"Empty Cradles" and the Quiet Revolution: Demographic Discourse and Cultural Struggles of Gender, Race, and Class in Italy

The current record-low birthrate of Italian women has generated lively debate about the future of the nation. In Italy, the average number of children per woman has arrived at around 1.2, a level "likely the lowest ever documented in the history of humanity for a large-scale population," according to one Italian demographer (Golini et al. 1995:1; Instituto Nazionale di Statistico [ISTAT] 1996b). A paradox has arisen in the midst of Italians practicing what demographers claim is the lowest-ever national fertility level: as the rest of the world worries about overpopulation, Italy and many other European countries sound alarms about below-replacement fertility levels (Anagnost 1995; Bongaarts 1998; Sen 1997).' This article examines the social context related to the current demographic situation in Italy and has three objectives: (1) to expose the strategies demographers use to frame the birthrate in Italy as a "problem" and to argue that this exercise of scientific authority has powerful and hegemonic consequences in terms of producing demographic knowledge that extends beyond the field of demography; (2) to suggest that this knowledge is integral to a politics of cultural struggle that portrays men and, in particular, women as irrational family-makers; and (3) to argue that this instance of demographic science contributes to an alarmism that enables an "elite" sort of racism toward immi-