Son Preference in a Sharecropping Society Gender Composition of Children and Reproduction in a Pre-Transitional Italian Community

Before the demographic transition, were couples able to control their fertility? Can we find evidence for this by comparing households with different occupations, in which the sex composition of the offspring may reveal a preference for children of a given sex and reproductive behaviours that differ in response to economic factors? To address this question, Matteo Manfredini, Marco BresCHi and Alessio fornasin make use of an original database on the fertility of nineteenth-century Tuscan families that combines information from parish registers and from a local census of inhabitants. They compare the probability of further births according to the sex composition of surviving children, focusing on four social groups: day labourers, sharecroppers, smallholders and non-agricultural occupations. The authors find evidence that sharecroppers tended to favour large families in order to secure a male heir.