The Case of the Missing Girls: Sex Ratios in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany

This article addresses the apparent shortage of women in the 1427 Florentine Catasto, perhaps the most complete premodern European demographic source. It argues that the shortage exists because it was only when they entered their first marriage that Tuscan women were viewed as complete, gendered beings by their families, government officials, and society. Before marriage, a woman’s place within the household, her gender, and even her existence were liminal, at least in Tuscan documents. The result is that the ratio of men to women is more balanced for that portion of the population past the age of marriage for women. Shifting the analysis from infants and men, where it has traditionally lain, to young adult women explains the gender imbalance in the documentation and provides a deeper understanding of the ways that gender, adulthood, and identity intersected in premodern Europe.