Reversing the Decline in White Fertility, By F. Roger Devlin

An Address to the Fourth Finnish Awakening Conference in Hyvinkää, May 24, 2025:

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2025/05/26/reversing-the-decline-in-white-fertility/

"The theme of this conference was announced as "immigration and the white fertility crisis." The two subjects are obviously related. Certain resources are not elastic, such as territory. The more of a nation's territory is occupied by immigrants, the less is left for the native population. Immigrants put pressure on other limited resources as well—jobs, housing, schools and hospitals, government spending—competing against the native population, and thereby making it more difficult for the natives to raise large families. Moreover, most immigrants to the West come from poorer countries, so they experience access to our labor markets and welfare state programs as an economic bonanza. They can afford more children here than they would have had back home. Across the West, migrant fertility is therefore higher than native levels. This means that even if all immigration were suddenly to stop today, the replacement of our own people by outsiders would continue for years to come through differential fertility. …

All this being admitted, however, there are many European countries with below-replacement fertility levels which cannot primarily be explained by immigration, and I believe Finland is such a country. Finnish women, I understand, now bear an average of 1.4 or fewer children over the course of their lifetimes. Large-scale immigration is still far too recent here to account for such a dreadful figure. So in my remarks today I am going to focus on harmful fertility-reducing trends internal to the West, which does not mean that I consider immigration unimportant.

Modern Homo sapiens arrived in Europe from Africa around forty thousand years ago. At the most fundamental level, what defines us, the European peoples, and distinguishes us from the rest of humanity, is the result of evolutionary pressures which have operated upon us in the unique environment of Europe during these past forty thousand years. Intelligence, careful planning for the future, and an ability to defer gratification and be sparing in our use of limited resources are just a few of the traits we owe to having made our homes in a land of prolonged cold winters. I do not think a Finnish audience should require a long argument in support of this point.

But today I want to emphasize one particular difference between Europe and Africa. When our remote ancestors migrated to the colder climate of Europe, women's dependence on male provisioning greatly increased.

In West Africa to this day, women produce most of the food, for men as well as for themselves. This is because African farming requires only simple tools such as hoes that women can operate just as well as men. But those African women would not have been able to nourish themselves as easily in pre-industrial Europe. Traditional European agriculture requires plowing, which makes far greater demands on upper body strength. In other words, in Europe, farming is men's work. For this reason, all over pre-industrial Europe, men provided the food while women took care of the home. This economic pattern worked to strengthen pair-bonding in Europe. It made us more monogamous than our remoter African ancestors. To this day, West Africa is polygamous: the most polygamous society in the world, in fact. This is because women who produce their own food do not need to seek out a reliable, committed provider. So they simply mate as they please, including with already-married men. Needless to say, intensive polygamy results in plenty of bachelors with a lot of time on their hands. Criminal gangs proliferate. It is not a pretty picture.

In Europe, on the other hand, the dedicated provisioning of wife and children has long been an essential part of male identity: a good man is to a great extent one who provides loyally and well for his family. And our women have become adapted to this state of affairs through evolutionary pressures. Forty thousand years in Europe is equivalent to about thirteen hundred human generations. Over these generations, women with a preference for willing and capable providers have had more surviving offspring and passed this preference on to their daughters. Provisioning ability is, therefore, a key component of sexual attractiveness in men, and a man without resources or at least a clear ability to acquire them is barely even perceived by women as a man. We men do not like this, of course. We think our women should love us "for richer or for poorer," as English marriage vows phrase it. But we cannot simply wish away thousands of years of evolutionary selection. Women are going to go right on being attracted to providers for the same reason men are attracted to youth and beauty. Women have no choice in the matter, and so men who wish to marry and raise families have no choice but to become providers.

