ABSTRACT
Long-term demographic changes accompanied structural shifts in the economies of Britain and France, and they helped shape the context within which women's work and family activities were performed. Demographers refer to these changes as a "demographic transition," a process as far-reaching and important for the history of populations as industrialization was for economic history. Demographic transitions involve a change from the high mortality and high fertility characteristic of preindustrial societies to patterns of low mortality and low fertility. But the process of change took place in two steps. First, mortality declined while fertility remained high or even increased, thus accelerating population growth. Then, as mortality continued to drop and as first child and then infant mortality fell sharply, fertility began to decline as well, slowing rates of population growth.1
