Above image: The Artist and His Family (1795) by American painter James Peale. Schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger, dispatched in 1750 by the Duke of Wuerttemberg to report on German settlers in Pennsylvania, was typical. “It must be confessed that the female sex in this new country is very fruitful,” he wrote. In both city and country, “when one comes into a house, one finds it usually full of children, and the city of Philadelphia is fairly swarming with them”. Whenever a visitor meets an American woman, he noticed, “she is either with child, or she …