Women’s Empowerment, Population Dynamics, and Development: Changing Interactions and Policy Responses in Developing Countries, 1950-2022

This book assumes that ＂women’s empowerment＂ is a social movement aimed at producing political, economic and social change. It traces the changing relationship among three unprecedented trends experienced in the ＂developing world＂ since 1950: declining levels of mortality and fertility, socioeconomic development, and women’s empowerment. It offers two policy analyses of the contemporary relationship of these three trends. One for the 30 countries that in 2021 still have TFRs above 4, and another for the 34 countries that currently have below replacement level fertility. This analysis highlights a new 21st century fact: over-ardent neo-Malthusian population controllers are no longer the greatest threat to women’s reproductive rights. That place has been assumed by over-ardent pronatalist population controllers in low fertility countries.

Dennis Hodgson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Fairfield University where he taught from 1976 until 2014. He was on the editorial committee of Population and Development Review from 2010 through 2021. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University where he was a student in its International Population Program from 1969 until 1976. Hodgson’s research has focused on understanding the relationship of population trends to the development of population theory and policy. He has published a number of articles analyzing the post-WWII period when most demographers came to see the rapid growth of population in the developing world as a crisis in need of policy intervention. He is coauthor with John Bongaarts of Fertility Transition in the Developing World (2022). He has published several articles on the role played by abortion in the fertility transition, and on the complex interaction between a government’s abortion policy and its population policy especially as it relates to reproductive rights. He was a consultant to the National Academy of Sciences consensus study of Women’s Empowerment, Population Dynamics, and Socioeconomic Development (2024). He has also published articles on the role that population concerns have played at various times in US history, from the 18th century through the early 20th century.