The heights of rural-born English female convicts transported to New South Wales

N icholas and Oxley's analysis of the heights of female convicts transported to New South Wales has brought a valuable new set of data under scrutiny, and their argument adds a further strand to the debate over the standard of living during the industrial revolution.2 Nicholas and Oxley find that English convicts born around i8i5 were shorter than those born i5 to 20 years earlier, with the fall in height being greater for women than for men and greater for rural than for urban women. The average height of rural English female birth cohorts fell from 'a peak of 6i.75 inches in i8oo ... to just under 6i inches by i8i5'. Urban English women experienced a 'less dramatic' fall in height of half an inch between I795 and i8I4. By way of contrast, there was a rise in the height of women convicts born in Ireland, where the effects of industrial transformation were much smaller. In Ireland, moreover, there was little difference between the heights of urban and rural convicts, while in industrializing England urban convicts were shorter than the rural-born. Nicholas and Oxley regard the fall in the height of English rural-born women convicts born after i8oo as evidence of a reduction in the net nutrition of these women during industrialization. In their view, a decline in traditional forms of production led to a corresponding decline in the relative position of women in the family and the labour market, and this led in turn to fewer household resources being allocated to females. A parallel decline in female literacy reflected a new distribution of resources which gave males greater access to education. On this analysis, the greater fall in the height of English rural women shows that the position of women deteriorated most in rural England. 'The convict data tell a tale of slowly improving nutritional standards in Ireland, lower and declining living standards in urban England, and a polarizing English country community where women bore the highest costs of industrialization.'3 If true, this would be an important finding. I argue below, however, that there was no significant change in the heights of the English rural-born women transported to New South Wales. Two lines of criticism of Nicholas and Oxley's analysis are developed. First, they attribute long-run significance

Demographic economics · Economics · Genealogy · Geography · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Demography · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History

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