Off the Record: Reconstructing Women's Labor Force Participation in the European Past

Abstract

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

The historical fertility transition at the micro level

“…From census data we know that the level of labor force participation among married women was very low during the period of concern; in 1920, for example, it was only 4% (Silenstam 1970:58). Most likely, however, many married women did various kinds of work to supplement family income without this being recorded in the sources, which makes the census figures gross underestimates of the extent of women"s work outside the home in this period (see Humphries and Sarasúa 2012). We can safely assume that such supplementary labor was much more frequent in the working classes, while the elite and middle class wives rarely worked for wages outside the home.…”

Digital humanities and the history of working women: a cascade

“…The question before us now is, given the limitations of the sources, whether we can nonetheless use them for women's work in the same way we can for men's (where the problem is admittedly smaller). The answer given by some recent studies -and the thrust of the argument in this collection of essays -is that we can (for a more guarded view see, however, Humphries & Sarasúa, 2012), as long as we acknowledge the limitations of the data (a concentration, for example, on regular and fixed paid work, and veiled information such as the fact that a farmer's wife also performed farm work), bear those in mind when evaluating the results, and make use of certain statistical routines (adding, for instance, a working spouse for farmers even if the census is silent; data triangulation). Problems will remain, of course, especially when comparisons are made over long stretches of time, as the article by Stanfors (2014) in this issue demonstrates, in part because, as she observes, data on female labour force participation measured in terms of persons might in the long run diverge considerably from a series measuring the extent of female labour force participation measured in terms of hours, due to the growth or decline in the incidence of part-time labour.…”

“…At present, there are a number of contentious issues regarding (a) whether the omissions in the series from one census to the next are of such significance that they cannot be remedied -especially for women, but also for men (see Desrosières & Thévenot, 1992;Marchand & Thélot, 1991); (b) the nature and extent of under-registration of working women (see, for example, Higgs, 1987, but also the articles by Devos et al (2014);McGeevor (2014);van Nederveen Meerkerk & Paping (2014), and by Stanfors (2014) in this issue); and (c) the putative causes of such under-registration. As to the latter, one pressing issue concerns whether women's work was under-recorded simply because the census takers followed instructions that sometimes required them to ignore part-time, seasonal, or auxiliary work (as argued by Shaw-Taylor, 2007, andby McGeevor (2014) in this issue) or because they ignored such work despite their instructions, refusing to accept that such work was work when it was performed by women (Humphries & Sarasúa, 2012). Whatever the cause of the under-registration, the fact that there was under-registration of part-time work, and that the extent of such under-registration varied from census to census (McGeevor, 2014;van Nederveen Meerkerk & Paping, 2014, both in this issue; Schmidt & van Nederveen Meerkerk, 2012), in part because the instructions given to the census takers changed, makes the census a more difficult source in that respect than, for example, marriage records, where occupations were self-declared.…”

Household economies, social norms and practices of unpaid market work in Europe from the sixteenth century to the present

“…In addition to the increase in qualitative sources in the wake of research done on the middle and merchant classes, legal sources and employment litigation, tax records, social surveys of private and public observers, and for the contemporary era, bankruptcies, instances of divorce and oral sources have provided new ways to keep track of what happens "off the record" (Humphries & Sarasúa, 2012).…”