What feminism and the ideal of "equality between the sexes" has done to European society has been to make women more economically self-sufficient, as the women farmers of Africa are. For women with no wish to marry or have children this has been beneficial. But there are not many such women. Most European-descended women want a secure home with a reliable husband and some children. For these women, feminism and jobs outside the home have been a disaster. It has also been a disaster for European birth rates. And here is another circumstance rarely noted: plenty of young men would sincerely like to be able to provide for a wife and family, but economic changes brought about by feminist thinking has made this much more difficult for them. Let me explain.

Before the industrial revolution most Europeans subsisted on agriculture, living and working in the same place, on the family farm. Industrial capitalism raised our standard of living, but meant that for the first time in history, people had to "go to work," i.e., they had to labor for money in one place while they carried on their family lives in another. This raised a new issue: who, exactly, should leave home to work and earn money? From the very beginnings of industrial capitalism there have been competing answers to this question. In the view of many employers, the owners of capital, it has long seemed obvious that anyone and everyone with a desire to work and earn a salary should do so: men, women, and even children. The more people who work, after all, the richer the country will become—not to mention the capitalists themselves! In accord with this way of thinking, early industrialism was marked not only by widespread female employment outside the home, but even by child labor.

Yet not everyone agreed with the capitalists. Others believed not everything of value can be bought on the market. Specifically, family bonds and the proper rearing of children are precious goods that can only deteriorate if everyone is out competing for wages on the labor market. On this competing view, fathers should go to work to support their families, while mothers and children should remain at home protected from market competition. With fewer people working outside the home, the price of labor rises, compelling the capitalist to pay fathers the same wage he would have paid the entire family under a system where everyone worked. The capitalists get rich somewhat more slowly, but people still had homes, and society did not simply turn into a giant factory and marketplace. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, this view largely won out. Child labor was done away with, and legal limitations were placed on women's ability to work for money outside the home.

This was known as the family wage system, and it prevailed through the mid-twentieth century in much of the West. It is consistent with the male provisioning model Europeans have inherited from our preindustrial past. But it is not perfectly consistent with laissez-faire capitalism. It involves restricting the free play of market forces, not only by outlawing child labor but by openly and unapologetically practicing what is now known as "sex discrimination." Under the family wage system, women were not permitted to compete against men on equal terms in many kinds of jobs, especially the most highly-paying. These were reserved for men because men were presumed to have families to support (as most of them did). Even many lower-paying jobs were open to women only as long as they remained unmarried, for a married woman's duties were presumed to lie elsewhere.

The family wage system was far from perfect. As feminists are happy to remind us, it limited women's choices. More importantly, in my view, it could not be tailored to the size of individual families. The same job and income that permitted one man to raise one or two children might have to stretch for another man with eight or ten. In the United States, three children came to be treated as the "normal" number for calculating a family wage, and while this has not historically been considered a large family, it at least represents a birth rate above replacement. Of course, under this system a few bachelors may get to enjoy a family wage without supporting a family at all. According to my observations, however, this is not as big a problem as one might anticipate, because the richer a bachelor gets, the harder it is for him to remain a bachelor, as he will be much desired as a husband. Women simply will not tolerate it.

For all of its imperfections, the family wage system prevailed for several generations in the United States and much of Europe, and there are still a few elderly people who can remember it. During this time, employment listings in newspapers were divided into two sections: men's jobs and women's jobs. There were more men's jobs, and they usually paid better. Women did sometimes complain about this, but they also seemed to like and appreciate men more than they do today. As I said, women are pre-programmed by our evolutionary history to perceive and evaluate men as providers, so they are going to like and appreciate us more when we provide for them. Yet for us to do this, arrangements must be made to allow it. The family wage system of open workplace discrimination against women was precisely an arrangement designed to support the traditional male provider role.

