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Abstract
In a 1990 article, Amartya Sen observed “More than 100million Women … Missing” from the populations of parts of south and east Asia. Direct observation and census data suggested that gender ratios deviated sufficiently from what is known to be normal in modern human populations to suggest that the phenomenon was not random. Researchers have explored major proximate causes of “missing” girls and women such as female-selective abortion, routine neglect of young girls in their families including differential access to modern medical care, and even infanticide. This article uses Sen's work and the research of others on Asia to compare with evidence of the disadvantaging or even “mortal neglect” of girls and women in Western European society in the early modern and modern periods — roughly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It argues that the current state of the evidence suggests little support for similar gender-specific forms of mortal neglect in Western Europe. It explores why this may have been so, using evidence from economic, social, demographic and religious life.
☆ The author would like to thank Amy Patterson for research and editorial help; and George Alter, Fabian Drixler, Joel Harrington, Satomi Kurosu, Donald Sutton, Frans van Poppel and an anonymous reader for the journal for their insightful comments and suggestions for revisions of a previous draft of this article. All errors of fact and logic are the author's alone.
Notes
☆ The author would like to thank Amy Patterson for research and editorial help; and George Alter, Fabian Drixler, Joel Harrington, Satomi Kurosu, Donald Sutton, Frans van Poppel and an anonymous reader for the journal for their insightful comments and suggestions for revisions of a previous draft of this article. All errors of fact and logic are the author's alone.
1 Recent studies (Abrevaya, 2009; Almond & Edlund, 2008) have suggested the practice of gender-selective abortion in the United States among east and south Asian women at parity three and higher.
2 The author notes the difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries' estimation of the extent of infanticide and the focus of their efforts among the young. Catholics were more concerned with rescuing newborns for purposes of baptism while the latter concentrated on Christianizing and educating older children (Mungello, 2008).
3 Parity-specific data on gender ratios proved critical in the debate over whether there is a biological dimension to higher gender ratios among Asian women than women from other areas of the world (see Das Gupta, 2006; Oster, 2005).
4 This belief persisted into the nineteenth century. See Lynch (1988).
5 Kertzer (1993) cites a figure of 57% legitimate for Milan (1845), 64% (1854) and 60% by 1869, when authorities closed the hospital. Levene (2006) notes figures for Florence of 47.5 and 32.3% for 1777 and 1782, respectively. About 30% of London's relatively short-lived foundling home's children were estimated to be legitimate in 1756–60.
6 Those defending the “surrogate infanticide” view argue that parents must have known that infants they deposited in hospitals would die as a result. Other observers, including myself, interpret the phenomenon differently, emphasizing the fact that many women believed — or hoped — that their own child would, in fact, survive, as evidenced by the large number of abandoned infants who were accompanied by notes and tokens that could be used to identify them in case parents were able to reclaim them.
7 Naples' hospital of the Annunziata, however, had a consistent record of more girls than boys across its history (see Da Molin, 2001).
8 Under European stem household rules, only one adult — usually a male, but sometimes a female — generally inherited the bulk or all of the land. Only s/he alone could bring a spouse into the household. Brothers or sisters who wished to co-reside in the family home either remained single for their lifetimes, found an heir to marry in their locality, or migrated away to seek their own fortunes elsewhere, either temporarily or permanently.
9 For recent critiques of Hajnal's treatment of central Europe, see Szoltysek (2007, 2008).
10 Alter et al. (2004) note that the impacts of living in a three-generation household probably affected girls' mortality differently in European households where the senior generation was significantly older than their counterparts in the Asian households under study because of significant differences in marriage ages.
11 While studies are eager to distinguish the experience of the elderly by their gender, there is a dearth of studies on Europe by the gender of the adult child co-residing. One of the few exceptions (Robin, 1984) emphasizes the importance of co-residence with daughters in one local study of nineteenth-century England.
12 Some revisionist accounts of stem families in western Europe have modified an earlier view of them as bastions of control by senior over junior generations. See, for example, Schlumbohm (1998). On migration from European stem family settings, see Lynch (2003) and Arrizabalaga (2005).
13 See also Gates and Hendrickx (2005).
14 Komlos (1994) defines net nutrition as the “food consumed during the growing years minus the claims on the nutrients of basal metabolism, of energy expenditure, and of disease encounters.”
15 Authorities in Japan attributed deep antipathy to infanticide in the western tip of Honshu, including the area around Hiroshima, as well as large parts of the sea coast to the Shinshu sect of Buddhism, in particular. On the regional influence of Shinshu on discouraging female-specific infanticide in the nineteenth century, see Kurosu (1994).
16 Protestant clergy also became much more reluctant than Roman Catholic ones to inquire too closely into the sexual lives of married people.
17 Sauer notes that the reluctance of English juries to convict women accused of infanticide — a capital offense — hastened legal changes there at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Sixteenth-century French decrees on declarations of pregnancy (déclarations de grossesse) were not well enforced, and were abolished under the Revolution. Japanese domainal authorities enacted surveillance laws regarding pregnant women during mid-nineteenth century anti-infanticide campaigns there (Drixler, 2008).
18 The question whether infanticide was increasing in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was informed by British efforts to expose, condemn, and suppress female-selective infanticide in those parts of colonial India where it was practiced (McDonagh, 2003).