Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-15T22:47:25.440Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Significance of Brawn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Pamela Sharpe
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Special Section: Debating Gender, Work, and Wages: A Roundtable Discussion
Information
Social Science History , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , Winter 2009 , pp. 489 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2009 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Burnette, Joyce (2008) Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cookson, J. E. (1997) The British Armed Nation, 1793–;1815. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Emsley, Clive (1979) British Society and the French Wars, 1793–;1815. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Tim, King, Peter, and Pamela Sharpe (1997) Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–;1840. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Scholliers, Peter, and Schwarz, Leonard (2003) Experiencing Wages: Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe since 1500. Oxford: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Schwarz, Leonard (2007) “Custom, wages, and workload in England during industrialisation.” Past and Present, no. 197: 143–;75.Google Scholar
Sokoll, Thomas (2001) Essex Pauper Letters. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stead, David (2006) “Delegated risk in English agriculture, 1750–;1850: The labour market.” Labour History Review 71: 123–;44.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. (1991) Customs in Common. London: Merlin.Google Scholar