Marriage choices, social homogamy and modernization in Milan, 1890-1899 and 1950-1959

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 19th and the first half of the 20th 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.