Is the law of nature in human fertility revealed in the rapid modernization of Northern Norway 1930-1980?

Anne Grethe Flakstad, Independent Researcher

In my studies at University of Tromsø, Norway since the beginning in 1978, my subject has been the role of women’s work under social and economic change in the Northernmost part of Norway. Many demographic indicators show that those areas represent the last modernized part of Europe. This modernization occurs very rapidly, during my own lifetime. In a remote village in the municipality where I was born in 1949. A midwife in a nearby village the beginning of 20th century discovered the last registered case of the disease lepra in Norway. In the 1930-ties the last people migrated from that very remote village.