The wages and employment of female day-labourers in English agriculture, 1740-1850

Economic History Review

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 664-690

  Burnette, Joyce ^a  

^a WABASH COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRICULTURAL LABOR; LABOR SUPPLY; WAGE DETERMINATION; WOMENS EMPLOYMENT;

EASTERN HEMISPHERE; ENGLAND; EURASIA; EUROPE; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE; WORLD;

EID: 14644429686     PISSN: 00130117     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2004.00292.x     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. This project was supported by a Sabbatical Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society and NSF Grant no. SES-0213954, and was completed while the author was an Academic Visitor at the London School of Economics. The author would like to thank Bert Barreto, Greg Clark, Frank Howland, and participants in workshops of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, the Rural History Centre at the University of Reading, and University of California Davis.
2. See Collins, E. J. T., and Jones, E. L., 'Collection and analysis'.
3. Turner, M. E., et al., Agricultural rent; Turner, M. E., et al., Farm productivity; Clark, G., 'Farm wages'.
4. Burnette, J., 'Labourers at the Oakes'; Gielgud, J., 'Nineteenth-century farm women'; Gilboy, E. W., 'Labour at Thornborough'; Smith, A. H., 'Labourers in late sixteenth-century England'; Miller, C. 'Hidden workforce'; Sharpe, P., 'Time and wages'; Speechley, H., 'Female and child agricultural day labourers'; Verdon, N., Rural women workers.
5. Turner, M. E., et al., Farm productivity, p. 52.
6. Accounts from the Estcourt estate of Shipton Moyne, Glos. Gloucestershire Record Office D 1571.
7. Workers in the US frequently receive retirement and medical insurance benefits in addition to their cash wage. My own (pre-tax) cash wage is only 75% of the value of my total compensation.
8. Verdon, N., Rural women workers, p. 120.
9. Quoted in Higgs, E., Making sense of the census, p. 81.
10. Miller, C., 'Hidden workforce'.
11. Verdon, N., Rural women workers, pp. 107-14.
12. P.P. 1834, XXX. See Verdon, N., 'Rural labour market'.
13. It is possible that the accounts are fictional if the bailiff was cheating, but this is unlikely to have been the norm, and the accounts had to be at least plausible enough to be believed by the employer.
14. Census of Great Britain, 1851 (P.P. 1852-3, LXXXVIII).
15. This is the same definition of winter as that used by Clark, 'Farm wages'.
16. The median has the advantage of not being sensitive to outliers. This method also indirectly separates out wages of boys.
17. Hunt, E. H., Regional wage variations, map 1. I tried three different regional configurations and chose the one that gave the highest R-squared in the wage regressions. The other regional configurations tried were Caird's map (Caird, English agriculture) and a configuration of my own based on the maps in Hunt, 'Industrialization and regional inequality'. I combined Hunt's regions 7, 9, and 10 because when these regions were entered separately they had similar effects on wages and employment.
18. Hunt, E. H., 'Industrialization and regional inequality'.
19. The correlation of my series and Clark's series for nominal winter wages is 0.97.
20. Snell, K. D. M., Annals, p. 37.
21. Sharpe, P., 'Female labour market', reports these estimates for 1770 and the 1820s, and attributes them to Feinstein.
22. Lindert, P. and Williamson, J., 'English workers' living standards'.
23. Clark, G., 'Farm wages'; Feinstein, C. H., 'Pessimism perpetuated'.
24. Horrell, S. and Humphries, J., 'Old questions, new data'.
25. Burnette, J., 'Testing for occupational crowding'; eadem, 'An investigation'. Economists sometimes assume that the female-male wage ratio can be used as an estimate of the productivity ratio: see Goldin, and Sokoloff, 'Relative productivity hypothesis'; Sokoloff, 'Productivity growth in manufacturing'.
