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Reviewed by:
  • Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain
  • Andrew August
Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. By Joyce Burnette (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008) 377 pp. 99.00

Burnette challenges the emphasis on gender discrimination in the labor market prominent in the work of many historians of women and industrialization.1 Instead, she applies economic models to argue that unrestricted markets efficiently sorted women and men into different jobs and paid them according to their productivity. Where male workers or professionals successfully barred women (based on economic interest more than gender ideology), men benefited at women's expense.

As Burnette notes, gender differences in wages and occupations during industrialization "are well known and easy to document" (136). To account for these patterns, she offers models that show that markets responded to differences in strength to sort men and women into occupations that "raised women's productivity" and "were to their comparative advantage" (145). Analysis of work roles in agriculture using cross-price elasticity and wage correlations shows that these labor markets did substitute women for men when conditions made such a choice rational. Thus, she concludes, employers did not exclude women from these segments of the labor market by custom or discrimination.

In other cases, she largely agrees with established scholarship that male workers or professionals excluded women, departing from conventional wisdom primarily in her argument that freer markets benefited women workers. Burnette also makes significant arguments about wages, suggesting that differences between men's and women's wages reflected a productivity gap rather than discrimination. She argues that many occupations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries required significant strength, and men's advantage in this area accounts for much of the wage differential.

Burnette brings an impressive range of sources to this discussion. Her arguments are carefully constructed, and she acknowledges exceptions to the trends that she cites (such as laundry work, which required great strength and was carried out chiefly by women). She makes a convincing case that market forces and differences in productivity were important factors; cultural determinists will be hard-pressed to dismiss her claims. However, Burnette's argument that, in competitive sectors of the economy, wage differences can be explained entirely through men's higher productivity remains subject to question. She does admirable work in estimating the difference in wages earned by men and women. Yet her estimates of the size of the wage gap—"women's wages were closer to one-half to two-thirds of male wages" (98)—remain approximate. She develops estimates for productivity differences from research ranging across time and geography, from nineteenth-century America to twentieth-century China. These data show that women were often less [End Page 91] productive than men in manual tasks; they do not, ultimately, prove that productivity differences during industrialization were the sole cause of the wage gap.

Similarly, Burnette argues convincingly that male and female labor markets were less distinct than many historians have suggested. However, she denies even the possibility of employer preferences excluding women against market forces. Applying Becker's economic assumptions, she argues that employers in competitive markets who discriminate "should fail" (242).2 Yet employers may have accepted some sacrifice of profit in order to enforce restrictions on women. Rose has shown, for example, that the marriage bar was routinely enforced in a number of industries and regions, though "it was not the product of an economic calculus."3

Burnette's book contributes a great deal to debates about women workers and industrialization. Her arguments stand on impressive empirical foundations, and she is systematic and clear in presenting them. Even readers who remain skeptical that productivity explains the entire wage gap or that discriminatory employers could not survive would do well to take its arguments seriously.

Andrew August
Penn State University

Footnotes

1. Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992); Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700– 1850 (London, 1996); Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New York, 1995).

2. Gary S. Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago, 1971; orig. pub. 1957), 44.

3. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 46.

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