Between Constraints and Coercion. Marriage and Social Reproduction in Northern and Central Italy, 18th-19th Centuries

In this paper we review the main theories of household and marriage systems, highlighting their inability to account for the astonishing variety of family and marriage patterns that characterized modern Italy. We propose a new interpretative framework, where social reproduction is given pride of place as the main factor shaping marital behavior and household formation in the past. We test our theory analyzing five populations in northern and central Italy, characterized by different ecological, economic, and social conditions. We use an event history analysis approach to model the timing of marriage in the populations under study. The results confirm that coercion mattered much more than Malthusian economic constraints. We conclude suggesting a more general application of our approach to the study of marital behavior, family formation, and residential patterns in the past

Maternal mortality in 19th- and early 20th-century Italy

Although dramatically reduced in Western and developed countries, maternal mortality is still today one of the most relevant social and health scourges in developing countries. This is the reason why high levels of maternal mortality are always interpreted as a sign of low living standards, ignorance, poverty and woman discrimination. Maternal mortality represents, therefore, a very peculiar characteristic of demographic systems of ancien regime. Despite this important role in demographic systems, no systematic study has been addressed to investigate the impact of maternal mortality in historical Italy. The aim of this article is to shed some light on such a phenomenon by investigating its trend over time and the determinants in some Italian populations between the 18th and the early 20th centuries. The analysis will make use of civil and parish registers linked together by means of nominative techniques, and it will be, therefore, carried out at the micro level

The legacy of Corrado Gini in population studies

This volume contains 12 papers that range over many different research subjects, taking in many of the population questions that, directly or indirectly, absorbed Corrado Gini as demographer and social scientist over several decades. They vary from the analysis of the living conditions and behaviours of the growing foreign population (measurements and methods of analysis, socio-economic conditions and health, ethnic residential segregation, sex-ratio at birth), to studies on the homogamy of couples; from population theories (with reference to the cyclical theory of populations) to the modelling approach to estimating mortality in adult ages or estimating time transfers, by age and sex, related to informal child care and adult care; from historical studies that take up themes dear to Gini (such as the estimates of Italian military deaths in WWI), to the application of Gini’s classical measurements to studying significant phenomena today (transition to adulthood and leaving the parental home, health care, disabled persons and social integration). The subjects and measurements that appear here are not intended to exhaust the broad spectrum of Gini’s research work in the demographic and social field (nor could they), but they can make up a part of the intersection between his vast legacy and some interesting topics in current research, some of which were not even imaginable in the mid twentieth century. Looking at the many contributions that celebrated Gini in Treviso and thinking about his legacy, it seems possible to identify at least two typologies of approach, to be found in this issue of the journal, too. On the one hand, there are contributions that aim to retrieve and discuss themes, methodologies and measurements dealt with or used by Gini so as to evaluate their present relevance and importance in the current scholarly debate. On the other, there are contributions that deal with topics that are far from Gini’s work, as they study very recent phenomena, but actually, among other things, make use of methods and indicators devised by Gini that are now so much part of the common currency of methodology, so they don’t require explicit reference to their Author