Deborah Oxley

Crust or crumb?: Intrahousehold resource allocation and male breadwinning in late Victorian Britain

R ecent development literature has identified a resource allocation bias against girls in favour of boys.2 The reason is, in part, economic. Boys engage in paid employment and bring resources into the family. Girls, facing limited employment opportunities, directly contribute little to the family purse. Furthermore, when they leave to marry, girls may take assets with them. Consequently, families perceive girls as being of lower value than boys, and parents direct resources towards the better economic asset-male offspring-a decision whose extreme outcome can be observed in excess female mortality. In this model, unequal access to paid work has its corollary in gender-differentiated receipts of welfareenhancing resources. This model of intrahousehold resource allocation raises questions for economic historians. In particular, it focuses attention on what was happening within households when the family ceased to be the basic unit of production and was replaced by individual wage workers, a profoundly gendered process culminating in that most valorized of workers, the male breadwinner. This shift over the course of the nineteenth century from households satisfying their material needs through the employment and income contributions of all family members to reliance on the earnings of a male head of household has been well documented.3 But its consequences for the way in which households allocated resources-in particular, the distribution towards non-contributing members-has received considerably less attention.4 Here, 1,024 household budgets of British workers in the textile, coal-mining, and metal-manufacturing industries

Work and prudence: Household responses to income variation in nineteenth-century Britain

A survey of industrial households conducted in 1889–90 is used to investigate participation in self-help organisations, such as sickness and death benefit clubs and friendly societies, and to examine whether payouts were important in seeing families through earnings crises. Formal self-help has been hypothesised to underpin the male breadwinner family form, reducing the risk incumbent in reliance on one source of earnings. The results here show that those households with multiple earners took out most insurance and also had recourse to informal strategies, such as eliciting greater labour force participation from other family members and economising on rent, when adversity carried male earnings down. Those reliant on a male breadwinner were left vulnerable. They insured less, benefits were insufficient to make up earnings shortfalls and they were unable to compensate for deficits through labour market strategies. Formal self-help was a complement to, not a substitute for, family employment.

Bringing Home the Bacon? Regional Nutrition, Stature, and Gender in the Industrial Revolution

The impact of changing diet and resultant nutrition on living standards over the industrial revolution has been much debated, yet existing data have enabled only general trends to be identified. We use data from Edens survey of parishes in 1795 and the Rural Queries of 1834 to go beyond average calorie intake, instead focusing on micronutrients and quality of diet. From this we discern regional differences in diet. In 1795 these differences were related to the availability of common land and the nature of womens work. Diet in both periods also maps onto stature. Using five datasets on height, we observe a positive impact of diet in 1795 on mens, womens, and boys heights. By 1834 the impact is less evident; for men it remained, for women and boys it either no longer existed or became negative. This may indicate the superseding of nutritional factors by environmental ones, but it also hints at the emergence of a different relationship between height and nutrition for women and children compared with men. We speculate that this points to a shift in the intra-household allocation of resources, but challenge the notion that the emergence of male breadwinning automatically led to universal female disadvantage.

Living Standards of Women in Prefamine Ireland

Prefamine Irish living standards have proved enigmatic. They are intriguing because they hold the key to understanding the trajectory of economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century. They have remained elusive because of the paucity of available information. Using Australian data, this paper examines regional trends in Irish-born female convict heights, identifying divergent tendencies between west and east that left Ulster women the tallest in the land.

Pitted but not Pitied or, does Smallpox Make You Small?

This article examines three propositions put by Leunig and Voth: that smallpox reduced stature irrespective of location, that stunting was most apparent among adolescents, and that these relationships were obscured in my earlier work by small sample size. It tests these claims by re‐examining the original data—including the neglected Wandsworth data set—and questioning the meaning of the chosen method of graphical representation. Furthermore, and most fundamentally, the relationship between smallpox and stunting is advanced by adding new data on a further 34,310 prisoners. Using considerably larger data sets with many more juveniles, and refined definitions of rural and urban locations, this article confirms that the ‘smallpox effect’ varied by location, age, gender, and time period. That the relationship between smallpox and stunting was mediated through place and time suggests the role played by evolving urban conditions. The article offers a warning on the dangers of aggregating data without paying heed to important composition effects, and it argues that size does matter: the size of the smallpox effect, population size, sample size, and the size of the p‐statistic. The reply concludes by again questioning the likely causes of stunting in the world’s first great metropolis, London, arguing for the importance of examining chronic illness as a source of ongoing nutritional insult.

Blood and bone: Body mass, gender and health inequality in 19th century British families

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, a new institution emerged: the modern prison. Some prisons invested in scales. Upon entry, prisoners were measured and personal details documented. These meticulously compiled records afford a new vantage point from which we can peer into the dynamics of the household. Body measurements – height, weight, and body mass (weight adjusted for height) – connect to both patterns of consumption and health risk. Prison data thus speak to both gender and health inequality in the past. The paper juxtaposes a service economy (Wandsworth near London) with a modern manufacturing sector (Paisley near Glasgow) in order to contrast how economic form and opportunities in the market sector shaped relations and outcomes in the household sector. We find that families bargained over the allocation of resources; that bargaining position was influenced by economic value, mediated by maternal sacrifice; that this was an earner bias rather than gender bias; and that new industrial work for women and children supported a more egalitarian distribution that improved everyones health status via superior heights and heavier weights. We examine Irish immigrants to assess cultural differences in family behaviour. Finally, the paper offers, for the first time, a detailed interpolation of Waalers health risk for women.

