Women, Work, and Wages in England, 1600-1850 PDF Download

Author: Penelope Lane
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843830779
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253

View

Book Description
The work of women is recognised as having been fundamental to the industrialization of Britain. These studies explore how that work was remunerated, in studies that range across time, region and occupation. Topics include the changing nature of women's work, customary norms, and women and the East India Company.

Author: Joyce Burnette
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139470582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 16

View

Book Description
A major study of the role of women in the labour market of Industrial Revolution Britain. It is well known that men and women usually worked in different occupations, and that women earned lower wages than men. These differences are usually attributed to custom but Joyce Burnette here demonstrates instead that gender differences in occupations and wages were instead largely driven by market forces. Her findings reveal that rather than harming women competition actually helped them by eroding the power that male workers needed to restrict female employment and minimising the gender wage gap by sorting women into the least strength-intensive occupations. Where the strength requirements of an occupation made women less productive than men, occupational segregation maximised both economic efficiency and female incomes. She shows that women's wages were then market wages rather than customary and the gender wage gap resulted from actual differences in productivity.

Author: Valerie G. Hall
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 1843838702
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

View

Book Description
A major contribution to women's history, labour history, and economic and social history. This book examines three different groups of women - in coal mining communities, in inshore fishing communities and in agricultural labour. It demonstrates how the work these groups undertook was fundamental in shaping their experiences as women in different ways and shows that women's experiences varied within class as well as between classes. The book illustrates how mining women, despite being restricted to domestic roles, created, through meticulous housekeeping, a power base in their homes and rendered their husbands dependent on them, while a minority took so active a role in politics that they were said to be 'the backbone of the Labour Party'; how fisher women, engaging ina household economy reminiscent of pre-modern times, exercised great influence on financial decision making through their roles in baiting lines and selling fish; and how some single female agricultural labourers exercised considerable autonomy whereas those who were tied in a family economy had little independence. Overall, the book makes a very significant contribution to women's history, to labour history and to economic and social history. "This is a tremendously useful and relevant book for historians of women as well as social and labor historians." - Professor Joan Scott, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton University VALERIE HALL is Professor Emerita of History at William Peace University, North Carolina

Author: William Cornish
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1509931260
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 781

View

Book Description
Law and Society in England 1750–1950 is an indispensable text for those wishing to study English legal history and to understand the foundations of the modern British state. In this new updated edition the authors explore the complex relationship between legal and social change. They consider the ways in which those in power themselves imagined and initiated reform and the ways in which they were obliged to respond to demands for change from outside the legal and political classes. What emerges is a lively and critical account of the evolution of modern rights and expectations, and an engaging study of the formation of contemporary social, administrative and legal institutions and ideas, and the road that was travelled to create them. The book is divided into eight chapters: Institutions and Ideas; Land; Commerce and Industry; Labour Relations; The Family; Poverty and Education; Accidents; and Crime. This extensively referenced analysis of modern social and legal history will be invaluable to students and teachers of English law, political science, and social history.

Author: Alison Toplis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131732305X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

View

Book Description
This detailed study is the first exploration of rural consumption of clothing in early nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources including newspapers, trade directories, court records, visual sources and surviving garments, Toplis investigates how the apparel of the mass of the British population was acquired.

Author: Nicola Jane Phillips
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9781843831839
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

View

Book Description
A reappraisal of the business enterprises of women in the `long' eighteenth century, showing them to be more flourishing than previously thought.

Author: Hugh Cunningham
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526112280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

View

Book Description
This book traces the history of the relationship between work and leisure, from the ‘leisure preference’ of male workers in the eighteenth century, through the increase in working hours in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to their progressive decline from 1830 to 1970. It examines how trade union action was critical in achieving the decline; how class structured the experience of leisure; how male identity was shaped by both work and leisure; how, in a society that placed high value on work, a ‘leisured class’ was nevertheless at the apex of political and social power – until it became thought of as ‘the idle rich’. Coinciding with the decline in working hours, two further tranches of time were marked out as properly without work: childhood and retirement. Accessible, wide-ranging and occasionally polemical, this book provides the first history of how we have imagined and used time.

Author: Judith M. Bennett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
Written for everyone interested in women's and gender history, History Matters reaffirms the importance to feminist theory and activism of long-term historical perspectives. Judith M. Bennett, who has been commenting on developments in women's and gender history since the 1980s, argues that the achievement of a more feminist future relies on a rich, plausible, and well-informed knowledge of the past, and she asks her readers to consider what sorts of feminist history can best advance the struggles of the twenty-first century. Bennett takes as her central problem the growing chasm between feminism and history. Closely allied in the 1970s, each has now moved away from the other. Seeking to narrow this gap, Bennett proposes that feminist historians turn their attention to the intellectual challenges posed by the persistence of patriarchy. She posits a "patriarchal equilibrium" whereby, despite many changes in women's experiences over past centuries, women's status vis-à-vis that of men has remained remarkably unchanged. Although, for example, women today find employment in occupations unimaginable to medieval women, medieval and modern women have both encountered the same wage gap, earning on average only three-fourths of the wages earned by men. Bennett argues that the theoretical challenge posed by this patriarchal equilibrium will be best met by long-term historical perspectives that reach back well before the modern era. In chapters focused on women's work and lesbian sexuality, Bennett demonstrates the contemporary relevance of the distant past to feminist theory and politics. She concludes with a chapter that adds a new twist—the challenges of textbooks and classrooms—to viewing women's history from a distance and with feminist intent. A new manifesto, History Matters engages forthrightly with the challenges faced by feminist historians today. It argues for the radical potential of a history that is focused on feminist issues, aware of the distant past, attentive to continuities over time, and alert to the workings of patriarchal power.

Author: Melanie Reynolds
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137369043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

View

Book Description
Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899 unlocks the hidden history of working-class child care during the second half of the nineteenth century, seeking to challenge those historians who have cast working-class women as feckless and maternally ignorant. By plotting the lives of northern women whilst they grappled with industrial waged work in the factory, in agriculture, in nail making, and in brick and salt works, this book reveals a different picture of northern childcare, one which points to innovative and enterprising child care models. Attention is also given to day-carers as they acted in loco parentis and the workhouse nurse who worked in conjunction with medical paediatrics to provide nineteenth-century welfare to pauper infants. Through the use of a new and wide range of source material, which includes medical and poor law history, Melanie Reynolds allows a fresh and new perspective of working-class child care to arise.

Author: Emma Griffin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

View

Book Description
The overlooked story of how ordinary women and their husbands managed financially in the Victorian era – and why so many struggled despite increasing national prosperityNineteenth century Britain saw remarkable economic growth and a rise in real wages. But not everyone shared in the nation’s wealth. Unable to earn a sufficient income themselves, working-class women were reliant on the ‘breadwinner wage’ of their husbands. When income failed, or was denied or squandered by errant men, families could be plunged into desperate poverty from which there was no escape.Emma Griffin unlocks the homes of Victorian England to examine the lives – and finances – of the people who lived there. Drawing on over 600 working-class autobiographies, including more than 200 written by women, Bread Winner changes our understanding of daily life in Victorian Britain.