Joyce Burnette. Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. Cambridge Studies in Economic History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii + 377 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88063-3.
Reviewed by Anne Clendinning (Department of History, Nipissing University)
Published on H-Albion (March, 2009)
Commissioned by David S. Karr
Occupational Discrimination and the Industrial Revolution: Rethinking the Role of Gender
With this book, economic historian Joyce Burnette adds to the already extensive research on the subject of women and work during the period of Britain’s industrialization. Published under the Cambridge Studies in Economic History series, Burnette’s study began as a doctoral dissertation completed in 1995, and then expanded with additional research and analysis on women and agricultural labor. In her efforts to determine the reasons for the occupational and wage differences that existed between men and women during the industrial revolution, Burnette utilizes a wide range of primary and secondary evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, including census records, trade directories, government enquiries, personal memoirs, and existing histories of women and work. Each chapter presents a specific element of Burnette’s central argument, which successfully unifies this well-written and carefully researched book.
Burnette presents historians of women and gender with a challenging thesis: gender differences in the labor market, which affected occupational and wage discrimination, were not caused by gender ideology, but were determined, first and foremost, by economic motivations. According to Burnette, previous studies of women’s work and the industrial revolution attribute the differences in male and female wages and occupations to gender ideology: social and cultural institutions enforced socially determined gender roles that confined women by custom to low-pay, low-status work.[1]. In contrast to the prevailing ideological explanation, Burnette argues that while ideology is part of the equation in some occupations, women workers were disadvantaged in terms of their pay and occupational opportunities not because of ideological prejudices, but primarily due to the changing labor market of industrializing Britain. For example, hand spinning was a skill that women acquired through their work experience and it employed thousands of women across Britain. The mechanization of spinning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries centralized production in factories, the majority of which were in the northeast of England, thereby reducing the overall number of jobs for women in the trade. Women’s traditional skills were devalued by mechanization, not because of gender discrimination. In addition, Burnette argues that women often lacked the physical strength and the required skills to do the same kinds of work as men and warrant the same wages paid to men. Another example from the textile industry is the adoption of larger, heavier spinning mules in factories, which eliminated jobs for female spinners because the equipment was too heavy for most women to operate; and even though the introduction of the self-acting mule in the 1830s reduced this reliance on strength, by then, the trade was protected by a union that excluded women. In the competitive labor market, women were also less productive than men, again based on women’s reduced levels of skill and physical strength, and also because female earning power was hindered by reproduction, childrearing, and domestic labor, all of which tied women to the home. In a labor market that rewarded strength, men had the comparative advantage, whereas women’s role in child raising gave them a comparative advantage in the home-based cottage industry.
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