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Postreproductive Longevity in a Natural Fertility Population

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Kinship and Demographic Behavior in the Past

Part of the book series: International Studies in Population ((ISIP,volume 7))

Fertility patterns may be useful markers for rates of biological aging. From historical data for the population of Quebec (taken in the “Registre de population du Québec ancien”, at the University of Montreal), we examine the effects of reproduction on longevity from evolutionary and sociodemographic perspectives. Using Cox hazard models on 1,923 women and 1,926 men married in the colony before 1740, we show that women bearing their last child late in life had longer postreproductive lives, suggesting that late menopause is associated with an overall slower rate of aging. Increased parity had an opposite, detrimental effect on women’s postreproductive survival. On the other hand, husbands’ longevity was less sensitive to parity and reproductive history. For husbands, increased effective family size (EFS), i.e., the number of children who survived up to age 18 in a “compressed” reproductive time span meant higher chances for survival past age 60. Children may serve as valuable economic assets on farmsteads during colonization, which would mostly benefit fathers. In a collaborative effort to unveil postreproductive aging patterns in historical populations, the results are compared to previous analyses conducted on the Utah Population Database and evolutionary and sociodemographic theories are addressed in light of these results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, Canada

    Alain Gagnon & Ryan Mazan

  2. Département de Démographie, Université de Montréal, Canada

    Bertrand Desjardins

  3. Department of Family and Consumer Studies and Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah, USA

    Ken R. Smith

Authors
  1. Alain Gagnon
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  2. Ryan Mazan
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  3. Bertrand Desjardins
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  4. Ken R. Smith
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Economic Demography and Department of Economic History, Lund University, Sweden

    Tommy Bengtsson

  2. Department of Oncological Sciences and Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah, USA

    Geraldine P. Mineau

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Gagnon, A., Mazan, R., Desjardins, B., Smith, K.R. (2008). Postreproductive Longevity in a Natural Fertility Population. In: Bengtsson, T., Mineau, G.P. (eds) Kinship and Demographic Behavior in the Past. International Studies in Population, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6733-4_10

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