Industrial Revolution

1
Industrial Revolution

• GDP per capita was broadly stable for 1000 years
  before the Industrial Revolution
• Britain 1780-1830
• Innovations in steam, textile manufacture, steel,
  chemicals (glass, paper, bleaching, portland
  cement)
• United States First textile mills around 1820
  Heavy use of steam followed the Civil War

2

• Industrial Revolution followed an agricultural
  revolution that started in 1700s
• Improvement of animal husbandry, development of
  improved breeds
• Ag chemicals raise yields
• Lowers food prices (raises real urban wages) and
  frees labor for industry

3
78
Approximate OECD life expectancy
50
38
24
Huffman and Orazem. 2006. The Role of Agriculture
and Human Capital in Economic Growth Farmers,
Schooling, and Health. in Evenson and Pingali,
eds. Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 3
4
Agriculture and Industrial Revolutions led to
sharp increases in income, health, urbanization,
education.
Huffman and Orazem. 2006. The Role of Agriculture
and Human Capital in Economic Growth Farmers,
Schooling, and Health. in Evenson and Pingali,
eds. Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 3
5
Kinsella, Kevin and Yvonne J. Gist. 1998.
Mortality and Health Economics and Statistics
Administration, U.S. Bureau of the Census
6

• Agrarian economy Whole family works on
  self-sufficient subsistence level farm
• Move to the city
• Factory cities were dirty
• Constant cleaning needed for coal dust
• Married women clean. Kids and dad work in
  factory.

7
France
Britain
1960
1960
1850
1850
Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott. 1978. Women,
Work and Family Holt , Rinehart and Winston
8
Britain
France
Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott. 1978. Women,
Work and Family Holt , Rinehart and Winston
9

• Robaix textile town 50 of workforce
• City archivist described it as The Manchester of
  France
• One of its poets described it as, a city without
  a past in art, without beauty, without a
  history.
• City hall today is black with soot

Manchester England, circa 1830
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Women were 31 of work force in 1872
Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott. 1978. Women,
Work and Family Holt , Rinehart and Winston
11

• Anzin coal mining and metal working (49 of
  workforce, all men and boys)
• By law, womens jobs were on the surface.
• Anzin grew due to demand for coal during the
  industrial revolution.
• Local poet
• Your name is black, Anzin, as black as your face
• You have your heroes, but where is your history?
• Women were 23 of workforce, mostly in
  dressmaking, shops
• Fewer jobs for girls, but 50 of boys 10-14 worked

Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott. 1978. Women,
Work and Family Holt , Rinehart and Winston
12
1906
Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott. 1978. Women,
Work and Family Holt , Rinehart and Winston
Childrens time in market substitutes for
mothers time in the market
13

• Child labor was an important source of income.
  Factories might hire the father and childrenall
  wages went to the parents

14
Agriculture and Industrial Revolutions led to
sharp increases in income, health, urbanization,
education. Did it raise child labor? Note
All kids worked on the farm. U.S. in 1820
children lt16 were 23 of manufacturing labor
force, 50 of textile mills 41 of wool mills
24 of paper mills Child labor share started to
decline by 1840
15

• Girls might be allowed to set money aside for a
  dowry for when they married
• Spinster A woman who did not marry and hence
  remained in factory work for life
• Factory work may have been better than other
  options
• whereas a large number of factory girls cannot
  be prevailed upon to give up their factory work
  after marriage, the majority of shop assistants
  look upon marriage as their one hope of release
  and would, as one girl expressed it, marry
  anybody to get out of the drapery business.
• Tilly and Scott Women, Work and Family

16
Percent labor force participation rates of
children, 10 to 15 years old
Percent of employed in agriculture is in brackets

• 1917-19 Department of Labor Study found child
  labor represented 23 of family income

17

• Tilly and Scott Women, Work and Family
• Married women were found in the least
  industrialized sectors, those sectors where the
  least separation existed between home and
  workplace and where women could control the
  rhythm of their work.
• Typical jobs home piecework charwomen
  laundress inkeeper boarders (as of 1930s, 30
  of urban homes in the U.S. had boarders)

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• Married women worked at home because it was
  costly for the family to have the mother work in
  the market
• Women controlled the family budget
• 75 was food then clothing and rent
• Husband controlled the rest (wine, beer, tobacco)

Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott. 1978. Women,
Work and Family Holt , Rinehart and Winston
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Wet nurses

• If an infant survived the trip to the wet nurse,
  often a long distance over rough roads, if
  furthermore the nurse had sufficient milk to
  nourish it and the other children she took in,
  and if it survived the other hazards of infancy
  under the care of an often indifferent
  parent-substitute, then the child was returned to
  the parents at an age when it could care for
  itself. The points, of course, is that many
  infants never returned. Usually they died.
• Infant mortality rates highest in places where
  married women worked away from home
• Tilly and Scott Women, Work and Family , p.133

