Abstract
Infanticide in 19th-century France is investigated by surveying historical evidence, and by modeling socioeconomic explanations of changes in secondary sex ratios, disaggregated by region and legitimacy status. The estimated seemingly unrelated regression model suggests that, while women received less than equitable access to the benefits of mechanization during the period of French industrial expansion, the need for low-wage female and child labor in the textile industry helped to significantly reduce female infanticide.
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