Was there any gendered preferences for children during the fertility transition? Results from Germany 1825–1900

Demographers demonstrate an increasing interest for studying parental gender preferences in developing countries and more developed societies. They find an association between the sex-composition of living offspring and the probability of having an additional child. In history, parents’ gender preferences have proven difficult to verify. This study makes use of John Knodel’s German village genealogies to obtain knowledge on this issue during a period of fertility transition, 1825-1900. Couples at first marriage who gave birth to minimum four children are targeted. Event history analyses (Cox regression models) of couples’ duration and propensity to progress to fifth parity, helps us to test if the probability to have additional children was influenced by the sex-composition of surviving children at lower parities. It appears that preferences for son(s) did influence parents’ reproductive behavior, as those having only girls experienced the highest transition rates to fifth parity. However, couples married from approximately 1870 onward started to exhibit a fertility behavior consistent with the desire to have at least one surviving boy and girl. That the gender preferences became more symmetrical already during the fertility decline we view as an surprisingly early move toward a modern European pattern.