Jane Humphries

Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.

Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

This article argues against the mainstream view that eighteenth-century common rights were of little significance to working people. Markets in common rights and in their products provide an index of value, and when neither common rights nor derived products were bought and sold, values are imputed from the market prices of similar goods. Since women and children were the primary exploiters of common rights, their loss led to changes in womens economic position within the family and more generally to increased dependence of whole families on wages and wage earners.

Old Questions, New Data, and Alternative Perspectives: Families' Living Standards in the Industrial Revolution

We have used the household accounts of 1,350 husband-wife families to investigate trends in male earnings and family incomes. This evidence confirms the material progress suggested by trends in the real wage rates of adult males. But the budget data underscore occupational and regional distinctions, discontinuities in the growth process, and changes over time in the ability of other family members to offset the effects of the business cycle on mens earnings. Overall, family incomes grew less than male earnings.

Off the Record: Reconstructing Women's Labor Force Participation in the European Past

Abstract Conventional histories of womens labor force participation in Europe conceptualize the trends in terms of a U-shaped pattern. This contribution draws on historical research to challenge such an account. First, it demonstrates that the trough in participation is in part statistically manufactured by uncritical reliance on official sources that systematically undercount women workers. Second, it exploits nonstandard sources to construct alternative estimates of womens participation. Third, it analyzes the reconstructed rates to determine their congruence with neoclassical economics and modern empirical studies. Not all posited relationships time travel. Supply-side factors such as marital status and number and age of children are major determinants of modern womens decision to enter the labor force, yet appear less prominent in historical contexts. Instead, the demand for labor seems decisive. Finally, the U-shaped curve is not entirely a statistical artifact, but appears to evolve at higher levels of participation than usually suggested.

CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

AS: My interest in inequality, which goes back to my school days, was initially quite fixed on class divisions. My involvement with gender inequality grew more slowly. There was much greater concentration on class in standard politics (including standard student politics), and when in the early 1950s I was studying at Presidency College in Calcutta, it was taken for granted that class divisions were incomparably more important than other social divisions. Indeed, when later on, in the late 1960s, I started working on gender inequality (I was then teaching at Delhi University), many of my close friends still saw this as quite an ‘‘unsound’’ broadening of interest, involving a ‘‘dilution’’ of one’s ‘‘focus on class.’’ But, in addition to that political issue of priority, it is also true that classbased inequalities are, in many ways, much more transparent, which no one – even a child – can miss, without closing one’s eyes altogether. Even my sense of agony and outrage at the Great Bengal famine of 1943, to which you refer (and which did strongly shake even my 9-year-old mind), was also linked to the class pattern of mortality. Aside from the anger and outrage at the fact that millions could actually die of hunger and hunger-related diseases, I was amazed by the extraordinary recognition that no one I knew personally, through family connections or social ones, had any serious economic problem during the famine, while unknown millions, men, women, and children, roamed the country in search of food and fell and perished. The class character of famines in particular and of economic deprivation in general was impossible to escape. There was, of course, evidence of inequality between men and women as well. But its severe and brutal manifestations (on which I researched much later – from the late 1960s to the 1990s) were well hidden from immediate observation. And the less extreme expressions were confounded by a prevailing attitudinal fog. For example, in comparison with Feminist Economics 9(2 – 3), 2003, 319 – 332

The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Britain

The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited patriarchal relationships and nascent industrial capitalism. Both camps agree, as Creighton has recently put it, about “the out-lines of [the] development” of the male breadwinner family. Where they disagree is in “the factors responsible for its origins and expansion”. Why did families move away from an asserted “golden age” of egalitarian sourcing of incomes, which involved husbands, wives and children, to dependence on a male breadwinner who aspired to a family wage? Neo-classical economic historians emphasize the supply conditions, concentrating on income effects from mens earnings, family structure variables and alternatives to womens employment in terms of productive activities in the home. In contrast, dual systems theorists emphasize demand conditions in terms of institutional constraints on womens and childrens employment exemplified by the exclusionary strategies of chauvinist trade unions, labour legislation which limited the opportunities of women and children, and the legitimation of mens wage demands by references to their need for a family wage. Our view is that systematic empirical investigation of the male breadwinner family has been lacking, even the timescale of its appearance and development remains obscure. Unless we fill in the outlines with more empirical detail we will never discover the reasons for its origins and expansion.

