ABSTRACT
A preference for sons rather than daughters is associated with Mediterranean and oriental cultures. Articles in the press are vividly illustrated by the distorted demographic statistics in China, parts of Asia, and North Africa, where females die in abnormally large numbers as a result of neglect, malnutrition and lack of health care, if not outright infanticide and sex-selective abortion. Seventeenth century prosecutions for infanticide yield no difference in the rate of girls and boys killed at birth, perhaps because the reason for killing an infant was usually illegitimacy. In seventeenth-century England, the men who published tracts on the management of the poor certainly thought that adult women are less than adult men. So did the Justices of the Peace who set maximum wage levels for agricultural labourers. Probate accounts make it possible for the first time to compare the exact sums expended by early modern parents and guardians on the upbringing of daughters and sons.
