. This last model accounts for about 73% of the variance in the period total fertility time series. Fertility fell as GDP rose. Fertility rose as the proportion of women who looked at childbearing as an investment activity rose, and fell as the proportion of women who looked at childbearing as an investment activity fell. Fertility rose with increases in real wages. These findings clearly support resource access theory. LESSONS

FROM

BARBADOS

AND ANTIGUA

Barbadian and Antiguan history thus teaches us that dependent women have big families and independent women have small ones. Conditions that increase women’s power relative to their children, parents, and spouses contribute to reductions in fertility. Other conditions do not. The Caribbean faces less of a ‘population problem’ than a power relations problem. On both Barbados and Antigua, women who were dependent on men and children in the 1950s were replaced in the 1980s by women able to chart their own course in life independently of their children. This change marked a dramatic change in women’s freedom and thus in their ability to make real choices about what to do with their lives.

West Indian Their ability to make these choices was not the product of a ‘modernization’ process that consisted of highly interdependent changes in many areas of social and economic life. On the contrary, women’s ability to make real choices is clearly linked with historical changes in only two dimensions of social life (power and resource access) and in only two related variables: education and jobs. The Antiguan. and Barbadian fertility transitions thus were functions of economic structural discontinuities which created new resource access channels for women and, so, empowered them.

EFFECTIVE

POLICIES

CREATE REAL CHOICES

The policy message is clear: if the objective is to achieve fertility transition, do not expect results from increased levels of literacy, education, urbanization, real income, or from well-run and financed family planning programs. Policy that leads to fertility transition must first change the cost structure of resource access. Policy may do so directly, as in China and Singapore. Alternatively, policy must create good jobs, for women as well as men, that reward individual skills and performance. In the modern world, these jobs require high levels of schooling. So policy also must create an educational system open to women which provides the skills that qualify them for employment which frees them from dependency on their children. Family planning programs do not make women independent of their children. They can neither create the jobs, nor provide the necessary education, that permit women to achieve meaningful control over their own lives. Consequently, family planning programs cannot, and should not be expected to lead to declines in fertility. Policy-makers who want family planning programs to do so will be disappointed. The marked reductions in birth rates known as ‘fertility transition’ seem unrelated to changes that may occur in men’s lives. The human right to have small families exists as a meaningful, legitimate expectation only when women can realistically expect to achieve and maintain an independence from their children. Of course, once women experience these changes in power and opportunities and marital fertility declines to very low levels, it is as hard to raise fertility as it appeared to be to reduce it, as Hungary recently found [36]. It does not follow that donor funding for family planning programs should be reduced. It does follow that effective policy decisions require a more sophisticated understanding of development if they are to provide an optimal mix of services, facilities, costs, and personnel training appropriate for the needs of different populations. Such a perspective requires a clearer understanding of contraceptive usage.

fertility

decline

1255

Women can use family planning programs for many purposes, only a few of which are associated with reductions in fertility. Moreover, family planning programs are not the only sources of fertility control technologies. Tirbani Jagdeo, the head of the Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation, points out that “ . . problems of access to contraceptives in the Caribbean are less problems of physical convenience and economic sufficiency and more problems of personal and social inhibitions to contraceptive use.. .” [3, p. 1411. Finally, women use fertility control technologies for many reasons and in ways which may or may not reduce their fertility. In severe economic circumstances, contraception and abortion may substitute for infanticide, which until recently was one of the few effective ways to limit family size. However, declines in fertility which stem from these conditions do not constitute the phenomenon of fertility transition as it is usually understood. Jack Harewood has recently suggested “ . . . to the extent that the increased use of contraception has contributed to the recent decline of fertility in the Caribbean, both the national problems of development and the personal problems of family improvement have been responsible” [48, cf. 491. If he is right, we should expect fertility to rise when economic circumstances improve, Contraception and abortion should bring about fertility transition only when women are freed from dependency on their children. Family planning programs contribute to a distinctive set of important health and human rights goals. They distribute birth control knowledge and technologies to people who want to use them, but who otherwise may not get them. They provide medical attention that otherwise might not be available. They provide contact with people who can offer encouragement, emotional support, and perhaps professional counselling, in ways that respect women’s integrity. Perhaps most importantly, family planning programs offer women means to circumvent some of the control over their lives exercised by men and the extensions of men’s power represented by formal governmental and church organizations. Family planning programs thus can help women realize new choices. That, after all, is what ‘development’ is all about. Family planning program success should be judged with reference to these goals, not fertility decline. Acknowledgements-The research reported here was funded by National Science Foundation grant Nos BNS 8507605, 8520445, and 8804719, and an American Republics Senior Scholar Research Grant from the Fulbright-Hayes program. I am most grateful for this support, but the opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the view of either funding agency. Carolyn Sargent, Linda Whiteford, and a Social Science & Medicine referee helpfully pointed out ambiguities in an earlier draft. Both the former provided valuable additional data on Jamaica and the Dominican Republic respectively.

