Jane Humphries
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 291939 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jane Humphries |
| PRENOMES | Jane |
| SOBRENOME | Humphries |
| ASSINATURA | HUMPHRIES J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-0797-3080 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 72 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 670 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 70 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1976 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Microhistory and Women’s Time Use
Gender historians have pioneered attention to ‘doing words’ to identify otherwise invisible women’s work. Searches in court records for verbs with female subjects have documented women’s widespread participation in economic activity, often directing and managing, while playing down their unpaid care for family members. This article turns to a microhistorical source, diaries written by Peter Walkden, a farmer and Nonconformist minister living in e…
‘Elbow grease and yellow soap’
Housework is central to feminist calls for recognition of women's work, economic histories explaining the sexual division of labour, and claims regarding the progressive role of scientific knowledge. Yet little is known about the time it actually took. We address this lacuna. We utilize British sources and find a substantial increase in the hours ordinary women spent on domestic labour between the late‐eighteenth and the mid‐twentieth centuries. …
Digital harms and penalties
The Australian regulatory framework that relates to the management of contemporary online harms emphasises the role of platforms in managing and policing infractions and has legislated civil penalties for their non-compliance. Although importantly shifting responsibility towards previously-exempt platforms, this approach contrasts with earlier regulatory options in which individual perpetrators were subject to penalties for harms they cause to ot…
Respectable standards of living
This paper argues that in all societies there is considerable agreement about what goods and services are needed to provide a decent living, and that this standard can be measured by the expense involved in maintaining people of good standing. Maintenance costs include two components of living costs that are neglected in conventional approaches. First, in contrast to the usual focus on a fixed basket of commodities, maintenance costs capture chan…
Forgotten Family
E. A. Wrigley identified the responsiveness of nuptiality and marital fertility to changes in male wages. Others have theorized the importance of women's decision-making in the timing of marriage, but without much empirical evidence. Combining new long-run series of annual wages for men, for married and single women, and for children with existing demographic data, the influence of women and children's remuneration on household formation is inves…
The Wealth of a Nation
Careworn
Economists ignore caring labor since most is provided unpaid. Disregard is unjust, theoretically indefensible, and probably misleading. Valuation requires estimates of time spent and the replacement or opportunity costs of that time. I use the maintenance costs of British workers, costs which cover both the material inputs into upkeep and the domestic services needed to turn commodities into livings, to isolate the costs of paid domestic labor. I…
The Best Job in the World
This article explores the effects of gender inequality and women's disempowerment in the context of historical coalmining. Across the United States and Europe, ex-coalmining regions are characterized by significant deprivation. While there are many reasons for persistent problems, this study focuses on the restrictions imposed on women's involvement in economic life. Families in mining communities exemplified the male breadwinner structure, in wh…
Beyond the male breadwinner
This article provides a novel framework within which to evaluate real household incomes of predominantly rural working families of various sizes and structures in England in the years 1260-1850. We reject ahistorical assumptions about complete reliance on men's wages and male breadwinning, moving closer to reality by including women and children's contributions to family incomes. Our empirical strategy benefits from recent estimates of men's annu…
Gender equality, growth, and how a technological trap destroyed female work
Development economists have long studied the relationship between gender equality and economic growth. More recently, economic historians have taken an overdue interest. We sketch the pathways within the development literature that have been hypothesized as linking equality for women to rising incomes, and the reverse channels–from higher incomes to equality. We describe how the European Marriage Pattern literature applies these mechanisms, and w…
Family Standards of Living Over the Long Run, England 1280-1850
This article uses new wage series for men, women and children in combination with an established cost of living index and standard assumptions about family size to construct a measure of family welfare in England, 1280-1850. It asks whether this family could achieve a standard of living historically defined as 'respectable'. It extracts information from primary and secondary sources to make adjustments for the participation rates of women and chi…
Losing the thread
In an earlier article we used archival and printed primary sources to construct the first long‐run wage series for hand spinning in early modern Britain. This evidence challenged Robert Allen's claim that spinners were part of the ‘high wage economy’, which he sees as motivating invention, innovation, and mechanization in the spinning section of the textile industry. We respond to Allen's subsequent criticism of our argument, sources, and methods…
Girls and their families in an era of economic change
