The Health and Mortality of Women and Children, 1850–1860

Abstract

I investigate health as determined by nonsurvival in manuscript schedules of families matched in successive censuses. Losses were systematically greater for infants of the unskilled and of residents in large cities; for young children who lived on the frontier or had more young siblings; and for women who lived on the frontier or in the South. The findings have implications for fertility studies based on child-woman ratios, estimation of interregional migration, generality of regional mortality studies, slave-white differences in health, the modern rise of population, and wealth estimation from probate records.