Women as Wage-Earners and the Significance Thereof in the Development of Economic Theory

WOMEN AS WAGE-EARNERS AND THE SIGNIFICANCE THEREOF IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC THEORY C. R. FAY I T would not be so very far from the truth to say that political economy was born in Charles Irs London out of taxes, plagues and envy of the Dutch. Inside Sir William Petty's Treatise oj Taxes and Contributions (1662) there is a core of economic theory-a preliminary statement of the law of rent, and that famous first effort after an immutable standard of value which runs: "all things ought to be valued by two natural denominations, which is land and labour .... so as we might express the value by either of them alone as well or better than by both, and reduce one into the other as easily as we reduce pence into pounds" (Petty's Works, ed. C. H. Hull, 44-45). In the same year, 1662, came John Graunt's Observations on the Bills oj Mortality, an epoch-making pioneer work in vital statistics. The bills were for London, and the series began in 1603. 1""'hey recorded christenings and burials, and the causes of death, as reported by the searchers, who / "are ancient matrons sworn to their office"-a grim employment indeed. The reason for the compilation was the periodic ravage caused by the plague, and by studying aggregates over the long period from I 603 to I664 (for the great plague of I665 led to a second edition in that year), Graunt was able to observe their peculiar properties, to become in fact the first statistician. He found that there were more males than females in the tables, and "that the one exceed the other by a thirteenth part." Nevertheless, "the said thirteenth part difference 263 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY bringeth the business but to such a pass that every woman may have an -husband without the allowance of polygamy "-and for these reasons :-"More men die violent deaths than women, that is, more are slain in wars, die by mischance, drowned at sea, and die by the Hand of Justice; n1oreover, more men go to Colonies, and travel into Foreign parts, than women; and lastly, more remain unmarried than of women, as Fellows of Colleges, and apprentices above eighteen." (op. cit., ed.Hull, 11,375: this edition of Petty includes Graunt.) To the statistician, as contrasted with the lawyer or economist, there is no question of bias for or against women. To him males and females are like bJack and white, odd and even, which in sufficiently large number exhibit laws. But the political economists of the Restoration, though they might discourse on taxation and vital statistics, were interested in the main in the characteristics of nations, in the differences between the wealth and policy of England, Holland, France and Spain. Holland was the envy and the pattern of seventeenth-century England. Of set purpose England followed her in the pursuit of commerce and manufactures; and-out of this pursuit a century later emerged the industrial revolution, with its profound reactions upon the economic status pf the family and in particular of the women and children in it. When Adam Smith was lecturing in Glasgow, and even when he published the Wealth oj Nations in 1776, the industrial revolution was in its very early stage. In the Lectures, as we have them, probably for the session of 1762-3 or 1763-4, women occupy a prominent position, but it is a legal and not an economic prominence. He lectured over the wide :field of Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms. Under Justice he dealt with domestic law, 264 WOMEN AS WAGE~EARNERS in relation to Roman jurisprudence. In such a view woman is a subordinate. He observes quaintly-and we may remember that he never married-"though there was little or no regard paid to women in the first state of society as objects of pleasure, yet -there never was more regard paid to them as rational creatures. In North America [he is referring to the native Indians] the women are consulted concerning the carrying out of war, and in every important undertaking. The respect paid to women in modern times is very small...