The social context of child mortality in the American Southwest

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 589-618

  Gutmann, Myron P ^a   Fliess, Kenneth H ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040164408     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/205043     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Judith N. McArthur, "Motherhood and Reform in the New South: Texas Women's Political Culture in the Progressive Era," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Texas, Austin, 1992);
2. Emma L. M. Jackson, "Petticoat Politics: Political Activism among Texas Women in the 19205," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Texas, Austin, 1980);
3. Molly Ladd-Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers' Letters to the Children's Bureau, 1915-1932, (New Brunswick, 1986), 19;
4. Frances Sage Bradley and Margaretta A. Williamson, Rural Children in Selected Counties of North Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1918);
5. Elizabeth Moore, Maternity and Infant Care in a Rural County of Kansas (Washington, D.C., 1917);
6. Florence Brown Sherbon and E. Moore, Maternity and Infant Care in Two Rural Counties in Wisconsin (Washington, D.C., 1919).
7. Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1991);
8. Robert Higgs, "Mortality in Rural America, 1870-1920: Estimates and Conjectures," Explorations in Economic History, X (1973), 177-195.
9. Eve Powell-Griner, "Differences in Infant Mortality among Texas Anglos, Hispanics, and Blacks." Social Science Quarterly, LXIX (1988), 452-467;
10. Richard G. Rogers, "Ethnic Differences in Infant Mortality: Fact or Artifact?", Social Science Quarterly, LXIX (1989), 722-736;
11. Powell-Griner, "Differences."
12. Texas' immigrant communities of European and Mexican origin had a strong tradition of infant baptism with registration, and a weak tradition of church burial registration (especially for children). White immigrants and their children from other states were not likely to be active church participants, and the churches were not likely to register vital events. The immigrant communities accepted public vital registration quickly, but the communities of native whites of native parentage had inadequate registration for some time after it was mandated in 1903. Gutmann and Fliess, How to Study Southern Demography in the Nineteenth Century: The Early Lessons of the Texas Demography Project (Austin, 1989)
13. We describe these counties in Gutmann and Fliess, How to Study Southern Demography; Gutmann, "Older Lives on the Frontier: The Residential Patterns of the Older Population of Texas, 1850-1910," in David I. Kertzer and Peter Laslett (eds.) Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age (Berkeley, 1995), 175-202. We include no counties in the far western part of Texas because this phase of the research involved longitudinal coverage from 1860 to 1910, and rural west Texas had little population before 1880. Even Jack County had a tiny, largely transient population in 1870.
14. For the size of ethnic groups in Texas, see Jane Zachritz and Gutmann, "Residence and Family Support Systems for Widows in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Texas," in Tamara Hareven (ed.), Aging and Generational Relations in Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspective, (Berlin, forthcoming), Table 1.
15. Gutmann, John E. Vetter, Gregory Joslyn, and Fliess, Staying Put or Moving On? Ethnicity, Migration and Persistence in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin, 1990). We have not categorized ambiguous names, such as Miller, as "German."
16. David Montejano. Anglos and Mexicain in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, (Austin, 1987).
17. Having one Mexican parent indicates Mexican parentage in this study. A person with one German and one Mexican parent is categorized as second-generation German. United States Census of Population and Housing, Spanish Surname List Prepared by the Bureau of the Census (Washington, 1980.)
18. United Nations, Manual X. Indirect Techniques for Demographic Estimation (New York, 1983).
19. Preston and Haines, Fatal Years.
20. See the works cited in note 9. See the Appendix for further discussion.
21. James W. Glover, United States Life Tables, 1890, 1901, 1910, and 1901-1910 (New York, 1976; reprint of United States Department of Commerce Publication, 1921), 52-55;
22. Preston and Haines, Fatal Years, Table 3.5, 112.
23. Preston and Haines, Fatal Years, Ibid.;
24. Glover, United States Life Tables, 76-77, 82-83.
25. It is important to understand that none of these indexes can be compared with those published by Preston and Haines because they use a different baseline life table.
26. Bradley and Williamson, Rural Children;
27. Moore, Maternity and Infant Care.
28. We have also experimented, using poisson regression, with the number of children dead as the dependent variable; the results did not suggest a different interpretation.
29. We verified the relationship between ethnicity and county of residence in another set of regression models, in which we interacted residence and ethnicity, finding that other whites had mortality that varied from county to county, but child mortality was similar to that of German Americans in DeWitt and Gillespie Counties.
30. Fliess, "The Historical and Genetic Demography of the Wends of Serbin, Texas, 1854 to 1920," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (University of Texas, Austin, 1986);
31. Fliess, "idem, "Mortality Transition among the Wends of Serbin, Texas, 1854-1884: Investigation of Changes in the Pattern of Death Using Parochial Records," Social Biology, XXXVIII (1992), 266-276.
32. On this issue, see Preston, "Resources, Knowledge, and Child Mortality: A Comparison of the U.S. in the Late Nineteenth Century and Developing Countries Today," Proceedings of the International Population Conference, Florence, Italy, 1985 (Florence, 1985), 373-388.
33. Fliess, "Mortality Transition."
34. Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (New York, 1983; 2d ed.).
35. United Nations, The United Nations Software Package for Mortality Measurement: MORTPAK LITE (United Nations, 1988).