ABSTRACT
Two Italian scholars, Marzio Acchille Romani and Roberto Lasagni, compiled sex-specific tallies of baptisms in Parma from 1500 to 1799. Each discovered that in this sizeable city there were too many girls relative to boys overall. Laura Hynes Jenkins explored a 25-year period in the early seventeenth century in more depth, discriminating between individual parishes and social classes. This large sample revealed that rural families displayed a propensity to keep boys and sacrifice girls. Urban parishes dominated by the textile trade eliminated boys and had remarkably high numbers of girls. The resulting difference – stable over more than a century – was on the order of 30 percent. Here the ongoing discrepancies are statistically significant and based on over 300,000 baptisms.