The paper uses autobiographical accounts by 227 working women alongside a larger sample of men's life stories to compare girls’ and boys’ experiences of first jobs, schooling and family life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It asks whether girls were disadvantaged in seizing the opportunities and fending off the threats to wellbeing occasioned by economic change. Girls were more likely than boys to experience sexual harassme…
Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850
Estimates of historical workers’ annual incomes suffer from the fundamental problem that they are inferred from day wage rates without knowing how many days of work day-labourers undertook per year. We circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day. Our data suggest that earlier annual income estimates based on day wages overestimate medieval labour incomes but…
Children’s work and wages in Britain, 1280–1860
Spinning the industrial revolution
The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's 'high wage economy' view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such 'high wage…
Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain
The Wages of Women in England, 1260-1850
This paper presents two wage-series for unskilled English women workers 1260-1850, one based on daily wages and one on the daily remuneration implied in annual contracts. The series are compared with each other and with evidence for men, informing several debates. Our findings suggest first that women servants did not share the post-Black Death "golden age" and so offer little support for a "girl-powered" economic breakthrough; and second that du…
Consumption conundrums unravelled
While consumption has moved to centre stage in accounts ofBritain's industrialization, evidence on the mass transformation of homes and expenditure on novelty is hard to reconcile with the poor living standards experienced by many working people. Part of the conundrum arises from the limitations of available probate evidence, but the motivational drivers behind raised consumption can also be questioned. Was it changed tastes or falling prices bec…
The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain
A new edition of the leading textbook on the economic history of Britain since industrialization. Combining the expertise of more than thirty leading historians and economists, Volume 1 tracks Britain's economic history in the period ranging from 1700 to 1870 from industrialisation to global trade and empire. Each chapter provides a clear guide to the major controversies in the field and students are shown how to connect historical evidence with …
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution. By Emma Griffin.
Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas
Amartya Sen: A Biographical Note Exploring the Challenges of Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas: An Introduction Articles: Gender and the Foundations of Social Choice: The Role of Situated Agency Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice Sen's Capability Approach and Gender Inequality: Selecting Relevant Capabilities Intra-household Inequality: A Challenge for the Capability Approach? Development as Empowerment Development as Fre…
The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective
The new meta-narrative of the industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy and that this itself caused industrialization. Contemporary inventions, although derived from scientific discoveries shared with mainland Europe, could only be profitable in the context of Britain's factor prices. Therefore, important inventions were only developed in Britain where they enabled access to a growth path that transcended trajectories as…
Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution1
Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large number of autobiographies by working men who lived through the industrial revolution has demonstrated that there was an upsurge in child labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with children's work entrenched in traditional sectors as well as spreading in newly mechanized factories and workshops. I have interpreted this rise in terms of the appearance of a new equilibrium in th…
Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women
This article argues against the mainstream view that eighteenth-century common rights were of little significance to working people. Markets in common rights and in their products provide an index of value, and when neither common rights nor derived products were bought and sold, values are imputed from the market prices of similar goods. Since women and children were the primary exploiters of common rights, their loss led to changes in women's e…
Women's labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865
Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries, Women's Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family, 1790-1865, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 89-117
Off the Record
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 alternativ…
Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850
Estimates of historical workers’ annual incomes suffer from the fundamental problem that they are inferred from day wage rates without knowing how many days of work day-labourers undertook per year. We circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day. Our data suggest that earlier annual income estimates based on day wages overestimate medieval labour incomes but…
The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective
The new meta-narrative of the industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy and that this itself caused industrialization. Contemporary inventions, although derived from scientific discoveries shared with mainland Europe, could only be profitable in the context of Britain's factor prices. Therefore, important inventions were only developed in Britain where they enabled access to a growth path that transcended trajectories as…
The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family
The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited…
The Exploitation of Little Children
