ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s Coale, Anderson, and Härm (1979) wrote a book on the decline in fertility in Russia since the 19th century, and in the mid-1980s Coale and Watkins (1986) summarized some of the principal findings of the Princeton European Fertility Project, a project that assembled data on overall fertility, marital fertility, and proportions married in more than 600 European provinces. The Princeton European Fertility Project (of which the study of Russia was a part) was intended to document the major decline in marital fertility in all of the provinces, and the associated changes in nuptiality, and to explore the socioeconomic circumstances under which the changes occurred. The results showed that some of the best-known themes of the so-called demographic transition are far from universally valid. For example, a sustained decline in fertility often preceded any major reduction in infant mortality; rural areas in France inhabited by peasants at moderate levels of literacy and rather high mortality began a major reduction in the frequency of births many decades before there was any decline in urbanized and industrialized England. There were also several positive findings.
