Disciplinary Differences: A Historian's Take on Why Wages Differed by Gender in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain

As a women's and an economic historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, I welcome further analysis and reassessment, such as Joyce Burnette undertakes, of women, work, and wages during the industrial transition. This topic has fallen out of fashion, and yet there is still much that we do not know. I enjoyed reading Burnette's (2008) book, which challenged and engaged me and made me reflect on the approaches, methods, and evidence that I, as a historian, am persuaded by when it comes to making claims about women and work in the past.

Burnette sets out to prove that men and women engaged in different occupations and received different wages (with women earning less) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain largely because of market forces, not gender discrimination. As a women's historian, I am, not surprisingly, skeptical of this claim. So I want to take a look at the pieces of Burnette's argument to illustrate some of its interpretive flaws.

According to Burnette's abstract, "gender differences in occupations and wages are largely driven by market forces" and by "economic motivations" rather than by "custom." I concur that market forces and "custom"—or what I would call gender stereotypes or gender ideology—can work together. I would argue that this is because gender ideology permeated all areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society, including the economic sector and especially the market. But unlike Burnette, I do not accept that the market operates outside a larger power structure that includes ideas about both class and gender. In her introduction Burnette (ibid.: 5) does admit that "market efficiency and custom usually prescribed the same outcomes" and that there was a "close relationship between the two," but elsewhere in her book she argues against this idea. While Burnette (ibid.: 5) says that she believes that economic outcomes shaped custom, I would argue the reverse: that gender ideology often shaped economic outcomes, such as the level of wages and the division of labor.

I also have grave concerns about attributing wages and work opportunities to abstractions like "market forces" and "economic efficiency." This takes the agency away from the people who made economic decisions. Why not use the term capitalists, the middle-class males who ran most of the farms and factories that Burnette relies on as the evidentiary basis for her book?

Burnette's argument that people in the past could not understand economic forces, so they resorted to gender to explain economic patterns, verges on the patronizing. Yes, macroeconomic forces on an international level may have been difficult to see clearly, but personal letters and such periodicals as magazines and newspapers illustrate that the average person's micro-level economic understanding in the eighteenth century was much better than ours today.

Burnette uses wage data as evidence for her assertion that women did not make less than men but instead were less productive. Her data largely confirm the findings of prior historians that women's wages were between half and two-thirds of male wages. If this is the case, how can these wages be justified by women's lower productivity, as Burnette argues, if a similar, albeit slightly improved, wage gap is still in place today? In 2007 women in the United States earned 77.8 percent of what men earned, and in the United Kingdom it was a similar 78.0 percent (Infoplease 2008). The historical continuity of the wage gap and its applicability across economic sectors leads me to conclude that the constant has been not women's supposedly lower productivity but gender inequality or discrimination.

On the one hand, Burnette accepts the work of women's historians like Pamela Sharpe, Deborah Valenze, and Sonya Rose, who say that women in the past were viewed as inferior to men; on the other hand, she claims that these beliefs did not cause women's low wages but may have been "simply the justifications given by employers to disguise their true motivations" (Burnette 2008: 83). What were these "true motivations"? To...