"Where There's No Woman There's No Home": Profile of the Agro-Pastoral Family in Nineteenth-Century Sardinia

Abstract

At the time of Italian Unification, in the mid-nineteenth century, Sardinia was known as one of the most economically and socially archaic parts of the new nation. This article considers family life and women's roles in both the cereal-producing villages and the pastoral mountain communities of Sardinia. Although nuclear family households characterize much of the island, in the pastoral portion of the island strong uxorilocal tendencies are found. The reasons for this, and the reasons for the relative gender equality found in Sardinian marriages are discussed, as is the impact on family life of the privatization of communal lands that took place in the nineteenth century.