26. P.P., 1843 vol. XII, 'Report of Mr. Vaughan on the Counties of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex,' p. 185. For US agriculture in 1860, Craig and Field-Hendrey, 'Industrialization and the earnings gap'. estimates the productivity ratio of females relative to males to be 0.61 in the North, and 0.60 for slaves in the South. In manufacturing, the ratio was 0.50 in the North and 0.44 in the South. Cox, and Nye, 'Male-female wage discrimination', estimates productivity ratios ranging from 0.37 to 0.63 for manufacturing in France in 1839-45.
27. Woodward, D., 'Determinants of wage rates', p. 37.
28. Sharpe, P., Adapting to capitalism, pp. 80, 145-6.
29. Scholliers, P. and Schwarz, L., 'Wage in Europe', p. 9.
30. This increase actually seems to be slightly more than the increase in the cost of living index. Taking the average index for the five years as the index for the five-year period, the cost of living index increased 32% between 1796-1800 and 1811-15 using Clark's index, and 33% using Feinstein's: Clark 'Farm wages'; Feinstein, 'Pessimism perpetuated'.
31. Priest, A., General view of the agriculture of Buckingham, 1813, quoted in Allen, Enclosure and the yeoman, p. 256.
32. The average value of 'Cottage industry' used here does not match the average in table 5 because it is taken directly from the 1851 census. The average reported in table 5 is a biased estimate of this average because it is taken from a non-random sample. The fact that the average in table 5 is larger than 1.7 indicates that the dataset oversamples counties with relatively high levels of cottage industry.
33. P.P., 1834 (167) XIX, pp. 19-20.
34. For Manchester in 1788 and 1846, 9% of the names listed were female; for Birmingham in 1850, 12%. See Lewis's Manchester Directory for 1788, Slater's National Commercial Directory of Ireland, 1846, and Slater's Royal National and Commercial Directory, 1850.
35. See Miller, C., 'Hidden workforce'.
36. Pinchbeck, I., Women workers, pp. 53, 67, 86.
37. Sharpe, P., Adapting to capitalism, p. 7;
38. Verdon, N., Rural women workers, ch. 4.
39. Pinchbeck, I., Women workers, pp. 54, 57, 63.
40. The year does not always run from Jan. to Dec., but it is always 12 consecutive months.
41. There are eight observations with zero female employment. On tobit estimation, see Woolridge, Introductory econometrics, ch. 17.
42. To test Pinchbeck's claim, a series of dummy variables for the time periods 1775-94, 1795-1815, 1816-32, and 1833-50 were also tried instead of the time trend. These dummy variables did not suggest any pattern other than a gradual decline in relative female employment.
43. See Sharpe, P., 'Female labour market'.
44. The rapid decline with size in the employment of women and boys compared to men meant that the eighteenth-century shift to large farms changed the sex balance of rural employment': Allen, Enclosure and the yeoman p. 215.
45. Miller, C., 'Hidden worforce', p. 145.
46. Young, A., Six months' tour, ii, p. 586.
47. P.P., 1843, vol. XII, p. 228.
48. Allen, R. C., Enclosure and the yeoman, p. 217.
49. Snell, K. D. M., Annals, pp. 40, 50.
50. See Collins, E. J. T., 'Harvest technology'; Roberts, 'Sickles and scythes'. In 1769 Arthur Young found the scythe being used to harvest wheat near Hull, an unusual practice at the time. This fits the relative price explanation, since in this area he notes that 'the prices of labour are most of them extremely high'. (Young, Six months' tour, i, p. 113).
51. Burnette, J., 'Labourers at the Oakes'.
52. Horrell, S. and Humphries, J., 'Women's labour force participation', p. 113.
53. Boyer, G., English poor law, ch. 3.
54. See Armstrong, W. A. 'Labour I', p. 685.
55. Armstrong, W. A. and Huzel, J. P., 'Labour II', p. 761.
56. Ibid., pp. 780-2.
57. Allen, R. C., Enclosure and the yeoman: the agricultural development of the south midlands, 1450-1850 (Oxford, 1992).
58. Armstrong, W. A., 'Labour I', in G. E. Mingay, ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales, VI (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 641-728.
59. Armstrong, W. A. and Huzel, J. P., 'Labour II', in G. E. Mingay, ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales, VI (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 729-835.
60. Boyer, G., An economic history of the English poor law, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1990).
