The role of the Great Depression in causing a sharp drop in fertility is so well understood and widely accepted as to require little additional discussion. Between 1929 and 1933 real income per capita in the U.S. declined by almost one-third. Widespread unemployment, a disastrous fall in stock prices, and numerous financial failures led many young men and women to postpone marriage and induced those who were married to delay having children or to abandon the idea entirely. The effect of the Depression on many was permanent, as evidenced by the fact that the cohort of women who were born around 1910 (and who entered the major child-bearing ages at the time of the Great Depression) had, on average, fewer children over their lifetimes than did the cohorts that preceded and followed them.