And the really amazing thing is that most men find satisfaction in providing for a wife and children as long as they receive a bit of love and appreciation in return. It makes them feel needed because, under such a traditional arrangement, they are needed. Women are largely helpless in the latter stages of pregnancy and while nursing. The more children they bear, the longer their period of helplessness. So if a society wants high fertility, it must accept that there are going to be a lot of helpless women, and it must allow their husbands to care and provide for them. A man has always been able to avoid a lot of trouble and anxiety by remaining a bachelor, so well-ordered societies both make it possible for men to support families and reward those who do so with status and respect.

Since about the 1970s, however, Western society has come under the almost irresistible influence of feminism with its ideal of "equal pay for equal work." It is important to recognize that this principle is neither new nor an invention of modern feminism. It is essentially identical to the ideal of the early capitalist bosses who wanted to see not merely our wives but even our children putting in long days at the factory. Business interests are always happy to swallow up the maximum possible amount of human labor from all sources at the lowest possible price because this increases their own profits.

Governments are also happy to have more incomes to tax. If the family wage system prevailed for such a long time, this was only at the insistence of organized labor. Neither economic theory, nor industrial power, nor political power showed any interest in protecting the family from economic competition. Also, please note that the power of organized labor was associated with the political left, not the nationalist or conservative right. In other words, the old, pre-multicultural left was not wrong about everything.

Under a feminist system that forbids "sex discrimination," men and women are pitted against one other in competition for jobs and money rather than cooperating and complementing one another. This drives down wages for everyone and makes a stay-at-home wife an expensive luxury only the wealthiest men can afford. Virtually the only working people who benefit from this system are women with no wish to marry, such as lesbian feminists. They can earn their own money and be entirely independent of men. But I do not believe our economic and social institutions should be arranged primarily to benefit lesbians.

And the system of "equal pay for equal work" is a return not merely to the early days of industrialism, but to the West African system of female food production. In West Africa, "strong, independent" women support themselves economically and are competed for by males who often have to pay a price, bridewealth, for the often-polygynous marriage. The resulting society might be suitable for them, but not for Europeans. It is a poor match for our evolutionary history.

Feminism has been a failure even for those few women who actually attain high status and high-incomes in the workplace, since even they typically cherish a desire to marry and have children. Rationally, since they earn so much themselves, they should have less need to look to men as providers. And that is just what feminists used to promise us: once women entered the workforce, men would be relieved of part of the pressure to provide for their families, while women would come to value us more on the basis of our personal qualities and less as mere economic resources. These promises went unfulfilled because the sex instinct is innate and not rational. The evidence is very clear that the more a woman earns the greater the stress she places on finding a husband who earns even more than she does, and the harder it becomes to find such a man.

So in summary: the feminist system of allowing men and women to compete against one another for wages makes it harder for men to live up to women's expectations in two distinct ways: first, it lowers men's actual earnings by increasing the supply of labor, and second, it raises the level of earnings that working women expect from us. Hence an astonishing paradox of contemporary Western life: we are living in the most prosperous society in human history, and our women are furious at our perceived inadequacies as providers.

Yet it was never working men who asked for this system! As I have already mentioned, it was capitalists and feminists who wanted antidiscrimination laws and "equal pay for equal work." Men were generally happy with the family wage system as long as their women rewarded them with a little love and appreciation. Millions of men in the West today would think they had died and gone to heaven if they could have what their grandfathers took for granted: a job that allowed them to marry and support a family. We do not have any right to demand of young men something we have made impossible for so many of them. Yet virtually no one today is advocating for a restoration of the family wage system. Most younger people do not know it ever existed. We must teach the young that it is perfectly right and proper to discriminate between the sexes for the simple reason that the sexes are different and want different things. It is time to declare feminism a failed experiment and move on from it.

Moreover, women have never done equal work and are not doing it now. Feminism has largely resulted in women performing make-work jobs that allow corporations to fill legal quotas but contribute little to the economy while also keeping the women from bearing and raising children. In America most companies now maintain unnecessary "human resources" departments where female paper-pushers can be kept busy. The best that can be said of such departments is that they may not always actively harm the companies which create them.

