Famine and the female mortality advantage: sex, gender and mortality in northwest England, c. 1590–1630

Abstract

Studies of modern famines have found disproportionately high mortality amongst adult men. The most commonly suggested root of this ‘female mortality advantage’ is biological, and it seems to be strongest when starvation is the main cause of death. The present study is the first to investigate the phenomenon in an early-modern society. Looking at the famines of 1597 and 1623 in northwest England, it finds some evidence for a female mortality advantage in 1623, but that this was concentrated in the first 12 months of the crisis (after the 1622 harvest). The female advantage was also much greater in north Lancashire and Westmorland than it was in the wealthier western Lancashire plain. Together this supports the idea that there was actual starvation during the 1623 crisis, at least in these areas at these times. There are, however, some reasons to suppose that the most mortal phase of the crisis, around the winter of 1623–1624, took place at a time when food was becoming more widely available, and hence should be attributed to diseases that followed the famine.

Association Between Fetal Exposure to Famine and Anthropometric Measures in Adulthood: A Regression Discontinuity Approach

“…Second, the sex difference in adult anthropometric values may be due to differential mortality. Females have had a mortality advantage over their male counterparts in almost all historical famines examined by 22 studies published prior to 2000 . A male fetus is more subject to death suffered from suboptimal availability of nutrients .…”

War-related excess mortality in The Netherlands, 1944–45: New estimates of famine- and non-famine-related deaths from national death records

“…This female mortality advantage is explained by several factors, ranging from social and political factors (like preferential treatment to women and children) to biological factors (like body fat and immune responses). (See, e.g., Macintyre 2002 and Healey 2015 for extensive summaries of literature; Li and Wen 2005 for men suffering higher mortality than women for post-WWII armed conflicts across time and countries; and Tabeau 2009 for age- and sex-specific mortality in the 1990s armed conflicts in former Yugoslavia).…”

The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth‐Century Rural Low Countries

“…16 In fact, when we look at the few sparse examples of evidence for periods prior to the Industrial Revolution, documentary sources for the early seventeenth century and bioarchaeological investigations for the late Middle Ages have tentatively suggested that the sex-selective nature of famine mortality may not have been as sharp as seen for the modern period. 17 Furthermore, recent bioarchaeological studies for the medieval period have conversely emphasised the vulnerability of young urban women to respiratory and infectious diseases. 18 A major hurdle, however, is the general lack of sex-disaggregated mortality data for the pre-industrial period.…”