Crediting Women in the Early Modern English Economy

An important assertion of recent development economics is that the reduction of gender inequality can promote economic growth, although it is more doubtful whether economic growth can, by itself, lessen gender inequality.¹ The same logic also informs concerns among campaigners for UK women’s rights that the government’s programme of austerity measures risks widening gender inequality. A report published by the Fawcett Society in 2013 warned that cuts in the public sector have disproportionately affected women, whereas the sectors identified for investment (business and manufacturing) are male dominated. The analysis also showed that the gender pay gap in Britain may be increasing for the first time since official records began. The report urges the government to heed its legal duty to assess the impact of policies on gender equality. The apparent neglect of such concerns gives a hollow ring to the championing of western democracy’s commitment to gender equality. More immediately, the report cautions that women’s skills and talents should not be overlooked in the drive for economic recovery and growth.²

From a historical perspective, one of the most interesting features of this report is the doubt it casts as to whether the relatively recent upward trend in women’s labour-force participation is sustainable. This in turn, challenges the validity of the U-shaped curve conventionally used to represent trends in women’s economic activity over the longer term. From a hypothetical pre-industrial peak, women’s apparent retreat from the labour market during the nineteenth century has been linked by historians to rising household incomes, shifting farming systems, and industrialization.³ Women’s subsequent return to work, especially after 1950, has been explained as a product of rising educational attainment and insatiable consumer desire.⁴ Recently critiqued as a ‘statistical mirage’ by Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, the nadir in women’s labour-force participation is attributed to a product of the myopia of census-takers who overlooked women’s work while assuming men’s full-time employment.⁵

Debates regarding the pre-industrial period, by contrast, have rarely questioned high levels of female productive activity, but have disputed its character. Commercial and capitalist development has largely been assumed to have been detrimental to women’s work opportunities, which have overwhelmingly been cast in negative terms.⁶ Other ‘pessimistic’ accounts of narrowing work prospects for women over the course of the early modern period cite the pressure of population on resources and a hostile economic climate as much as the processes of capitalist growth.⁷ In connection with either economic expansion or contraction, therefore, women’s roles have persistently been represented as subject to growing constraints and marginalization. However, any suggestion that diminishing opportunities for women might have been preceded by a ‘golden age’ has also been firmly rebuffed. Far from equal partners in family enterprise, enjoying a ‘rough and ready equality’, women have been shown to be clustered in the lowest paid and lowest valued sectors, denied access to formal training, and paid derisory wages by contrast to men.⁸ The most sceptical rejection of any change in women’s productive status (either for better or worse) is Judith M. Bennett’s concept of ‘patriarchal equilibrium’ which emphasizes the enduring adaptability of male privilege.⁹ Stressing the long-term continuities in the relative status of women to men, as represented by pay differentials, the narrower range of women’s work and the limited value attached to it, Bennett has argued that there was no ‘great divide’ between medieval and modern women.¹⁰

The purpose of this essay is neither to rehabilitate sixteenth and seventeenth-century England as a ‘golden age’ for women, nor to assert the destructive potential of commercial expansion for gender equality. The discussion instead stems from my unease about the extent to which focusing on women’s disadvantages relative to men risks eclipsing the significance of their contribution at a time when their economic participation was extensive. This is not to suggest that gender inequality is an unimportant aspect of economic history, but to argue that we need to explore women’s impact in...