But the women who fill such superfluous corporate positions can contribute much more to society by returning to their natural and proper work of bearing and nurturing the rising generation. This will not only bring Western fertility rates back up to replacement level, but leave women themselves far happier. People are most content when living in accordance with the nature their evolutionary history has given them. Many young women today do not value motherhood because they literally do not know what they are missing. That is why so many are preoccupied with unrestricted abortion and ever more of the "equality" that is making them miserable when what they ought to be demanding is better wages for their husbands.

No treatment of the modern Western fertility crisis would be complete without some discussion of divorce, more specifically, of unilateral divorce on demand with mother custody. Here I should emphasize that I am not familiar with Finnish child custody law, so you may have to tailor my points to your specific national situation. But the broad trends are common across the West.

Many people today are unaware of the traditional view within European Christendom that legal custody of children belonged properly to the father, not the mother. This used to be an essential aspect of marriage, differentiating it from mere fornication or cohabitation. Women have always been free to leave their husbands, but under traditional arrangements they could not take the children with them, nor could they demand continued economic support from husbands they had abandoned, nor could they contract any new legally or religiously recognized marriage. The consequences of family abandonment were usually disastrous for a woman, so unless they were married to some sadistic monster, most wives and mothers stayed and made the best of things. But they could leave if they insisted: even in the strictest and most traditional Christian societies, marriage was never meant to be a form of imprisonment.

This began to change only in 1839 when the British Parliament devised a new legal principle known as the "tender years doctrine." It held that in cases of marital separation, mothers should retain custody of children up to the age of seven years with the father required to continue financial support. Thirty-four years later, the tender years doctrine was extended to include all children up to the age of sixteen. The prestige of the British Empire ensured that the new thinking spread. Women acquired the right to leave their husbands and take the children with them, while husbands were still required to provide financial support for children they might not even be able to see, much less act as good fathers to.

Then, beginning in the United States in the 1940s, a new legal reform was proposed under which divorce could be granted without grounds upon petition by either spouse. In other words, reformers sought to make the marriage contract unenforceable. It ought to be obvious that this amounts to the legal abolition of marriage itself. A marriage either party can abandon at any time for any reason or for none at all is no different from cohabitation. Significantly, this reform was first proposed by an organization called The National Association of Women Lawyers. It was women, not men, who wanted to make it easier to dissolve their marriages. They would never have advocated such a change if the switch from father to mother custody had not already become almost universally accepted.

Unilateral divorce without grounds became law in the United States during the 1960s-70s. Since then, nearly half of American marriages have ended in divorce, with women making the decision in almost all cases involving children. Over the years, child support payments for divorced husbands have been made increasingly onerous, and men unable to pay can be jailed. Women can now gain all sorts of legal advantages over their former husbands simply by making wild accusations of beating and abuse, so that is exactly what many of them do.

Of course, word of this eventually gets out. This brings us up to the present and the recent emergence of a new social trend no one seems to have predicted: young men are deciding not to get married. Unforeseen as this development was, nearly all commentators are in agreement on the reasons for it: the current generation of young men is immature, irresponsible, cowardly, and simply refuses to grow up. I wish I had more time to share with you some of the abuse now being hurled at young American men for, in effect, simply trying to stay out of jail or avoid being left homeless by vindictive ex-wives. These young men are stubborn, and some refuse even to socialize with young women. Not only older people but even young women themselves are starting to become simply furious with them. Anger is not especially attractive, so the angrier the women get, the less inclined the men are to change their minds. I am genuinely curious to see how this situation is going to play out in the coming years. As they say on the internet: grab some popcorn!

So to conclude: if you want men to father a sufficient number of children, you should let them keep those children at home with them and avoid treating husbands and fathers like disposable filth to be plundered by divorce courts and adulterous ex-wives. Along with ending competition from immigrants and restoring the family income by legalizing "sex discrimination in the workplace" once again, that is my best recommendation for bringing Western fertility back to replacement level.