High fertility and poverty in Sicily: Beyond the culture vs. rationality debate

Abstract

Until the turn of the twentieth century, the rural town of the Sicilian interior that we call Villamaura conformed to what may be a characteristic premodern population dynamic. Surrounded by large, wheat-producing and pastoral estates, the town was differentiated into strata of unequal power and wealth. Members of an affluent gentry class enjoyed large families, but for the great majority in other groups – artisans, landed peasants (called burgisi ), landless and landpoor peasants – high fertility was offset by high rates of infant and child mortality. Family size more or less corresponded to family wealth and income and served as one of the visible indices of local social standing. Villamaura's incorporation into the structures of capitalism during the late nineteenth century led to an overall decline in mortality, rising fertility, and a total reversal of this relationship between family size and standard of living. Around 1900, members of the town's landed gentry began to limit their fertility, mainly through the use of coitus interruptus. Between the world wars, artisans adopted and then perpetuated the same strategy for family limitation. The town's small number of landed burgisi clung to a different mechanism for articulating fertility with resources: the delay of the marriages of both daughters and sons until an adequate dowry or inheritance could be accumulated.

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