After the American Civil War, lots of Southern women died as bachelorettes due to the

[raccoon]

shortage of men, so many of them having died in that war. (Author mentions that in CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC.)

I wonder if that's true of other countries/time periods? For instance, Germany after WWII. England, France, Germany, and other Western European countries after WWI?

[Odin2005]

1. it was particularily bad in France after WW1.

[raccoon]

2. I think England too--I read a book by Vera Brittain, who was a nurse in WWI. nt

[RZM]

3. You left out the Soviet Union after WWII, where the discrepancy was truly unbelievable

The region with the closest male to female ratio after the war was in Central Asia (I believe it was Tajikistan). The ratio there was 72:100. In the Smolesnk region in the Western part of the country (which had endured German occupation) it was 17:100!

Some professions that had been somewhat feminized during the war (notably medicine) never entirely returned to the prewar state of things.

This was one of the reasons for the Soviet 'Family Law' that was enacted in July 1944, when the war was still going on. The law essentially absolved men of legal parental responsibilities as an incentive to get the birthrate up.

Though I don't know as much about it, I believe a similar situation occurred in Paraguay in the 19th century. A bunch of Paraguay's neighbors ganged up on it during a war and this resulted in a very large gender imbalance there for a generation or two after.