Abstract

 
 
 In this article, we investigate to what degree infant mortality risk was transferred from grandmothers to mothers in the Antwerp district, Belgium, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We also investigate some of the determinants of infant mortality and explore the role of the family - paternal factors (presence, age, and social class), mother’s childcare experience, and infant household location - in the survival of infants. The data for this research were retrieved from the Antwerp COR*-database and were transferred into the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS). The results of the survival models show that women whose mother experienced three or more infant deaths had a 77% higher risk of experiencing the loss of an infant themselves, compared to women whose mother experienced zero infant deaths in the past. These results remained robust after controlling for potential mediating and moderating factors. The results on the age of the mother at birth, her marital status, as well as the living environment suggest that at least part of the intergenerational transfer in infant mortality can be explained on the basis of life history theory: women who grew up in a high-risk family tended to reproduce earlier and faster, and often raised their children without a partner. In this way they unconsciously created riskier conditions for the raising of their own infants: the mothers had little life experience, limited resources, and often no assistance from a partner. As a result, their own children were also at an increased risk of dying in infancy.
 
 
Highlights
AND OBJECTIVESBy the middle of the 19th century, infant mortality in Western countries was much higher than it is today
We interpret the cumulative hazard graph (Figure 4) for our main study variable to get an initial impression of how different levels of infant mortality of the grandmother relate to infant death among the mothers in the study
With respect to the first goal, we re-categorized the grandmother infant mortality variable to include the additional category of 3 or more infant deaths. The purpose of this additional category was to see whether this could better capture the effect of a ‘high mortality household’, since we expect that a higher level of infant mortality would be associated with an increase in risk transmitted from grandmother to the mother
Summary
AND OBJECTIVESBy the middle of the 19th century, infant mortality in Western countries was much higher than it is today. Death in high mortality regimes is often coupled with a fatalistic attitude of the population under study (cf Courbage & Puschmann, 2015), research both on contemporary developing countries and on Western societies in the past show that infant mortality is not randomly distributed, but rather is clustered among certain families (Das Gupta, 1990; Edvinsson, Brändström, Rogers & Broström, 2005; Vandezande, 2012). Even in case of the latter, the focus in historical studies is directed towards the female caretaker by way of testing the ‘Cinderella effect’ (e.g Willführ & Gagnon, 2012)
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