Introduction

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.