ABSTRACT

Marriage patterns are a key element in the social reproduction of inequalities because, through marriage, socio-economic resources are distributed among individuals and households. Furthermore, the measure by which individuals from different groups marry each other can be considered as an indicator of the grade of openness of a society. From a historical perspective, modernization theory has traditionally predicted a decrease in marital homogamy by social origin. Long-term trends in social homogamy have been investigated in the social history field, and empirical evidence is quite diverse across contexts and periods. We analyzed patterns of social homogamy in Milan using new couple-level data on marriages between the end of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century. Following the modernization framework, we hypothesized that the transition towards an industrial society should be accompanied by an increase in social heterogamy. Results show that, net of changing marginal distributions across social classes, patterns of couple formation remain substantively the same across time. Men appear less mobile than women, who have a higher tendency towards upward marital mobility. As for intermarriage among social classes, boundaries between the top and bottom classes, and barriers between manual and non-manual workers remained strong across time. These results, as previously found in other contexts, do not fully corroborate the modernization theory.

摘要

婚姻模式是不平等社会再生产的一个关键因素，因为通过婚姻，社会经济资源在个人和家庭之间分配。此外，不同群体的个人彼此结婚的衡量标准可以被视为社会开放程度的指标。从历史的角度来看，现代化理论传统上预测社会出身的婚姻同婚现象会减少。社会历史领域已经对社会同婚的长期趋势进行了调查，并且经验证据在不同背景和时期中非常多样化。我们使用的19月底之间的婚姻新人级别的数据分析了社会homogamy模式在米兰^日和20上半年^个世纪。遵循现代化框架，我们假设向工业社会的过渡应该伴随着社会异质性的增加。结果表明，除去社会阶层边际分布的变化，夫妻形成的模式随着时间的推移基本保持不变。男性的流动性似乎低于女性，而女性的婚姻流动性更高。至于社会阶层之间的通婚，上层阶级和下层阶级之间的界限，以及体力劳动者和非体力劳动者之间的壁垒一直存在。这些结果，正如之前在其他情况下发现的那样，并没有完全证实现代化理论。