Reply to Adrienne Germain's Comments on "Women and Population Studies: Review Essay"(Vol. 1, No. 3)Author(s): Nancy BirdsallSource: Signs, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1977), p. 522Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173315 .

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522 Letters/Comments

Reply to Adrienne Germain's Comments on "Women and Population Studies: Review Essay" (vol. 1, no. 3)

Nancy Birdsall

The evidence is clear: Sending mothers into the fields and factories will not necessarily solve the world's population problem. I must dispute Germain's assertion that such statements are prejudicial to the cause of women. First, the statement is not, as she assumes, a "policy conclusion," but an analytical conclusion, following from the results of numerous studies cited in my article. The findings of such studies appear con- tradictory precisely because policy interventions such as jobs for women are successful in varying degrees "at different times in different societies" (pp. 700-701). "In summary . . . the nature of female employ- ment is important, and there is growing evidence that the higher the wife's work status, the greater is her interest in limiting her fertility" (p. 711).

Second, "correlation with lower fertility is not the only reason to employ women!" (her comment, p. 926). Programs for women indeed have their own justification. There is danger in systematic piggybacking; the piggybacked cause (in this case, fertility reduction) may go out of fashion, and in many countries women will still not have asserted their intrinsic right to the choice of meaningful work outside the home, irre- spective of fertility effects.

Germain's comments on present data limitations are well taken; we need more micro and longitudinal data. And indeed, Western models must be applied with caution. Equal pay for equal work is a goal of Western women; African and Asian women need time, energy, better food and health care for themselves and their children, and the choice of planning their families; these needs may or may not subsume another job outside the home.

Readers interested in recent empirical work testing the concept of husband-wife differences in the demand for children should see Coch- rane and Bean's careful application of the new home economics model to data from a survey of Mexican-American families.1

Yale University

1. Susan H. Cochrane and Frank D. Bean, "Husband-Wife Differences in the De- mand for Children,"Journal of Marriage and the Family 38, no. 2 (May 1976): 297-307.

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