The Lure of Aggregates and the Pitfalls of the Patriarchal Perspective: A Critique of the High Wage Economy Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution

The newly dominant interpretation of the British industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy (HWE) and that the high wages themselves caused industrialization by making profitable labour-saving inventions that were economically inefficient in the context of other relative factor prices. Once adopted these macro inventions put Britain on a growth path that transcended the trajectories associated with more labour-intensive production methods. This account of the HWE economy is misleading because it focuses on men and male wages, underestimates the relative caloric needs of women and children and bases its views of living standards on an ahistorical and false household economy. A more realistic depiction of the working-class family in these times provides an alternative explanation of inventive and innovative activity based on the availability of cheap and amenable female and child labour and thereby a broader interpretation of the industrial revolution.

Mundane heroines: Conflict, Ethnicity, Gender, and Female Headship in Eastern Sri Lanka

For the last twenty years, eastern Sri Lanka has witnessed a bitter and bloody civil conflict. This paper explores the experience of female-headed households in the region. Only partially the product of war, such households cannot be bundled together as a social problem with a single solution. Our study endorses the feminist suspicion of falsely homogenizing accounts of womens lives and suggests instead an alternative emphasis on the many ways in which gendered relations of dominance and subordination are maintained. With its co-existing Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhala groups, eastern Sri Lanka facilitates the exploration of ethnicity as a source of variation. The households included in this study share a common structure and face the same economic problems, yet ethnic differences divide them. The paper charts the problems, strategies, and partial triumphs of these lone mothers and proposes policies to help them in their mundane but heroic struggle.

The Working Class Family, Women's Liberation, and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth Century British History

Recent Marxist analyses have focused on the working class family as the arena of domestic labour and the context of the reproduction of labour- power. The effect has been to view the family in terms of the functional prerequi sites of capitalism, and to locate its reproduction in the reproduction of capital. But to look only from the perspective of capital is to neglect the role of class struggle. This paper attempts to redress this bias by arguing that in certain per iods of capitalist development labours defence of the family, a defence moti vated by the familys role in the determination of the standard of living, the development of class cohesion and the waging of class struggle, was an important reason for its survival.

Exploring the challenges of Amartya Sen¿s work and ideas: an introduction

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is renowned for his humanitarian approach to economics. His contribution has also been crucial to the development of several aspects of feminist economics and gender analysis. Many of his writings have addressed gender concerns directly, but even when not explicitly feminist, his work has often engaged with themes that are central to feminist economics and philosophy. Indeed, IAFFE has claimed him as ‘‘a feminist economist.’’ This special issue of Feminist Economics is meant as a tribute to a brilliant economist and a fine man. It is also intended as a contribution to scholarship and future research on gender. It both builds on Sen’s ideas and engages with them critically. It outlines the range and usefulness of his work for gender analysis but does not shy away from exploring some of its silences and implicit assumptions. This challenging project was initiated on a sunny summer’s day in London in June 2000. The three of us met to identify the major topics and concepts in Sen’s work which we would endeavor to cover, such as justice, freedom, social choice, agency, functionings and capabilities, missing women, famines, inequality and poverty measures, the human development approach, and culture and identity. Papers were invited through an open ‘‘Call’’ publicized through academic journals, e-mail lists, and publications with a wide readership in developing countries, such as the Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, India). We also actively solicited papers from experts working on the relevant themes. For the final set of papers we held a workshop at All Souls College, Oxford, UK, in September 2002. The aim of the workshop was to facilitate wide-ranging and in-depth interactions between Sen and the authors, as well as among the paper writers themselves and others invited. The discussions were interactive, spirited, and challenging. We were privileged to have Amartya Sen join us for the full duration of the workshop, and comment on all the presentations. After the workshop, with a final round of revisions, the papers took the form in which they appear in this special issue. Although at the project’s initiation we had hoped to cover all the major aspects of Sen’s work, we were only partially successful. For a start, Feminist Economics 9(2 – 3), 2003, 3 – 12