Industrial Revolution Britain Research Articles

Identity, Labor, and Welfare: the Worlds of Work and Family

Identity, Labor, and Welfare: the Worlds of Work and Family Deborah Simonton (bio) Susan Porter Benson. Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. xii + 233 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8014-3723-6 (cl). Joyce Burnette. Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii + 377 pp. ISBN-10: 0-521-88063-3 (cl). Lisa DiCaprio. The Origins of the Welfare State: Women, Work, and the French Revolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. ix + 259 pp. ill. ISBN-10: 0-252-03021-4 (cl). Laura Levine Frader. Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. ix –447 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8223-4182-6 (cl); 0-8223-4198-7 (pb). Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo and Marjorie Keniston McIntosh. Women, Work and Domestic Virtue in Uganda, 1900–2003. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; Oxford: James Curry; Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2006. xii–308 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8214-1733-9 (cl), 0-8214-1734-7 (pb); 0-85255-988-7 (cl); 0-85255-987-9 (pb); 9970-02-586-4 (pb). Nancy Locklin. Women’s Work and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany. Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate Publishing limited, 2007. viii + 162 pp. ISBN-10: 0-7546-5819-1 (cl). Edith Sparks. Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xv + 329 pp. ill. ISBN-10: 0-8078-3061-5 (cl); 0-8078-5775-0 (pb). Carolyn Steedman. Master and Servant: Love and Labor in the English Industrial Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 263 pp. ISBN-10: 0-521-87446-5 (cl); 0-521-69773-6 (pb). The history of women’s work has its own history. Women’s work was a central issue in much of the earliest modern research on women’s history. [End Page 198] Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) and Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1930) are both well-known and were innovative for their time.1 Perhaps less-well known but important for French women’s history was Léon Abensour’s chapter “La Femme du peuple” in La Femme et le Féminisme en France avant la Révolution (1923), rarely surpassed for detail.2 As the feminist movement of the seventies began to questions women’s roles, female historians pioneered a new wave of women’s history, while Pinchbeck’s and Clark’s studies were reissued, along with a string of essays, many relating to women’s work, by the historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Joan Scott, Louise Tilly and Olwen Hufton on France; and the historians Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Karin Hausen on Germany. Adding significantly to historical debates about women’s work was Scott and Tilly’s Women, Work and Family (1978), which explicitly identified and analyzed relationships among various role expectations for French and English women.3 It was in certain ways a pioneering book constructed on a narrow empirical base. This was necessarily the case in 1978, when so much basic research was yet to be carried out. Much of the research on women significantly coincided with the emergence of the new social history, a history from below, which concerned itself with the “workers” and the “plebeians.” While contemporaries and historians often disregarded women as “workers,” increasingly they recognized women as contributors to the so-called family economy. As a research base began to build up, historians also began to look for more explanatory frameworks within which to understand the character of women’s work and its exclusions, as well as women’s agency within workplaces. A number of key issues mediate relationships between women and their labor, some shared with men, of course. Since concepts of gender, status, and power shape our understanding of work, and establish women’s specific kinds of participation as workers, we must look for ways to understand the nature and character of the work experience. While women’s work is delineated by factors such as economy, class, and demography, notions about women’s (and men’s) spatial and social distributions are...

Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (review)

Reviewed by: Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain Eric Schneider (bio) Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. By Joyce Burnette. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+377. £55. This book is the most forceful argument to date that gender wage differences and occupational sorting during the Industrial Revolution were based on market responses to real differences between male and female productivity, not on gender discrimination or custom. Joyce Burnette argues that productivity differences between the genders can be explained by two key factors. Most important, men's greater strength gave them a productivity advantage over women in manual labor, which resulted in men receiving higher wages for their greater productivity. Differences in human capital between men and women also contributed to the gender wage gap. Burnette sees strength as exogenous to the economic system because it was a product of biology, and human capital as endogenous because men and women had different incentives to invest in human capital. Thus, women earned approximately one-half to two-thirds the salaries of men performing the same task for equal periods of time because they were less productive. This argument challenges earlier historiography, which has emphasized the role of ideology, gender discrimination, and custom in determining women's wages. Burnette argues that ideological concepts of "women's work" rarely limited the industries in which women could work. Instead, conceptions of women's work reflected natural and efficient occupational segregation and were later harnessed by male unions in noncompetitive markets to justify the exclusion of women. Gender discrimination did not influence wages because men and women were given equal piece-rate wages for producing the same goods. Finally, women's wages were not set by custom because they varied over time and were responsive to regional economic pressures. Burnette also argues that, in competitive labor markets, occupational sorting based on strength decreased the gender difference in wages by allowing women to specialize in low-strength industries where they could [End Page 195] be more productive. This was the most efficient outcome for women and the economy as a whole. However, women were sometimes excluded from industries where labor markets were less competitive by men's distributional coalitions, which used ideological and discriminatory language to justify their attempt to maintain higher wages by excluding women. This outcome was less efficient for women and the economy. Of particular interest to the readership of this journal will be Burnette's discussion of how technological change shifted occupational structure. Because hand spinning in preindustrial England required little strength, women had a comparative advantage and performed most spinning work. Even with several substantial improvements in spinning technology in the early years of the Industrial Revolution—the spinning jenny and throstle—women continued to dominate the spinning industry because these new technologies were not strength-intensive. However, with the invention of mule-spinning, a task requiring a great deal of strength, women were pushed out of the spinning industry because men had a greater comparative advantage. After men became dominant in mule-spinning, they created unions and successfully excluded women after the self-actor decreased the strength requirements necessary to operate the machine. Thus new technology that either increased or decreased strength requirements could significantly influence occupational sorting in the economy. I agree with Burnette that strength did create real differences in productivity between men and women, but these productivity differences could have had an endogenous as well as exogenous determinant. For example, Burnette too readily dismisses the influence of gender inequality in the distribution of food in the household, which has been shown to leave women in a weaker and less-productive state than men. Therefore, it may not be possible to remove gender roles and ideology from gender differences in productivity and wages, even if wages were determined by the marginal product of female and male labor. In addition, in order to definitively prove that wage differences were determined by productivity differences and not by custom, Burnette would have to show quantitatively that wage differences were greater for occupations where strength was more important than in occupations where strength was not important. This is a difficult task given the paucity and nature...

Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain

Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain

Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism, by Phyllis Mack and, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain, by Joyce Burnette

<i>Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism</i>, by Phyllis Mack and, <i>Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain</i>, by Joyce Burnette

Gender, work and wages in industrial revolution Britain - By Joyce Burnette

Gender, work and wages in industrial revolution Britain - By Joyce Burnette

Book Review: Historical Studies: Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain

Book Review: Historical Studies: Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain

Introduction

One of the most vexing social debates of the late twentieth century in the industrialized West has centered on the complex of questions regarding the paid participation of women in the labor force. Which women engage in paid work, and for what reasons? For how many hours in a week, or weeks in a year, do they work for wages? What kind of work is it appropriate for women to do or, as some would ask, are they even capable of performing? How should the compensation for that work be established or evaluated? Joyce Burnette–s book Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship that seeks historical answers to these questions. In this roundtable discussion three historians and two economists respond both to Burnette’s book and to the larger scholarly debates about the nature of women’s work in the past. The themes that have most piqued the interest of these respondents lie primarily along three lines: the problem of evaluating the relative strength of male and female labor, and the importance of strength to wage setting; the struggle to properly define power relationships, either between men and women in the household or workplace or between owners of capital and sellers of labor; and the problem of the thinness or thickness of markets or, more specifically, the problem of limited female mobility.

The Significance of Brawn

It has been interesting to follow Joyce Burnette's work over the last few years and to see its culmination in Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (2008). As will be obvious to the book's readers, much of it is an argument with me and several other feminist economic historians who have a different take on the reason that female wages were, in general, so much lower than male wages in the period 1750–1850. It is worth saying at the outset that Burnette has the a priori assumption that economic forces are the crucial determinant of behavior. Burnette's explanation also has a different departure point from mine. Hers is to explain why men’s pay is so much higher than women’s pay. Mine is to explain why payments to women are so much lower than those to men.

Testing for Occupational Crowding in Eighteenth-Century British Agriculture

In the unskilled labor market of Industrial Revolution Britain, there was a distinct division of labor between the sexes. This occupational sorting may have been caused by gender discrimination, but, because men and women had different comparative advantages, it could also have been produced by a competitive market. This paper attempts to determine whether the division of labor resulted from discrimination in the form of occupational crowding by testing whether men and women were substitutes. Data on the employment of English farm servants in 1770 indicate that employers were willing to substitute male and female workers, which implies that the division of labor between the sexes was influenced by economic motivations, and was not determined by gender ideology alone.

Exclusion and the Market: The Causes of Occupational Segregation in Industrial Revolution Britain

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Services for Freer Trade

Politicians from all parties made much during the electlon campaign of the ‘erosion of the industrial base’. Kate Phylaktis examines the figures and discovers a fundamental change in the structure of the UK economy. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution Britain is importing manufactures; these are paid for by the surplus earned by the export of services, which now employ more than 60% of UK labour.

The Theory and Practical Application of Vertical Log Frame-Saws

Wood is one of the most important of raw materials; it can be used in various ways to meet demand, and can also be grown as required. In spite of its extensive use throughout the ages, and the wastage caused by fire and axe, there still exist huge virgin forests, covering partly unexplored regions of the world, whilst scientific forest management gains increased scope in keeping the timber resources in line with the constantly growing demand. Saw-milling is one of the main methods employed in wood conversion, producing sawn timber such as boards, planks, battens, and cants. Three types of saw-mill head rigs are used, i.e. circular, band, and frame. This paper deals with certain particulars related to the reciprocating type—the frame- or gang-saw. The circular- and band-saw-mills use continuously moving saw-blades, but frame-saws have to be sufficiently powered and strong enough to take up the great force developed by the reciprocating motion of the saw-gate, blades, and all accessories. The first patents and other technical literature relating to almost any type of woodworking and saw-mill machinery are of British origin. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution Britain was leading for many years in the manufacture of these machines, but more recently frame-saws and other types were developed in many parts of the world, where a growing saw-mill industry has had to satisfy its needs for such machines, well suited to local demands. It should be a matter of topical interest to give some details here of the close relationship between theory and practice in their application to the frame-saws, due to the fact that enormous damage was done during the recent war years, not only to all kinds of property which requires urgent replacement, but also to the fact that numerous saw-mills have first to be put in order, before they can again produce the timber needed for urgent repair work.