Historical and Subgroup Variations in the Association between Marriage and First Childbirth: a Life-Course Perspective

As an institution, marriage supposedly sets the context within which love, sex, and childbearing are legitimated. For women, the roles of wife and mother are tightly interwoven—being married carries the risk of becoming preg nant. It is expected that childbirth will follow relatively soon after marriage. In other words, marriage and childbearing are supposed to be linked through both sequence and timing. This paper takes a life-course approach in examining em pirically the patterning of marriage and first childbirth among white and black women first married between 1950 and 1971. The results indicate considerable historical and racial differences in the joint arrangements of marriage and childbirth. A major distinction is that the historical variation among white women was a consistent shortening of maritally conceived first-birth intervals over the 1950s followed by a consistent lengthening of these intervals over the 1960s and early 1970s. Among black women, on the other hand, historical varia tions have been less consistent and have involved the sequencing rather than the timing of maritally conceived births.