A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: Bi-modal Fertility Dynamics and Family Life in French-Canadian Quebec

Abstract

Historians have struggled with an ingrained perception of what constituted the “traditional” Quebec family at the beginning of the twentieth century. Early studies on the demographic history of Quebec portrayed women as generators of large families, a practice prescribed by the political elite as well as the Catholic Church. The new social history, and most especially the recent generation of feminist-inspired historians, has revisited and criticized the myth of the large family. Aggregated demographic statistics would indicate that francophone families continued to produce significantly more children than their English-speaking counterparts well into the twentieth century, despite a longstanding experience of industrialization, urbanization and contraception — the so-called hallmarks of modernization. Yet statistics also make clear that, even before the onset of declining fertility in the late nineteenth century, the majority of Quebec families did not do so, and there was in fact wide variation in family size. The real distinctiveness of Quebec’s fertility decline was its unique and persistent minority of very large families that disappeared virtually overnight in the mid-twentieth century when the children of these families chose not to continue the pattern.