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.

Facing severe social and economic challenges following World War II, both Chicago and Milwaukee formed local economic development partnerships. However, Chicago’s development approach emphasized downtown, while Milwaukee’s approach focused largely on manufacturing. This article uses literature on path dependence and urban regimes to show how development strategies initiated in both cities during the late 1940s became entrenched over time, although more so in Chicago than in Milwaukee. I argue that postwar development policy in each city can be understood only through a genuinely historical approach that links outcomes at the close of this narrative in 1980 with key causal factors dating back to the 1940s.

Joyce Burnette's (2008) book investigates why women earned lower wages and had different occupations than men during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Of more relevance in the present is why women often have lower earnings than and work in different occupations from men today. The answers from the past and present have some similarity, but the differences are considerably greater. The world of “brawn” jobs was transformed by technological change and sectoral shifts into a world of “brain” jobs. I will first address the question posed in the book and will end with that concerning today.

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.

As a women's and an economic historian of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Britain, I welcome further analysis and reassessment, such as Joyce Burnette undertakes, of women, work, and wages during the industrial transition. This topic has fallen out of fashion, and yet there is still much that we do not know. I enjoyed reading Burnette's (2008) book, which challenged and engaged me and made me reflect on the approaches, methods, and evidence that I, as a historian, am persuaded by when it comes to making claims about women and work in the past.

Explanations of the gender pay gap and related labor market segregation remain fiercely debated. On the one side are those economic historians who take a primarily neoclassical view, in which competition among workers and employers eliminates wage differences that do not reflect productivity and occupational segregation that is not the outcome of choice. Persistent discrimination must reflect anticompetitive institutions, for instance, trade unions. A corollary of the neoclassical perspective is that markets are liberating, freeing agents, including women, from cultural stereotypes and ensuring that they get paid what they are worth, although of course this need not imply wage equality if there are gender differences in productivity. On the other side are those cultural historians who interpret wage differences as reflecting custom and, as far as women are concerned, the cultural deprecation of women's work, while occupational segregation represents gender stereotypes of fit work for women. In this view, socially and culturally constructed gender identities can influence market outcomes, producing discrimination in wages and work that persists even in the face of competitive forces.

This article investigates patterns of socioeconomic difference in the wartime morbidity and mortality of black Union soldiers during the American Civil War. Among the factors that contributed to lower probabilities of contracting and dying of disease were lighter skin color, a nonfield occupation, residence on a large plantation, and residence in a rural area prior to enlistment. Patterns of disease-specific mortality and timing of death suggest that the differences in the development of immunity to disease and in nutritional status prior to enlistment were responsible for the observed socioeconomic differences in wartime health. For example, the advantages of light-skinned soldiers over dark-skinned and of enlisted men formerly engaged in nonfield occupations over field hands resulted from differences in nutritional status. The lower wartime mortality of ex-slaves from large plantations can be explained by their better-developed immunity and superior nutritional status. The results of this article suggest that there were substantial disparities in the health of the slave population on the eve of the Civil War.