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.

本文探讨了意大利自由党（1871-1192年）的人力资本性别差距的演变。首先，我们表明，意大利落后于法国，普鲁士和英国等较先进的国家约50年，而在欧洲其他地区，性别识字率的地区差异是无与伦比的。接下来，我们测试1911年向小学集中化的转变（Daneo-Credaro改革）是否对女性识字率产生了决定性的改善。我们依赖于1911年和1921年识字率的全新横截面微观（城市）数据集，以及1911年左右的潜在决定因素。这些数据与倾向评分匹配相结合，可以提高识别度，表明小学中央集权使女性识字率的年均增长提高了0.78个百分点。从而，尽管这项改革并非专门针对女孩，但它带来了意想不到的结果，即人力资本的快速积累给妇女带来了意外的后果，而雌性的母鸡则减少了教育上的性别差距。我们简要讨论了这场“沉默的革命”为何可能对意大利的经济历史产生重要影响。