Strength and Power in the Industrial Revolution

Joyce Burnette's (2008) book investigates why women earned lower wages and had different occupations than men during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Of more relevance in the present is why women often have lower earnings than and work in different occupations from men today. The answers from the past and present have some similarity, but the differences are considerably greater. The world of "brawn" jobs was transformed by technological change and sectoral shifts into a world of "brain" jobs. I will first address the question posed in the book and will end with that concerning today.

Burnette answers that there are three explanations for differences between male and female earnings and occupations in Industrial Revolution Britain. First, male productivity in many manufacturing occupations was considerably higher than female productivity because of differences in the innate strength of men and women. Productivity differences also resulted from disparities in occupational preparation due to women's shorter available time, because of childbirth and the care of children, to recoup the benefits of job training. Second, unions protected male jobs, and social norms supported and coordinated mass action that prevented women from entering previously male occupations. Finally, there could have been discrimination, although it is not clear that discrimination was different from the protection of jobs by men through unions and social norms.

The conclusion of this carefully worked volume is that differences in earnings and occupations in the past can be explained by a combination of "strength" and "power." The greater brawn of men, the "strength" part of the argument, gave them inherent advantages. Even when these advantages did not exist or when they were waning, the ability of men to organize enabled them to protect their jobs and wages, at least for a while. That is the "power" part of the argument. I agree with most of the conclusions and methodology in this work and will offer various extensions of them.

There is no question that strength matters for productivity, particularly when machinery and motive power are limited. Even today there are positions that require considerable strength, and, to the extent that brawn is a scarce resource, these positions amply reward it. But the vast majority of positions today do not require physical strength, and in large measure that is because various types of machinery, together with motive power, substitute for human strength. That was also true in the more distant past.

Examples of the substitution of machines for brawn abound. The most important for the period of the early Industrial Revolution can be found in textiles. Take spinning, for example, and the famous technological choice between rings and mules. Why were so many women occupied in factory spinning in the United States, where it was uniformly a female job, when it was a male position in Britain? Much has been written on the subject by economic historians (e.g., Sandberg 1969; Lazonick 1984).

Part of the reason for differences in textile technologies between Britain and the United States concerns the fact that a preexisting group of male textile workers in Britain protected men's positions, whereas in the United States men were mainly occupied in farming, in which their relative productivity was quite high (Goldin and Sokoloff 1984). Thus in the United States young women from rural areas were enticed into the factories with high wages, and the spinning and weaving technologies used were those that made the most of their productive attributes (Dublin 1979). In spinning the ring technology was employed in the United States, whereas the mule, which required greater strength, was used in Britain. There is ample evidence that even in weaving British machinery was adapted in the United States for the smaller frames of women. Britain excelled in finer cloth, which used the finer thread made by the mule technology. But much of the technological choice was endogenous to the type of available labor force: male or female.

Another example comes from the U.S. experience during World War II. Before women were needed in defense factories, the necessity of great strength to move heavy parts and equipment was the reason for the...