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The Significance of Brawn

  • Pamela Sharpe
Extract

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.

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References
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Burnette, Joyce (2008) Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cookson, J. E. (1997) The British Armed Nation, 1793–;1815. Oxford: Clarendon.
Emsley, Clive (1979) British Society and the French Wars, 1793–;1815. London: Macmillan.
Hitchcock, Tim, King, Peter, and Pamela Sharpe (1997) Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–;1840. London: Macmillan.
McCulloch, J. R. (1837) A Statistical Account of the British Empire: Exhibiting Its Extent, Physical Capacities, Population, Industry, and Civil and Religious Institutions. 2 vols. London: Knight.
Oren, Laura (1974) “The welfare of women in labouring families: England, 1860–;1950,” in Hartman, Mary S. and Banner, Lois (eds.) Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women. New York: Harper and Row: 226–;44.
Scholliers, Peter, and Schwarz, Leonard (2003) Experiencing Wages: Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe since 1500. Oxford: Berghahn.
Schwarz, Leonard (2007) “Custom, wages, and workload in England during industrialisation.” Past and Present, no. 197: 143–;75.
Sokoll, Thomas (2001) Essex Pauper Letters. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press.
Stead, David (2006) “Delegated risk in English agriculture, 1750–;1850: The labour market.” Labour History Review 71: 123–;44.
Thompson, E. P. (1991) Customs in Common. London: Merlin.
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Social Science History
  • ISSN: 0145-5532
  • EISSN: 1527-8034
  • URL: /core/journals/social-science-history
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