61. Burnette, J., 'Testing for occupational crowding in eighteenth-century British agriculture', Exp. Econ. Hist., 33 (1996), pp. 319-45.
62. Burnette, J., 'An investigation of the female-male wage gap during the industrial revolution in Britain', Econ. Hist. Rev., L (1997), pp. 257-81.
63. Burnette, J., 'Labourers at the Oakes: changes in the demand for female day-laborers at a farm near Sheffield during the agricultural revolution', J. Econ. Hist., 59 (1999), pp. 41-67.
64. Caird, J., English agriculture (1850).
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66. Collins, E. J. T., 'Harvest technology and labour supply in Britain, 1790-1870', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., XXII (1969), pp. 453-73.
67. Collins, E. J. T. and Jones, E. L., 'The collection and analysis of farm record books'. J. Soc. Archivists, III (1965), pp. 86-9.
68. Cox, D. and Nye, J. V., 'Male-female wage discrimination in nineteenth-century France', J. Econ. Hist., 49 (1989), pp. 903-20.
69. Craig, L. A. and Field-Hendrey, E., 'Industrialization and the earnings gap: regional and sectoral tests of the Goldin-Sokoloff hypothesis', Exp. Econ. Hist., 30 (1993), pp. 60-80.
70. Feinstein, C. H., 'Pessimism perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the industrial revolution', J. Econ. Hist., 58 (1998), pp. 625-58.
71. Gielgud, J., 'Nineteenth-century farm women in Northumberland and Cumbria: the neglected workforce' (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Sussex, 1992).
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76. Higgs, E., Making sense of the census (1989).
77. Horrell, S. and Humphries, J., 'Old questions, new data, and alternative perspectives: families' living standards in the industrial revolution', J. Econ. Hist., 52 (1992), pp. 849-80.
78. Lindert, P. and Williamson, J., 'English workers' living standards during the industrial revolution: a new look', in J. Mokyr, ed., The economics of the industrial revolution (1985). pp. 177-205.
79. Miller, C., 'The hidden workforce: female field workers in Gloucestershire, 1870-1901', Southern Hist., 6 (1984), pp. 139-61.
80. Pinchbeck, I., Women workers and the industrial revolution, 1750-1850 (1930; repr. 1981).
81. Roberts, M., 'Sickles and scythes: women's work and men's work at harvest time', Hist. Workshop, 7 (1979), pp. 3-28.
82. Scholliers, P. and Schwarz, L., 'The wage in Europe since the sixteenth century', in P. Scholliers and L. Schwarz, eds., Experiencing wages: social and cultural aspects of wage forms in Europe since 1500 (New York, 2003), pp. 3-24.
83. Sharpe, P., 'Time and wages of West Country workfolks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries'. Loc. Pop. Stud., 55 (1995), pp. 66-8.
84. Sharpe, P., Adapting to capitalism: working women in the English economy, 1700-1850 (1996).
85. Sharpe, P., 'The female labour market in English agriculture during the industrial revolution: expansion or contraction?', Agric. Hist. Rev. 47 (1999), pp. 161-81.
86. Smith, A. H..'Labourers in late sixteenth-century England: a case study from north Norfolk,' Cont. & Change, 4 (1989), pp. 11-52, 367-94.
87. Snell, K. D. M., Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985).
88. Sokoloff, K., 'Productivity growth in manufacturing during early industrialization: evidence from the American northeast, 1820-1860', in S. L. Engerman and R. Gallman, eds., Long-term factors in American economic growth (Chicago, 1986), pp. 679-729.
89. Speechley, H., 'Female and child agricultural day labourers in Somerset, c. 1685-1870' (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Exeter, 1999).
90. Turner, M. E., Becket, J. V., and Afton, B., Agricultural rent in England, 1690-1914 (Cambridge, 1997).
91. Turner, M. E., Becket, J.V., and Afton, B., Farm productivity in farm accounts, 1700-1914 (Oxford, 2001).
92. Verdon, N., Rural women workers in nineteenth-century England (2002).
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95. Woolridge, J., Introductory econometrics: a modern approach (2000).
96. Young, A., A six months' tour through the north of England (Dublin, 1770).