W. PENN HANDWERKER

1256 REFERENCES

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26. Davidson M. Female work status and fertility in urban Latin America. Sot. econom. Stud. 27, 481, 1978. and fertility: 27. Powell D. Female labor force participation an exploratory study of Jamaican women. Sot. econom. Stud. 25, 234, 1976. 28. George P. M., Ebanks G. E. and Nobbe C. E. Labor force participation and fertility, contraceptive knowledge, attitude, and practice of the women of Barbados. J. camp. Fam. Stud. 7, 273, 1976. In Women 29. Massiah J. Women who head households. and the Family (Edited by Massiah J.), Vol. 2: Women in the Caribbean Project, p. 62. Institute of Social and Economic Research (Eastern Caribbean), University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, 1982. status, education, and 30. Macisco J. J. et al. Migration fertility in Puerto Rico. Mlbank meml Fund. Bull. 47, 167, 1979. 31. Seims S. A Cohort Analysis of Fertility Decline in Barbados. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1978. W. P. The origins and evolution of culture. 32. Handwerker Am. Anthropol. 91, 313, 1989. 33. Hammel E. A. A theory of culture for demography. Populat. dev. Rev. 16, 455, 1990. which 34. We also expect fertility to fall in a population experiences an increased mean period of lactation and to rise when the mean period of lactation falls, but the effect of lactation is very small relative to the effects of sexually-transmitted diseases and sexual union variables. 35. Cates W., Rolfs R. T. and Aral S. 0. Sexually transmitted diseases, pelvic inflammatory disease, and infertility: an epidemiologic update. Epidemiol. Rev. 12, 199, 1990. fertil36. Simonelli J. M. The politics of below-replacement ity: policy and power in Hungary. In Births and Power (Edited by Handwerker W. P.), p. 101. Westview, Boulder, Colo., 1990. families and 37. Eng R. Y. and Smith T. C. Peasant population control in eighteenth-century Japan. J. Interdiscipl. Hist. 6, 417, 1976. 38. Pillsbury B. The politics of family planning: sterilization and human rights in Bangladesh. In Births and Power (Edited by Handwerker W. P.), p. 165. Westview, Boulder, Cola., 1990. from Rose Jones, 1990. 39. Personal communication 40. Caldwell J. C. Theory of Fertility Decline. Academic Press, San Francisco, 1982. 41. Mosk C. Patriarchy and Fertility, Japan and Sweden 1880-1960. Academic Press, New York, 1983. tran42. Schneider J. and Schneider P. The demographic sition of landpoor peasants in a Sicilian rural town. Paper presented at the 85th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 1984. W. P. The modern demographic transition. 43. Handwerker Am. Anthropol. 88, 400, 1986. W. P. Women’s power and fertility tran44. Handwerker sition: the cases of Africa and the Caribbean. Popular. Environ. 13, 55, 1991. tourism and class/race struc45. Henry P. De-colonization, ture in Antigua. In Contemporary Caribbean, A Socialogical Reader (Edited by Craig S.), p. 39. The College Press, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1981. 46. Henry P. Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1985. 47. All models reported in Table 2 yielded normally distributed residuals which showed no serial correlation. Residuals were slightly heteroskedastic, so tests were based on heteroskedastic-consistent standard errors. . . Condition indexes for the tirst and second models show a multicollinearity problem. Multicollinearity is not a problem for the third model. The multicollinearity in these models comes from a very close relationship betweeen Women’s educational

West Indian fertility decline attainment and the percentage of women who viewed childbearing as an investment. Better measurements might well show that increases in women’s educational attainment helped lower Antiguan period total fertility. Indeed, the findings from analyses of the fertility of individual women (Table 1) say that we should find some such influence, even if it is only slight. The GDP variable in the current data may capture this influence.

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48. Harewood J. Introduction

In Con(Edited by Craig S.), p. 39. The College Press, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1981. 49. Diaz-Briquets S. and Perez L. The demography of revolution. In Cuban Communism (Edited by Horowitz I. L.), p. 409, 6th Edn. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987. temporary

Caribbean,

and background.

A Sociological

Reader