The Wages of Women in England, 1260-1850
This paper presents two wage-series for unskilled English women workers 1260-1850, one based on daily wages and one on the daily remuneration implied in annual contracts. The series are compared with each other and with evidence for men, informing several debates. Our findings suggest first that women servants did not share the post-Black Death "golden age" and so offer little support for a "girl-powered" economic breakthrough; and second that du…
Old Questions, New Data, and Alternative Perspectives
We have used the household accounts of 1,350 husband-wife families to investigate trends in male earnings and family incomes. This evidence confirms the material progress suggested by trends in the real wage rates of adult males. But the budget data underscore occupational and regional distinctions, discontinuities in the growth process, and changes over time in the ability of other family members to offset the effects of the business cycle on me…
Protective Legislation, the Capitalist State, and Working Class Men
Was Dick Whittington taller than those he left behind? Anthropometric measures, migration and the quality of life in early nineteenth century London
Excess Female Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales
Sex differences in mortality among historical populations are an intriguing yet neglected issue. In mid-nineteenth-century England and Wales, although women and girls enjoyed an overall longevity advantage, they tended to die at higher rates than males at ages when modern life tables show female advantage. We use multilevel modeling to analyze these sex differences in mortality. We identify significant regional variation, related to local demogra…
Spinning the industrial revolution
The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's 'high wage economy' view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such 'high wage…
Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution1
Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large number of autobiographies by working men who lived through the industrial revolution has demonstrated that there was an upsurge in child labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with children's work entrenched in traditional sectors as well as spreading in newly mechanized factories and workshops. I have interpreted this rise in terms of the appearance of a new equilibrium in th…
Destined for Deprivation
An input-output table for 1841
S tudies of industrialization inevitably involve some investigation of economic structure: structural changes comprise a defining characteristic of 'the industrial revolution' according to standard descriptions2 and the construction of output index numbers to ascertain growth rates requires knowledge of the distribution of value added.3 Surprisingly, these concerns have not spilled over into a direct interest in the interrelationships among indus…
Exploring the Challenges of Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas
Beyond the male breadwinner
This article provides a novel framework within which to evaluate real household incomes of predominantly rural working families of various sizes and structures in England in the years 1260-1850. We reject ahistorical assumptions about complete reliance on men's wages and male breadwinning, moving closer to reality by including women and children's contributions to family incomes. Our empirical strategy benefits from recent estimates of men's annu…
Mundane heroines
For the last twenty years, eastern Sri Lanka has witnessed a bitter and bloody civil conflict. This paper explores the experience of female-headed households in the region. Only partially the product of war, such households cannot be bundled together as a social problem with a single solution. Our study endorses the feminist suspicion of falsely homogenizing accounts of women's lives and suggests instead an alternative emphasis on the many ways i…
Female-headed households in early industrial Britain
Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought
Stature and relative deprivation
Economic historians and development economists have exploited links between nutrition, health status and physical stature to argue that evidence about height can be used to supplement conventional economic indices of well-being. Evidence on stature may be available for time periods when conventional economic indices are not. It may also exist for sections of populations for which only aggregate income data is available, and so expose variations i…
The dilemmas of lone motherhood
The acute dilemmas facing lone mothers in raising their children and earning a living form a common theme across the articles in this special issue of Feminist Economics on Lone Mothers. Like other parents, lone mothers face difficult decisions in allocating their time to caregiving and income generation, but in their families there is only one adult to do both. Further, that one adult is a woman, who will generally earn less than a man, compound…
Continuing the Conversation
AS: My interest in inequality, which goes back to my school days, was initially quite fixed on class divisions. My involvement with gender inequality grew more slowly. There was much greater concentration on class in standard politics (including standard student politics), and when in the early 1950s I was studying at Presidency College in Calcutta, it was taken for granted that class divisions were incomparably more important than other social d…
Family Standards of Living Over the Long Run, England 1280-1850
This article uses new wage series for men, women and children in combination with an established cost of living index and standard assumptions about family size to construct a measure of family welfare in England, 1280-1850. It asks whether this family could achieve a standard of living historically defined as 'respectable'. It extracts information from primary and secondary sources to make adjustments for the participation rates of women and chi…
Women
