"The first observance of Labor Day is believed to have been a parade of 10,000 workers on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City, organized by Peter J. McGuire, a Carpenters and Joiners Union secretary. By 1893, more than half the states were observing a "Labor Day" on one day or another, and Congress passed a bill to establish a federal holiday in 1894. President Grover Cleveland signed the bill soon afterward - designating the first Monday in September as Labor Day. 

152.8 million:

Number of people 16 and older in the nation's labor force in May 2007. In the nation's labor force are 82.1 million men and 70.7 million women."

(Source: U.S. Census Bureau, "Facts for Features: Labor Day 2007: Sept. 3," CB07-FF.13, July 9, 2007; http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/010328.html .)

"Labor is God's education."

(Source:  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Speech before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, Boston, Massachusetts, January 25, 1841; "Man the Reformer," Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849), quoted in Andrews, Robert; Biggs, Mary; and Seidel, Michael, et al. eds., The Columbia World of Quotations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. www.bartleby.com/66/ .)

Fertility rates have risen in recent decades for unmarried American women.  Fertility rates have likewise risen in recent decades for married American women.  So why has the overall American fertility rate changed very little?  This question recently attracted the attention of a team of demographers at the University of Oregon, and their analysis identifies the national retreat from wedlock as the key to the mystery. 

The researchers begin their work by defining "the apparent paradox" in American fertility data.  They note that between 1974 and 2000 the birth rate among unmarried white women ages 20 to 39 "more than tripled, rising from 13 per 1,000 in 1974 to 46 per 1,000 in 2000" and that during the same period the birth rate among married white women of the same ages "rose by nearly half, from 94 [per 1,000] to 135 [per 1,000]."  The analysts report that "patterns are similar for black women," unmarried and married.  Nonetheless, the data indicate that 1974 to 2000 was "a period of relatively flat total birth rates."

What is going on here?  When the Oregon scholars parse the data, they highlight "the effects that marriage behavior has on the composition of married and unmarried women."  That is, in the researchers' statistical model  "a decline in marriage will cause increases in the nonmarital birth rate, the marital birth rate, and the nonmarital birth rate relative to the marital birth rate, even though the total birth rate does not change."  The Oregon scholars characterize recent American fertility data as "remarkably consistent with the various predictions of the [statistical] model." 

Apparently, when fewer women marry, those who still do wed tend to be distinctively committed to family and childbearing.  Meanwhile, as a growing number of women wed late in life or not at all, an increasing number of them-predictably enough-bear children out of wedlock.  

Of course, even if a society's overall fertility rate remains unchanged, serious social problems are brewing when wedding bells rarely ring and when more and more children have unmarried parents.

(Source: Jo Anna Gray, Jean Stockard, and Joe Stone, "The Rising Share of Nonmarital Births: Fertility Choice or Marriage Behavior," Demography 43 [2006]: 241-253.)