The Family World System (Page 4)

In one zone, however, Therborn tracks a major change. After marrying as never before in the middle decades of the century, Western Europeans started to secede from altar and registry in increasing numbers. Sweden was once again the vanguard country, and it still remains well ahead of its Scandinavian neighbors, not to speak of lands farther south. The innovation it pioneered, from the late 1960s onward, was mass informal cohabitation. Thirty years later, the great majority of Swedish women giving birth to their first child--nearly 70 percent--were either cohabiting or single mothers. Marriage might or might not follow cohabitation. What became a minority option, in one country after another--Britain, France, Germany--was marriage before it. In Catholic France and Protestant England alike, extramarital births jumped from 6-8 percent to 40-42 percent in the space of four decades.

Manifestly, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s lay behind this spectacular transformation. Therborn notes the arrival of the pill and IUD as facilitating conditions, but he is more interested in consequences. What did it add up to? In effect, a double liberation: more partners and--especially for women--more pleasure. In Finland in the early 1970s, women had bedded an average of three men; in the early '90s the number had risen to six (by then the gap in erotic satisfaction between the sexes had closed). In Sweden the median number of women's lovers more than tripled during the same period, a much greater increase than for men. "More than anything else," Therborn concludes, "this is what the sexual revolution has brought: a long period for pre-marital sex, and a plurality of sexual partners over a lifetime becoming a 'normal' phenomenon, in a statistical as well as in a moral sense."

How far does the United States conform to the emergent European pattern? Only in part, as its different religious and political complexion would lead one to expect. Europeans will be astonished to learn that in 2000 about a fifth of American 18- to 24-year-olds claimed to be virgins on their wedding day. Only 6 percent of American couples cohabited. More than 70 percent of mothers at first birth are married. On the other hand, the United States has nearly twice as many teenage births per cohort as the highest country in the EU and an extramarital birthrate higher than that of the Netherlands. Without going much into race or region, Therborn describes the American system as "dualist." But from the evidence he provides, it might be thought that electoral divisions are reflected in sexual contrasts, blue and red in the boudoir too.

In the last part of Between Sex and Power, Therborn moves to fertility. Here the conundrum is the "demographic transition"--the standard term for the shift from a regime of low growth, combining lots of children and many early deaths, to one of high growth, combining many children but fewer deaths, and then back to another one of low growth, this time with both fewer deaths and fewer children. There is no mystery about the way medical advances and better diets led to falling rates of mortality in nineteenth-century Europe and eventually reached most of the world, to similar effect, in the second half of the twentieth century. The big question is why birthrates fell, first in Europe and North America between the 1880s and 1930s, and then for the majority of the human race from the mid-1970s onward, in two uncannily similar waves. In each case, "a process rapidly cutting through and across state boundaries, levels of industrialization, urbanization and levels of income, across religions, ideologies and family systems" slashed fertility rates by 30-40 percent in three decades. Today, the average family has no more than two to three children throughout most of the former Third World.

What explains these gigantic changes? The first nations to experience a significant fall in fertility were France and the United States, by 1830--generations in advance of all others. What they had in common, Therborn suggests, was their popular revolutions, which had given ordinary people a sense of self-mastery. Once the benefits of smaller families became clear in these societies, neolocality allowed couples to make their own decisions to improve their lives before any modern means of contraception were available. Fifty years later, perhaps triggered initially by the onset of a world recession, mass birth control began to roll through Europe, eventually sweeping all the way from Portugal to Russia. This time, Therborn's hypothesis runs, it was a combination of radical socialist and secular movements popularizing the idea of family planning, together with the spread of literacy, that brought lower fertility as part of an increasingly self-conscious culture of modernity. This was birth control from below.

In the Third World, by contrast, contraception--now an easy technology--was typically propagated or imposed from above, by political fiat of the state. China's one-child policy has been the most dramatic, if extreme, example. Once lower birthrates became a general goal of governments committed to modernization, family systems then determined the order in which societies entered the new regime: East Asia in the lead, North India and black Africa far in the rear guard. Here too it was a sense of mastery, of human ability to command nature--not always bureaucratic in origin, since the better-off societies of Latin America moved more spontaneously in the same direction--that powered the change. The consequences of that change, of which we can still see only the beginnings, are enormous. Without it, the earth would now have some 2 billion more inhabitants.

In Europe and Japan, meanwhile, fertility has dropped no less dramatically, falling below net reproduction rates. This collapse in the birthrate, from which the United States is saved essentially by immigration, promises rapid aging of these nations in the short run and, if unchecked, virtual extinction of them in the long run. There is now a growing literature of public alarm about this prospect, what the French historian Pierre Chaunu denounces as a "White Death" threatening the Old World. Therborn eschews it. Negative rates of reproduction in these rich, socially advanced societies do not correspond in his view to any birth strike by women but rather to their desire to have two to three children and careers that are the equal of men's, which the existing social order does not yet allow them to do. In denying themselves the offspring they want, European parents are "moving against themselves," not with the grain of any deeper cultural change.

Between Sex and Power ends with four principal conclusions. The different family systems of the world reveal little internal logic of change. They have been recast from the outside, and the history of their transformations has been neither unilinear nor evolutionary but rather determined by a series of unevenly timed international conjunctures of a decidedly political character. The result has not been one of convergence, other than in a general decline of patriarchy, due more to wars and revolutions than to any "feminist world spirit." In the South, the differential timing of changes in fertility continues to shift the distribution of global population further toward the subcontinent and Africa and away from Europe, Japan and Russia. In the North, European marriage has altered its forms but is proving supple and creative in adapting to a new range of desires: Conventional jeremiads notwithstanding, it is in good shape. Predictions? Serenely declined. "The best bet for the future is on the inexhaustible innovative capacity of humankind, which eventually surpasses all social science."

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