Women transported: Gendered images and realities

For several decades historians have been criticising stereotyped depictions of female convicts as whores. Moving beyond such images, these historians have demonstrated that female transportees were active and resourceful in the colony. However, crumbling images and dynamic colonial roles have not yet been teamed with a thorough reassessment of the types of criminals the women were before being transported. Influential 19th century views regarding women offenders and female transportees dissuaded important historians from applying to women convicts the same analytic tools that they had used to study male convicts. Crimes took a back-seat to accusations of depravity. Studying the crimes for which the women were transported reveals, however, that most female convicts were not reprobates, but first-time offenders guilty of small-scale property crimes.

Migration and Opportunity: An Antipodean Perspective

Australian data can reflect on British questions, about the quality of immigrant labour, and the opportunities gained by migrating, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three case studies are presented. The first uses quantitative methods and convict transportation records to argue that Ireland suffered a “brain drain” when Britain industrialized, siphoning off the cream of its workers to England and some, eventually, to Australia. Drawing on an entirely different type of data, the second study reaches strikingly similar positive conclusions about the qualities of Australias early assisted immigrants: three splendidly visible immigrants stand for the tens of thousands of people who sailed out of urban and rural Britain to the distant colonies. A no less optimistic view of Australias immigrants half a century later is demonstrated in the third case study on female domestic servants. Often referred to as the submerged stratum of the workforce, the most oppressed and the least skilled, the label “domestic servant” obscured a wide range of internal distinctions of rank and experience, and too often simply homogenized them into a sump of “surplus women”. This study helps to rescue the immigrant women from this fate and invests them with individuality and volition, offering the vision of the intercontinentally peripatetic domestic, piloting her way about the globe, taking advantage of colonial labour shortages to maximize her mobility and her family strategies. Best of all, these migrants emerge as individuals out of the mass, faces with names, people with agenda.

Who were the Female Convicts

SummaryThe convicts exported to Australia have been the subject of enquiry since transportation commenced, and the conclusions reached about the nature of the convict “character” have not always been favourable. One belief that has received particular currency is that the convicts were amongst the worst of the apprehended members of a professional criminal class said to be operating within Great Britain. It is the purpose of this essay to question this belief by investigating the origins and characteristics of a sample of 2,210 female convicts arriving in New South wales from 1825 to 1840 and to establish an alternative picture of who those “damned whores” really were.

An Archaeology of Institutional Confinement: The Hyde Park Barracks, 1848–1886

and elitism—in different parts of the world at different times. This approach goes towards explaining why, for instance, associations in the Far East catered for the elite, while associations in North America engaged in more philanthropy and those in Australasia were generally interested in leisure or recreation above all else. While the focus here is on Scottish migrants, Bueltmann’s approach to ethnic associationalism will be useful in illuminating the experience of a variety of migrant groups in any number of countries. As large, heterogeneous groups of migrants, it is sometimes difficult to justify selecting ‘the Scots’ as a category for analysis. The book acknowledges that ethnic associationalism was not unique to the Scots, but Bueltmann ably demonstrates why they provide a useful example in this case. Often, Scots lead the way in establishing associations and clubs in places of settlement and, setting them apart from many migrant groups whose identity was frequently ascribed from the outside, demonstrated active agency in collective identity making. It is perhaps the often self-selecting nature of diasporic Scottish communities, however, that raises the most problems, for not all Scots were active or had agency in the making of their identities. Bueltmann acknowledges this difficulty and highlights that most Scottish migrants, in fact, had little to do with ethnic associations. Except for some notable cases, women did not participate in mainstream Scottish ethnic associational culture. Additionally, Scottish clubs and societies were often the domain of the commercial class and the migrant elite, although some activities of Scottish associations—‘patrician benevolence’, for instance—nevertheless still filtered through to the working class. It is undeniable that many insights into diasporic processes can be gleaned from a study of ethnic associationalism—and Bueltmann is successful in articulating these—but concerns over representativeness are also valid. The problem of precisely why these groups did not capture more of the diaspora remains, as does the question of how, if not through associations, non-participants negotiated their ethnicity and connected with the social structures of the host country. The latter issue is particularly relevant to those migrants who did not fit dominant conceptualisations of what it meant to be Scottish in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Bueltmann’s study is ultimately successful, largely because of the sophistication of her approach and the care with which she treats her evidence. Through a series of highly readable, illuminating, and novel case studies, she has demonstrated why ethnic associationalism should be taken more seriously and provides an exemplar of how we can approach such clubs and societies.