This paper employs a historical case study of the struggle between capital and labor in a context of high unemployment and falling production to illustrate the genesis of social pressures which affect the nature of women's oppression. The argument is that women's oppression does not exist in isolation, but is the product of complex interaction between changing economic circumstances and existing ideologies and institutions. My particular purpose …
Causes of Growth
The Working Class Family, Women's Liberation, and Class Struggle
Recent Marxist analyses have focused on the working class family as the arena of domestic labour and the context of the reproduction of labour- power. The effect has been to view the family in terms of the functional prerequi sites of capitalism, and to locate its reproduction in the reproduction of capital. But to look only from the perspective of capital is to neglect the role of class struggle. This paper attempts to redress this bias by argui…
The socio-economic determinants of recourse to legal abortion
Protective Legislation, the Capitalist State, and Working Class Men
A Treatise on the Family
Journal Article A Treatise on the Family Get access A Treatise on the Family. By Gary S. BECKER. (London: Harvard University Press, 1981. Pp. xii + 288. £14.00.) Jane Humphries Jane Humphries University of Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 92, Issue 367, 1 September 1982, Pages 739–740, https://doi.org/10.2307/2232577 Published: 01 September 1982
The 'Emancipation' of women in the 1970s and 1980s
“…The Most Free From Objection …” The Sexual Division of Labor and Women's Work in Nineteenth-Century England
Most explanations of trends in women's work emphasize women's role in childbearing, along with technological and organizational changes in production. The explanations neglect an important factor: the need to control sexuality in order to secure demographic order. Segregated employment enabled almost all family members to work, while discouraging heterosexual intimacy. Nineteenth-century attitudes illustrate the anxiety felt when unrelated men an…
Inter-War House Building, Cheap Money and Building Societies
(1987). Inter-War House Building, Cheap Money and Building Societies: The Housing Boom Revisited. Business History: Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 325-345
Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women
This article argues against the mainstream view that eighteenth-century common rights were of little significance to working people. Markets in common rights and in their products provide an index of value, and when neither common rights nor derived products were bought and sold, values are imputed from the market prices of similar goods. Since women and children were the primary exploiters of common rights, their loss led to changes in women's e…
Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England
Old Questions, New Data, and Alternative Perspectives
We have used the household accounts of 1,350 husband-wife families to investigate trends in male earnings and family incomes. This evidence confirms the material progress suggested by trends in the real wage rates of adult males. But the budget data underscore occupational and regional distinctions, discontinuities in the growth process, and changes over time in the ability of other family members to offset the effects of the business cycle on me…
Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought
French and British Mothers at Work
French and British Mothers at Work. Get access French and British Mothers at Work. By Dex (Shirley), Walters (Patricia) and ALDEN (DAVID M.). (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Pp. xiv + 213. £40.00 hardback. ISBN 0 333 58233 0.) Jane Humphries Jane Humphries Cambridge University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 104, Issue 427, 1 November 1994, Pages 1487–1488, https://do…
An input-output table for 1841
S tudies of industrialization inevitably involve some investigation of economic structure: structural changes comprise a defining characteristic of 'the industrial revolution' according to standard descriptions2 and the construction of output index numbers to ascertain growth rates requires knowledge of the distribution of value added.3 Surprisingly, these concerns have not spilled over into a direct interest in the interrelationships among indus…
The Economics of Equal Opportunities
The Exploitation of Little Children
Women's labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865
Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries, Women's Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family, 1790-1865, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 89-117
Portrait of the Family within the Total Economy
Journal Article Portrait of the Family within the Total Economy: A Study in Longrun Dynamics, Australia 1788-1990. Get access Portrait of the Family within the Total Economy: A Study in Longrun Dynamics, Australia 1788-1990. By SNOOKS (GRAEME DONALD). (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xv+311. £35.00 hardback, US $54.95 hardback. ISBN 0 521 45203 1.) Jane Humphries Jane Humphries Cambridge University Search for other w…
Wages, Manufacturers and Workers in the Nineteenth-Century Factory
Contents: Ghent and the Cotton Industry - The Voortman Mill: A Typical Cotton Factory? - Women, Men and Young People at Voortman - Wages as a Cost of Production - Wages as an Income - Conclusion: Income Strategy Versus Wage Policy
The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family
The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited…
Short stature among coal-mining children
Towards a family‐friendly economics
Symposium
Female-headed households in early industrial Britain
Economics (47 obras) · Sociology (38 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (37 obras) · Political science (34 obras) · Labour economics (22 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Demographic economics (21 obras) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (19 obras) · History (19 obras) · Gender Studies (17 obras)