L, March.Sociology and Eugenics.27
THE FERTILITY OF MARRIAGES ACCORDING TO
PROFESSION AND SOCIAL POSITION.
(Abstract.)
By M. Lucien March,
Directeur de la Statistique Generale de la France.
Statistics of families furnish, perhaps, the most appropriate data for
the examination of the factors which govern the productiveness of marriages
or their sterility.
Statistics concerning the children born in the eleven and a half million
French families, classed according to occupation, have been prepared in
France for the first time as a result of the census of 1906. These
statistics give information as to the number of children per family, either
alive on the day of the census or previously deceased, in each occupation,
for all the families in the whole country taken together, and for the
different provinces. Further, a special investigation of the 200,000
families of employees and workmen in the public services has furnished
more circumstantial details, which have enabled the number of children
and number of deaths of children in a family to be brought into relation
with the income of the head.
The results obtained by the method described above are the subject
of this report. The effects of occupation, social position and income are
analysed by means of co-efficients expressing the productiveness of marri
ages, after eliminating the influence of such factors as duration of1 marriage,
age, and habitat, all of which may obviously affect the productiveness of
a marriage. These results confirm what has been learnt from previous researches
of the fertility of different social classes, but they go further in that they
show that the difference is not exclusively dependent on income.
In general there are more children per family in the families of work
men than in the families of employers, and the latter contain more than
those of employees other than workmen. Further, one finds industries in
which the number of children in the employers’ families is larger than in
the families of workmen in other industries. Thus, differences are intro
duced by the occupation. Industries employing many hands seem the
more favourable to the production of large families, both among workmen
and among employers. Agriculture, in which a large number of persons
are engaged in France, does not seem to conduce to fertility. Fishermen
and sailors in the merchant service, on the other hand, appear to form the
class in which fertility is the most considerable.
The importance of the occupational factor is such that we could place
its influence on the same plane as that of “ concentration ” of population,
