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Between 1920 and 1940, fertility dropped below replacement level in many Western countries. In today's scholarly literature, the drop is usually explained as a temporary reaction to the exceptional conditions of the inter-war period. This paper confronts that interpretation with the interpretations offered by scholars writing between the wars. According to leading demographers of the time, low fertility was due not to war or economic crisis, but rather to processes that now tend to be associated with the Second Demographic Transition, including secularization, individualization, rising consumerism, and women's emancipation. Since these were seen as structural features of modernization, most inter-war scholars argued that subreplacement fertility would remain an obstinate feature of modern society for an extended period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author proposes an alternative formulation of Ryder's equations of demographic translation by constructing a filter which relates period and cohort-based parametric fertility schedules. The resulting filter is used to study fertility data from eight countries in Europe and North America. The author concludes that although a cohort-based model can explain all but the short-run variations in period fertility, the resulting model would have to be quite complex. In particular, it would need to explain the observed tendency for changes in the tempo and spread of cohort fertility to lead changes in the quantum of cohort fertility by several years. An analysis of the spectral properties of the translation filter indicates that a period-based model could easily produce this pattern. The fact that the period-based model provides a more parsimonious description of the observed patterns sheds doubts on the predictive value of cohort-based models of fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]