Abstract
ABSTRACTData from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex‐disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled database of adult burial information for 293 rural localities and small towns in the seventeenth‐century Low Countries, explicitly comparing mortality crises against ‘normal’ years. In contrast to expected results, we find no clear female mortality advantage during mortality spikes and, more to the point, women tended to die more frequently than men when only taking into account those years with very severe raised mortality. Gender‐related differences in levels of protection, but also exposure to vectors and points of contagion, meant that some of these female advantages were ‘lost’ during food crises or epidemic disease outbreaks. Responses to mortality crises such as epidemics may shine new light on gender‐based inequalities perhaps hidden from view in ‘normal times’ – with relevance for recent work asserting ‘female agency’ in the early modern Low Countries context.
Highlights
Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases
As a reflection on the various challenges and potential pitfalls facing evaluations of gender as a factor in demographic trends, this article provides empirical information that examines whether women in rural communities in the early modern Low Countries were dying at a reduced degree compared to men during periods of significantly raised mortality by systematically comparing the situation to ‘normal times’
Much has been written in recent years on female agency, independence and participation in the context of the early modern Low Countries, the findings from this paper suggest that these facets did not lead to female welfare gains, may only have described urban women’s experiences and/or had no positive impact on women’s capacity to survive during crises
Summary
While this article does not dispute the biological or physiological principles associated with the female mortality advantage during mortality crises caused by famines and epidemics, it shows that women’s potential advantages did not always translate into superior chances of survival. As seen during contemporary struggles with COVID-19, restrictions on customary practices regarding the marking and commemoration of the dead – including funerals and burials – is highly traumatic. Overall, it remains to be seen how frequently throughout history women’s natural advantages were lost – only further sex-disaggregated mortality evidence going back further in time for a wider range of places will tell us whether the seventeenth-century Low Countries was something of an anomaly, or part of a broader pre-industrial pattern which is quite distinct from findings seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
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