Before their time : employment and family formation in a Northern textile town, Keighley, 1851-81.

This thesis studies the phenomenon of low fertility amongst midto
late- nineteenth century textile workers by examining fertility
behaviour in the context of one contemporary textile town; the worsted
centre of Keighley, in Yorkshire's West Riding.
The high level of women's work, both before and after marriage,
to be found in the textile districts has long been said to lie behind
the low levels of fertility there. Using the census enumerators'
books returned for Keighley in 1851,1861,1871 and 1881 the fertility
levels and patterns of various occupational and class groups were
calculated in order to assess the effects of the town's high level of
female employment on its inhabitants' marital fertility. The
measures used, however, are shown to give a distorted impression of
fertility behaviour due to the point-in-time nature of the census data.
With the aid of a computer Nominal Record Linkage was undertaken
to gain a clearer picture of the family building strategies of different
individuals, and various groups, over time.
The patterns which emerge from the two types of analysis suggest
that women in Keighley could, or would, not work when they had several
children. They further suggest that the low fertility levels in the
town during the early years of the study period were the result of
younger married women not achieving a normal fertility potential,
rather than older women limiting the number of their children in a
parity specific way, which became an increasingly common practice by
the 1880s. A debate is conducted as to whether the lack of fertility
amongst young married women was deliberate in order that they might
elongate their work-span, or whether it was the result of long years of
work having adverse consequences for the female textile workers'
reproductive systems.