“The one-child pest is now affecting the body of the slovak nation” (Bazovský 1929): on restricted reproduction in southern Slovakia in the first half of the 20th century

Abstract

The paper discusses the perceptions of a specific restricted fertility habit (a one-child system strategy) in south-central Slovakia in the 1920s and 1930s. The specific regions under analysis had a predominantly Slovak Lutheran population. The first part of the paper concentrates on the opinions, reasons and possible solutions to the issue proposed in periodicals, annual reports and canonical visitation notes. Lutheran pastors in Slovakia warned against the declining parishes at that time. More generally, intellectual personalities of the 1920s and 1930s looked with growing anxiety at the process of depopulation and the rise of single-child families. As the importance of the phenomenon declined after the Second World War, reactions became muted. In the second half of the 20th century, it became mostly a matter of interest for ethnographic research on fertility reduction, or “the one-child system”, which forms the subject of the second part of this paper.