Irene Barnes was born on December 25, 1906 in Meadville, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri in 1927, earned a master's degree in anthropology from Northwestern University in 1928, and completed her doctorate in sociology from the University of Minnesota in 1931. In 1929, while still a student, she married Conrad Taeuber; he and their children Richard and Karl would also become noted demographers. She took a faculty position at Mount Holyoke College in 1931, but in 1934 her husband joined the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and she moved with him to Washington, DC. She began working on the journal Population Literature of the Population Association of America; when its editor Frank Lorimer left the position in 1935, the journal moved to the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where it became Population Index, and she moved with it. She was initially a research associate there, and was promoted to senior research demographer in 1961; she retired in 1973. She died on February 24, 1974, of pneumonia and emphysema.
Contributions
As well as her work on Population Index, Taeuber directed the Census Library Project, a joint effort of the Library of Congress and the Bureau of the Census, from 1942 to 1945. She also chaired committees on population and demography for the Pacific Science Association and American Sociological Association, and served as president of the Population Association of America for 1953–1954. Taeuber wrote and edited many books and articles, totalling "a dozen influential books and book-length reports and some 250 articles and chapters." But her most significant work was the book The Population of Japan. Nearly 500 pages long, this book is in seven sections. The first one gives a historical and sociological overview of Japanese life and culture, followed by sections on the Meiji period and the modern era. Next follow sections on internal migrations, the Meiji-era expansion of the Japanese empire, the effects of fertility and mortality on the population, and a demographic view of the effects of World War II on Japan with an eye to future possibilities. This work "demonstrates the power of demographic analysis... as an instrument for the description of social change". It was well-received in Japan, and a Japanese translation was published by the Mainichi Press.
