The Significance of Brawn

It has been interesting to follow Joyce Burnette's work over the last few years and to see its culmination in Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (2008). As will be obvious to the book's readers, much of it is an argument with me and several other feminist economic historians who have a different take on the reason that female wages were, in general, so much lower than male wages in the period 1750–1850. It is worth saying at the outset that Burnette has the a priori assumption that economic forces are the crucial determinant of behavior. Burnette's explanation also has a different departure point from mine. Hers is to explain why men's pay is so much higher than women's pay. Mine is to explain why payments to women are so much lower than those to men.

In Burnette's explanation, biological and physiological factors make the critical difference. Gender ideology is something that she would like to dismiss, but, like custom, it somehow continues to hover around in her analysis. My colleague, Amy M. Froide, discusses this in her contribution. Burnette (ibid.: 72) posits that both custom and market forces pushed women's wages below men's. Networks of credit and the availability of coin are relevant, though, and something not discussed by Burnette. This would be one reason behind the payment of a family wage. There was a significant shortage of specie in Britain until at least 1810, and well after that it was usual to make payments in round amounts. For example, when paying nonresident poor, it was common to send a one-pound note, both for security and because sending a smaller or more specific amount of money could raise practical difficulties. I have written elsewhere about the payment of sixpence to female agricultural workers. While this may seem absurd to those who believe in the accurate reflection of supply and demand in monetary measures, in fact the payment with particular coinage was a reflection of minting and specie supply limitations.

Burnette argues that men and women operate in different labor markets: by the mid- to late eighteenth century their jobs were not interchangeable. Men's jobs usually required more strength than women's jobs, and thus their pay was a true reflection of their output. Burnette shows the difference in strength by referring to modern-day physiological tests. These do not of course allow for the facts that many men were disabled due to military participation in the Napoleonic Wars and that poor diet and rampant disease might diminish one's physique. However, Britain was overpopulated, so it continued to produce many strapping young men. While there may have been a stable core of workers in some areas, the casualized nature of employment was everywhere apparent (Stead 2006). This remains somewhat poorly researched, but at the height of the Napoleonic Wars some 400,000 British men were in the military; hence the reports of "petticoat harvests" in arable areas of England.¹

Despite the amount of economic history scholarship devoted to the study of human height in the last two decades and more recent work on body mass, feminist historians have been slow to embrace these physiological explanations.² The limited research that has been possible on the allocation of food in families suggests that most of the protein went first to male workers and perhaps second to children.³ While renovating my house built in the British colony of Van Diemen's Land in 1833, I unearthed a number of archaeological artifacts that demonstrate how heavy basic household implements were in the early nineteenth century. One of the great advances of the modern world is in material science, where everyday objects are now so much lighter and easier to handle. The people hanging the heavy iron meat hooks and wielding the solid tools in my garden in the nineteenth century were assigned servants who were convicts and thus the same sort of people who formed the workforce that Burnette has analyzed. At a very basic level, it is not difficult to imagine that ordinary people needed a...