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There was no World War in the 1970s, no Great Depression. It was a time of peace and prosperity and yet fertility went to replacement and then below.
How hard is it to understand this? It's RIGHT THERE in a clear academic consensus, all these sources pointing out that female empowerment and education reduces fertility, how they observe this all over the world. There are all these charts showing what can be easily deduced from common sense - that if women are joining the workforce and higher education en masse they're having fewer children. And yet people still try to confuse this blindingly simple issue. The more empowered women are, the more they choose to do other things than having children. Broadening one's view from the sexual revolution (which neatly arrives right as the post-war baby boom ends), we can look at the whole 20th century. You have female enfranchisement happening all across the West and fertility declining. Countries without female empowerment like pre-1945 Japan lack this trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/
What explains TFR declines beginning in the 18th and certainly early 19th century in some countries then?
I said there were other causes like urbanization above. Wars and the economic situation also have an impact. It's not a monocausal thing.
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Industrialization driving humans out of the farms and into the cities and removing the competitive advantage of having lots of kids as free labor.
Extremely high TFR was largely ascribed to the needs of labor-intensive agricultural work.
I'd actually say the 1920s (from a modern lens) had extremely low TFR, more than the numbers would suggest. If the US had a TFR of 2.3 (2.0 in the 1930s) and was 50% rural, and rural areas were bringing up that average, then TFR in urban areas would have had to be somewhere around current South Korean birthrates.
I think we are, socioeconomically, simply returning to those conditions (even though rural areas still have more kids these days, modern TFR is by and large functionally just urban TFR, but older TFR numbers very much aren't).
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The status of women was advancing all throughout the 19th century in the US plus there are other factors involved.
No it doesn't, go look at the graph. There's a brief fall due to the chaos of the Meiji Restoration then fertility goes back up. A fall with the Great Depression and WW2, as you (or at least I) would expect. Then it nose-dives after equality of the sexes is introduced. Same story in South Korea - static for decades under Japanese rule, then legal equality of the sexes, then straight down as the effects of that decision become clear. At the same time of course, South Korea is urbanizing. But it's not like urbanization started in 1950, that there was no urbanization from 1900-1950.
At no point did I say that 100% of fertility was determined by female empowerment. There are other factors involved, the state of the economy, politics, cultural quirks and so on. What I am saying is that female empowerment lowers fertility. Speaking broadly, Sweden has empowered women and low, sub-replacement fertility, it's not a hole in my argument.
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