Seventeenth-century English and colonial sex ratios: a postscript

Abstract

An important but largely neglected demographic factor in the growing social differences between England and her North American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may well have been the sex ratio. The hypothesis in Herbert Muller's pioneering ‘Sex Composition and Correlated Culture Patterns’ is tested against the findings of later research by colonialist scholars, and factors affecting the sex ratio for Stuart England are also examined. This subject will be approached from a rather different slant in the author's forthcoming Women in Stuart England and America.