Suspicious deaths: Household composition, infant neglect, and child care in nineteenth-century venice

Abstract

Scholars have long debated whether widespread malparenting - ranging from unconscious neglect to outright infanticide - characterized parental attitudes in the European past, thus contributing to keeping infant mortality at exceedingly high levels. While historians tend to believe that parental commitment and emotional involvement in childrearing were largely inadequate, most demographers object that the evidences produced in support of such an opinion are not convincing. In this paper I provide new demographic evidence in favour of the malparenting hypothesis. I analyze infant mortality in a large longitudinal sample of the Venetian population around mid-nineteenth century, asking whether the risk of death of the index child was affected by the composition of the household, and particularly by the age and gender of its siblings, which could influence both the desirability of a newborn and the sustainability of its rearing. My approach is similar to that followed in studies of less developed countries, where gender preference, sibling composition, and family planning strongly influenced the parental attitude toward newborns, consequently affecting their chances of survival. Results show that demographic outcomes in nineteenth-century Venice - especially as far as the lowest social strata are concerned - were remarkably similar to those found in countries like India and Bangladesh.