20

• With husband and children working, wife supported
  the work outside the home
• Cooking fire never went out
• Cooking
• Bathing
• Cleaning clothes
• U.S. 1917 25 of households have electricity
• By 1930, 80 have electricity
• Last ad for coal stove in the Ladies Home Journal
  was in 1918

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Lancashire England, 1850s
22
Pittsburgh Hell with the lid off
23
Could Household appliances matter for time
allocation?
24
Source U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of
the Census, Historical Statistics Colonial Times
to 1970, Statistical Abstract
25
Source Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in
America Schocken Books, 1982
26
Time spent in household activities by women who
are not engaged in market work
Average weekly hours of housework for fulltime
housewife 1924 52 hrs/week 1965 55
hrs/week Avg for working mothers 26 hrs/week
Vanek, Joanne. Time Spent in Housework.
Scientific American November 1974
27
Time spent on laundry by women who are not
engaged in market work
Vanek, Joanne. Time Spent in Housework.
Scientific American November 1974
28
When did womens labor market careers become
compatible with raising a family?
29
Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap An
Economic History of American Women, 1990
30
Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap An
Economic History of American Women, 1990
31

• Early in the century, married women in the labor
  force were poor
• 1925 Philadelphia survey. Of working mothers
• 60 had no income from a husband
• Illness 14
• Desertion 13
• Death 22
• Nonsupport 11
• Another 29 stated their husbands income was
  insufficient

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Women in college

• In 1900, 10 of married female college graduates
  worked
• 74 had careers before marriage
• Some contend this means that women college
  graduates faced labor market constraints
• But that proportion was consistent with the labor
  market as a whole

33
Percent of women in the occupation that are
married
Early on, professional women were more likely to
be married
Wilson, Margaret G. 1979. The American Woman in
Transition The Urban Influence, 1870-1920
34

• The advent of the marriage bar also led to the
  rise of the single career-woman
• Marriage as a hindrance to career success
• Ida Tarbell, early 20th century sociologist
• I could never marry . It would interfere with
  my plan it would fetter my freedom. Tarbell
  prayed in her youth not to find a man to marry
• The Business of Being a Woman. Quoted in
  Matthae, An Economic History of Women in America,
  p. 258.

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College Education as a means to improve womens
productivity in the home

• It is not the chief happiness or the chief end
  of woman, as a whole, to enter these new
  occupations to pursue them through life. They
  enter many which they soon abandon and that is
  goodparticularly the abandonmentThe prime
  motive of the higher education of women should be
  recognized as the development in women of the
  capacities and powers which will fit them to make
  family life more productive in every sense,
  physically, mentally, and spiritually.
• Charles W, Eliot, President of Harvard College
  1908. Womens Education A Forecast. Magazine of
  the Association of Collegiate Alumna

36

• Conflict between career and family
• 1910
• Of women who graduated from college, 50 never
  married or else did not have children
• Of those who did not go to college, 22 never
  married or did not have children
• Goldin, cited by Blau, Ferber and Winkler, p.
  31-33

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Even as married womens labor supply increased in
the century, the opposite was true for college
educated women

• 1947 Fraction of women who are single, by age and
  education
• Age College Total
• lt30 41 21
• 30-39 22 11
• 40-49 26 8
• gt50 35 8
• Source survey data reported by Haverman and
  West. 1952. They went to College.

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Even as married womens labor supply increased in
the century, the opposite was true for college
educated women
1951 survey 50 of undergraduates aspired to be
full-time homemakers Mirra Komarovsky, Women in
the Modern World
Armed with their special high school or college
preparation for their homemaking vocation, ,
women from the 1920s on into the 1950s set upon
their callingprofessional homemaking. They were
educated, armed with an increasing array of
appliances, and freed from the larger social
obligations of social homemaking , which had now
been shouldered by government institutions. They
were aided by psychologists and social scientists
who undertook the scientific study of the
dimensions of good mothering
Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America
Schocken Books, 1982
39
Conflict lessening between career and family

• 1972 College cohort 13-18 of women had
  earnings at least at the 25ile for college men
  and a child by age 40.
• 1982 College cohort 21-27 of women had earnings
  at least at the 25ile for college men and a
  child by age 40.

40
Cohany and Sok, Trends in labor force
participation of mothers with children and
infants Monthly Labor Review 130 (February
2007)9-16
41
Cromartie, Stella Labor force status of
families a visual essay Monthly Labor Review
130 (July-August, 2007) 35-41.
42
Cromartie, Stella Labor force status of
families a visual essay Monthly Labor Review
130 (July-August, 2007) 35-41.