The second factor encouraging a collapsing birth rate sits at the intersection of women’s rights and industrial technologies: birth control. In the days before the Industrial Revolution, the most reliable method of birth control was good timing. Industrialization expanded the options list. In 1845 the U.S. government awarded a patent for rubber vulcanization to Charles Goodyear,* which set industry on the path to making cheap, reliable condoms. Combine such advances with the early women’s rights movements, and the political and economic stars of the fairer sex began their long rise—but at the
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