Sara Horrell

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.

Gender and Skills

A survey of a random sample of over 600 employed adults in the Northampton area is used to compare mens and womens perceptions of the content of their jobs and to construct an index of skill. Differences were found between men and women in perceptions of both the types of skills required in their jobs, with women emphasising personal and social skills, and in the level of skill involved. Mens jobs on average appeared to be higher skilled, but the main difference was found in fact not to be by gender but between full- and part-time jobs. Some of these differences may be related to differences in perceptions of skill. Women part-timers were much less likely than men to perceive their jobs as skilled, even when sharing similar perceptions of job content.

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.

Home Demand and British Industrialization

Household budget studies are used to assess working-class demand for manufactures over industrialization. Contrary to demand-side proponents, increased urbanization, enhanced opportunities for womens and childrens work, and a declining subsistence sector all retrenched consumption patterns into demand for the products of traditional industries and decreased demand for the products of new manufacturing industries. However, consideration of national expenditure on necessities shows an increasing surplus available for discretionary expenditure between 1801 and 1841. This reflects an increased purchasing power of the middle and upper classes that may have manifested itself as substantially increased demand for domestic manufactures.

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.

Stature and relative deprivation: fatherless children in early industrial Britain

iEconomic historians and development economists have exploited links between nutrition, health status and physical stature to argue that evidence about height can be used to supplement conventional economic indices of well-being. Evidence on stature may be available for time periods when conventional economic indices are not. It may also exist for sections of populations for which only aggregate income data is available, and so expose variations in living standards within populations: indeed this may be its most important contribution. Moreover height is an aggregate function of many aspects of well-being, including real income, work intensity and the disease environment. Unlike real income data it can reflect net environmental factors such as arduous employment at an early age that is not fully oset by inputs of food and health care. This article exploits these potentially useful attributes of the anthropometric approach to explore a neglected aspect of inequality in early industrial Britain and to try to capture evidence of the net eect of relative deprivation through cross-sectional analyses of heights. Children in families headed by women comprise the subsample on which we focus. Considerable qualitative and some quantitative evidence exists to suggest that children in such families were relatively deprived. Female-headed

Living Standards in Britain 1900-2000: Women's Century?

Two composite measures are calculated to map improvements in living standards over the 20th century: the Dasgupta- Weale index and the Human Development Index. A gendered version of the latter is also considered. Indicators of income, leisure, inequality, wealth, health, education and political rights are included. The indices reveal a century of progress. But progress has been neither continuous nor uniformly shared. Downturns are evident in some of the indica tors since 1980, demonstrating that the gains are not immutable and need to be protected. Womens position has im proved if the end of the century is compared to its beginning, but there has been little change in womens position relative to mens over the last few decades on the dimensions considered here.

Consumption Conundrums Unravelled

While consumption has moved to centre stage in accounts of Britains industrialization, evidence on the mass transformation of homes and expenditure on novelty is hard to reconcile with the poor living standards experienced by many working people. Part of the conundrum arises from the limitations of available probate evidence, but the motivational drivers behind raised consumption can also be questioned. Was it changed tastes or falling prices because of improved technology which prompted the purchase of new goods? Utilizing evidence from an alternative source, property stolen through housebreaking and burglary as reported in the Old Bailey Papers and Proceedings for 1750–1821, we identify those goods that were commonly stolen as the fashion icons of their day, trace such goods back to their original owners, thus linking ownership and status, and through analysis over time show how consumption evolved. This analysis incorporates the influence of price and real incomes on ownership, allowing the influence of price and fashion on consumption patterns to be identified separately. The findings show that, in addition to price and income effects, fashion had a strong influence, but this was not just emulation; differentiation too was evident. The evidence points to a complex interplay between desires and differentiation, aspiration and affordability, in determining the goods that people possessed.