Conventional histories of women's labor force participation in Europe conceptualize the trends in terms of a U-shaped pattern. This contribution draws on historical research to challenge such an account. First, it demonstrates that the trough in participation is in part statistically manufactured by uncritical reliance on official sources that systematically undercount women workers. Second, it exploits nonstandard sources to construct alternative estimates of women's participation. Third, it analyzes the reconstructed rates to determine their congruence with neoclassical economics and modern empirical studies. Not all posited relationships time travel. Supply-side factors such as marital status and number and age of children are major determinants of modern women's decision to enter the labor force, yet appear less prominent in historical contexts. Instead, the demand for labor seems decisive. Finally, the Ushaped curve is not entirely a statistical artifact, but appears to evolve at higher levels of participation than usually suggested.
KEYWORDSEconomic development, economic history, economic growth, women's labor force participation, family wage, labor market inequality JEL Codes: J01, J16
This article uses the declarations of householders in the Cadaster of Ensenada to calculate labour participation rates for women and men from 22 localities in inland Spain. The article establishes the actual levels of women's market activity, which are much higher than commonly assumed. This unique source also makes it possible to analyse the region's occupational structure. Due to the labour-intensive character of manufacturing work, the abundant supply of cheap labour, the diffusion of cottage industries, and the demand for commodities from internal and colonial markets, a large portion of the region's population worked in manufactures in the eighteenth century. This finding challenges standard interpretations of the Spanish economy at this time as mostly agricultural, which rely on sources that exclude women workers. Most workers in the manufacturing sector were women, and their market activity was concentrated in textile manufacturing. Once women are included in the analyses, the industrial share of employment follows a U-shaped trajectory from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. The article concludes that the standard interpretation of structural change, based solely on empirical evidence for male workers, gives a misleading picture of when, where, why, and how structural change occurred.
In contemporary societies, status as a wage worker is a fundamental
source of social and political identity. Wage labour is also the main source
of income for individuals, conditioning – to a large extent –
access to
property, patterns of consumption, and receipt of public benefits. In Jane
Lewis's words, despite an unequal wage structure between the sexes,
the
‘best way of avoiding poverty risks, for both men and women, according
to statistics, is being in the labour market’.Labour markets have
almost always
had gender disparities, with
women in a secondary position in terms of wage levels and promotion
opportunities. In present-day Europe, public policies are the primary
mechanism for counterbalancing women's secondary position in the
labour market and also within the family. But this has not always been
the case. Among the profound changes in the character of European states
during the nineteenth century was their transformation from being one of
the mechanisms reinforcing and organizing labour markets along gender
lines to becoming an institution that has promoted equal-opportunity
policies in the twentieth century and attempted to improve women's
disadvantaged position.
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