A “Silent Revolution”: school reforms and Italy’s educational gender gap in the Liberal Age (1861–1921)

Abstract

This paper explores the evolution of the human capital gender gap in Liberal Italy (1871–1921). First, we show that Italy lagged some 50 years behind more advanced countries like France, Prussia and the UK, and that the regional divide in gendered literacy was unparalleled in the rest of Europe. Next, we test whether the shift to primary-school centralization in 1911 (the Daneo-Credaro Reform) brought about a decisive improvement in female literacy. We rely on a brand new, cross-sectional micro (municipal)-dataset of literacy rates in 1911 and 1921, as well as their potential determinants around 1911. Such data, combined with propensity score matching to improve identification, show that primary-school centralization increased the average annual growth of female literacy by 0.78 percentage points. Thus, even though the Reform did not aim at girls specifically, it brought about the unintended consequences of more rapid human capital accumulation for women and—ceteris paribus—a reduced educational gender gap. We briefly discuss why this “Silent Revolution” likely had important implications for Italy’s economic history.

Escuelas, maestras y territorios. Capacidades estatales y capital humano en Uruguay, 1877-1910

“…Los factores influyentes para Europa se encuentran tanto en la oferta como en la demanda educativa. Para Italia, investigaciones resaltan el atraso relativo y las heterogeneidades regionales, que disminuyen paulatinamente a partir de la primera década del siglo xx (Cappelli, 2020;Cappelli y Vasta, 2021). La disminución se explica por la emergencia de la reforma Daneo-Credano de 1911, donde el Estado centralizó la Administración educativa, compensado disparidades fiscales municipales en la provisión de escuelas (Cappelli, 2015) y, además, reduciendo brechas de género en la matriculación (Cappelli y Vasta, 2021) debido a la feminización de la docencia (Cappelli y Quiroga, 2021).…”

Whither Education? The Long Shadow of Pre-Unification School Systems into Italy’s Liberal Age (1861–1911)

“…(4)–(7)). The gender educational gap in the Liberal Age is still under-researched, with few exceptions that have shown important differences in educational levels and trends across Italy’s macro-regions (Bertocchi and Bozzano 2016; Cappelli and Vasta 2021). Our results indicate that growing enrollment rates for girls were associated with growing class sizes, and this correlation was more prominent than in the case of boys (Cols.…”

“…1 The long-term growth of human skills has gone hand in hand with the rise of public schooling and mass education since the 1850s; yet, whether human capital improved throughout the nineteenth century as a result of milestone school acts fostering public education (Gomes and Machado 2020; Milner 2020; Montalbo 2021) or as a result of favorable economic and demographic trends (Cvrcek 2020) is still contended. Similarly, whether national school acts in the nineteenth century brought about more equity in access to education or simply reinforced existing social and spatial inequality in literacy and schooling continues to be a debated issue (Beltrán Tapia and Martinez-Galarraga 2018; Cappelli and Vasta 2020, 2021). The last decade has witnessed a growing stream of literature on the determinants of educational levels in the past.…”