In front of a large and attentive audience, Professor Fernández retraced the history of women's property rights in the USA starting from the 19th century, when according to the patriarchal system, married women could "only act under the protective wing of the husband and the husband acquired the rights of his wife" and when a third of all children died by the age of ten. It was a system that began to come to an end with the introduction of two variables: an increase in wealth and a reduction in the birth rate.
With statistics and graphs to hand, Prof. Fernández demonstrated that as development progressed the "disparity between male and female children increased in terms of wealth" and thus "husbands, when they in turn became fathers, changed their perspective". It was however, a concession, because "it has always and in every case been men who decided".
More generally, as illustrated by the New York University Professor, "independent growth of the system makes people happier and this is true in both patriarchal and egalitarian systems", however, "when one is poor the difference between the two systems is clearly minimal". It is only when wealth increases that one can begin to see the difference in a patriarchal system like the one the last century, and while people are initially happier, as wealth gradually increases so does inequality between the genders, and it is here that "the situation is overturned and people become more unhappy".
The there is the variable of fertility, which is inversely proportional to happiness and wealth: "The lower the birth rate, the more wealth and happiness increase, at least initially", continued Raquel Fernández, who explained how fathers, when they had fewer children, began to give more weight to female rights. Finally, as the Professor explained, the USA represents an excellent model for study, given that the granting of women's property rights took place over an extensive period of time and was different from one state to another, from the middle of the 19th century until the 1920s.
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Lunedì, 01 Giugno 2015 - 02:00
Comunicato
1352
According to Professor Raquel Fernández, everything depends on fertility and wealth
WOMEN'S RIGHT TO PROPERTY
Women did not conquer their rights. These were instead gradually conceded by men following a fall in the birth rate and an increase in wealth. This is the theory put forward by New York University Professor, Raquel Fernández today at the Festival of Economics in Trento. She was introduced by the journalist Roberta Carlini: "when you are young, they bring you up to do like your daddy done", a famous song by Bruce Springsteen said, but today times have changed, the social mobility of women is the only revolution promised in the course of the last century that has been achieved; if we look at the mother-daughter trend we must revise the pessimistic analysis".-
