Breadwinner, bread maker: Intrahousehold inequality in 1930s rural Italy

Giulia Mancini, University of Rome "Tor Vergata"

This paper examines the gender segregation in productive roles and its consequences on basic dimensions of women’s and girls’ wellbeing among rural households in interwar Italy. It uses microdata assembled from a collection of family monographs, which recount the lives, work, and consumption behavior of more than 800 men and women. It finds that, despite the emphasis put by the qualitative literature on non-stereotypical examples of female work, a rigid gender-based division of labor was the rule; women commanded a lower share of total household income, while putting in as many or more working hours than men; and an empirical test for gender bias in the allocation of household expenditures delivers evidence of a pro-boy bias among older children (5 to 14 years old). This result suggests that women may have been subject to material deprivation

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 168. Determinants of Female Labour Market Outcomes