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 U-shaped curve is not entirely a statistical artifact, but appears to evolve at higher levels of participation than usually suggested.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic development
• economic history
• economic growth
• women's labor force participation
• family wage
• labor market inequality

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of the articles published in this and the following symposia originatedin the Exploratory Workshop financed by the European Science Foundation (ESF) in November 2010, under the title “Reconstructing the Female Labor Force Participation Rate in Western Europe, 18th and 19th Centuries,” which we convened. Research projects financed by several European research agencies have made possible the labor-intensive archival work that lies behind these contributions. In particular, Carmen Sarasúa gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through research grant ‘‘Reconstrucción de la tasa de actividad femenina española, 1750–1980'', HAR2009-11709 and Jane Humphries the support of the Economic and Social Research Council through a Professorial Fellowship, “Memories of Industriousness: The Industrial Revolution and the Household Economy in Britain 1700–1878.” We are also indebted to the editors of Feminist Economics for accepting our initial proposal and for sharing our conviction that looking at the past is important to understand the present. Finally, we thank Lourdes Benería for her comments and inspiration.

Notes

Many feminist economists have argued that women's care and domestic work in the home is also productive, and that the value it produces should be included in national accounts (for example, see Nancy Folbre and Barnet Wagman [1993]). We are sympathetic to this perspective, but in these symposia, participation or economic activity – while not always individually remunerated – relates to the remunerated production of goods and services exchanged on markets. This narrow definition, while likely leading to an underestimation of women's economic activity, is consistent with standard labor statistics, enabling ready comparison with other sources. This approach constitutes a first stage in the ongoing project of reconstructing the history of women's work. We hope that future research will address the looming question of the value of women's unpaid work and develop more encompassing estimates of participation.

Boserup's work has been described as “the first investigation ever undertaken into what happens to women in the process of economic and social growth” and is said to have inspired the UN Decade for Women between 1975 and 1985 (Swasti Mitter 1989; see also Irene Tinker [2004]). Influential historical versions of the U-shaped curve include Eric Richards (1974), K. D. M. Snell (1981), and Anita Nyberg (1994).

Interestingly, Saniye Dedeoğlu reports similar reticence in a recent investigation of women's work in garment production in Turkey where “low income women in Turkey tend to report themselves as housewives even if they engage in home-based piecework or other forms of informal activities” (2010: 9).

The reported estimates in Figure 1 are likely on the low side, as only women identified in the sources as working for the market are included as active (see note 1).

Thus in recent work, Rosemary Atieno (2012) has tried to include a class dimension in her analysis of women's participation in Kenya, while Fariba Solati (2012) has focused on the dampening effects of patriarchal culture and religion on women's participation in the Middle East and North Africa.

A recent study of France and Switzerland has pointed out the influence of patriarchal ideas on legislation and, in turn, on labor markets: Encouraged by a pro-natalist and pro-family concern, thoughts on the question materialised in France through the 1932 family benefits national law […] In accordance with the papal encyclicals, Catholics regarded the limitation of female work as a first step to re-establishing a social order seen as normal (our translation; Céline Schoeni 2012: 555).

In nineteenth-century Spain, rural women were concentrated in nonagricultural occupations, such as domestic manufacturing (mostly foods and textiles) and services (domestic service, wet-nursing, cloth washing, retail trade), with men in agriculture. With the exception of regions where family farming dominated, women's agricultural work was mostly seasonal. Recording all women workers would have thus implied a rise in industry and services, but because population censuses failed to record rural women as workers (they were “housewives”), 66.3 percent of Spain's total working population was still officially in agriculture in 1900.