ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE OF ‘VIÚVAS DA SECA’ IN THE NORTHERN SEMIARID OF PARAÍBA (1970 – 2010)
Migration; Migratory selectivity; Northern Semiarid; Gender roles; Family dynamics
Drought widows is the term used by Ab'Saber (1999) to characterize the population of women who are widows of living husbands, left behind by the migratory flows carried out selectively by gender and working age. This phenomenon has become frequent throughout the Northeast region, especially in the northern semi-arid region, a region with the most severe droughts, which make the economy fragile and incapable of retaining labor in the period which the second Brazilian demographic transition began. The historical series from 1970 to 2010 proposes to monitor the changes in the sociodemographic profile of women widowed from the drought through data from the Brazilian Demographic Census, caused by the ideational changes widespread during the second demographic transition (LESTHAEGHE AND SURKIN, 1988). Taking the population between 15 and 49 years of age as the analysis population, as it covers the reproductive period, and coincides with the age at which there is a greater probability of consensual cohabitation, divorce, children, as well as being the age at which labor migration would find greater male streams. Due to the difficulty in finding questions about migration for the entire series, it is initially proposed to use the Sex Ratio as a proxy for male emigration in the northeastern semi-arid region in 1970, comprising 754 municipalities. According to the Foz Group (2021), variations in this indicator require further explanations to understand the composition by sex of the observed population, and sex-selective migration may be one of its causes. The Sex Ratio for the aforementioned region in that year was categorized into three levels, the highest being the one that includes municipalities whose Femininity Ratio was greater than 130 women for each group of 100 men, in this group there are 26 municipalities, of which 14 of them are part of the federative unit of Paraíba. Therefore, the great expressiveness of municipalities in Paraíba in this cut, lies in the need for further investigations to understand the occurrence of the phenomenon in Paraíba, using the migratory balance to prove that the differential of the Sex Ratio initially observed was due to male emigration and not to female immigration to the state. Preliminary analyzes make it possible to confirm assumptions such as that of Camarano and Abramovay (1999) in which masculinity would be greater in rural areas, as well as the Youth Dependency Ratio would be greater in these areas than in urban areas. In the same way as the urban transition highlighted by the Foz Group (2021), first supported by Zelinsk, it cooperates to reduce long-distance migratory flows and greater flows at medium and short distances with the reurbanization of new migratory spaces, causing productive decentralization, especially after the year 2000 with the internalization policies of vocational and higher education. Just as periods of economic crisis encourage return flows, as Dota and Queiroz (2019) present, the data found in the migratory balance confirm the reduction in emigration and the increase in immigration over the historical series. Subsequently, the next step should include analyzes on the declared level of female leadership in the state of Paraíba, Northeast region and Brazil, for concomitant observation of the declared state of union, in which it is expected to find greater volumes of consensual unions than civil marriages, whose instability of unions would be responsible for the increase in single-parent families headed by women in the group of municipalities selected for the case study. So that the woman's last level of education can be compared with her occupation condition and with the number of children, signaling the tradeoff of the quantity for the quality of the children (BECKER, 1962), as well as the reduction of fertility according to higher levels of female schooling.