We have compiled evidence on women's wages and sought to circumvent the problems noted earlier. Yet a female wage series is vital to our understanding of British economic history.įigure 1 THE REAL WAGES OF UNSKILLED MALE FARM LABOURERS (BY DECADE) Day wages, where they exist, must be compared with longer-term contracts that usually involved board and lodging for which a value has to be imputed. Women were more likely paid as part of a team, by task, or in kind. Data on their remuneration is fragmentary and difficult to interpret. Women's economic activities are hard to capture. Several have tried to document women and children's economic experience in different times and places (Snell Reference Snell1985 Berg Reference Berg1993 Horrell and Humphries Reference Horrell and Humphries1995 Burnette Reference Burnette2008 Schneider Reference Schneider2013), but to date none have attempted to match the well-known evidence on the long-run evolution of male wages with comparable series for women workers. They played a role in the decision when to marry (and hence the size of families) and they participated in the workplaces of industrialising Britain, but we know little about their labour markets. Women worked as single women, married women, and widows. Yet not all wage workers were men and not all families had male breadwinners. These trends have been held to track wellbeing, account for demographic transformations, and, recently, even explain the causes and chronology of the Industrial Revolution. As shown in Figure 1, real wages rose for nearly a century and a half, fell to a plateau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then improved slightly by 1850. The trends in men's wages in the centuries after the Black Death are now well accepted.
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