The Malthusian intermezzo: Women's wages and human capital formation between the late Middle Ages and the demographic transition of the 19th century

Abstract

The paper offers a new explanation for 'the great conundrum', the acceleration of population growth in England in the second half of the 18th century. It is argued that it was not only population growth that was 'different' in England, but the stagnation of the rise of literacy and of human capital in general, seems to be an anomaly of this period. This 'conundrum' has been explained in the following way. It is demonstrated that in England the gender wage gap increased a lot during the early modern period, which was caused by: (a) the switch from post Black Death labour scarcity to labour surplus, which in particular harmed the economic position of women, and (b) changes in the structure of agriculture, leading to the rise of large-scale, capital intensive and labour extensive farms, which had a very limited demand for female (wage) labour. This is also suggested by the fact that on the Continent (in the Netherlands) a much smaller decline of female wages occurred, because there family farms continued to be quite important. Moreover, the decline of English wages had important effects on its demographic development. It helps to explain the decline of the average age of marriage of in particular women between 1600 and 1800, and the related increase in fertility that occurred in this period -resulting in a much faster rate of population growth after 1750 than elsewhere in Western-Europe. It also helps to explain the stagnation in human capital formation that occurred during the 18th and early 19th century -again a feature peculiar for the English development in these years. The explanation of 'the great conundrum' is therefore intimately linked to the changing position of women on the labour market and within marriage.

Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth?

“…In many regions of Switzerland, Germany, and France, as local studies indicate, the EMP prevailed but women's work, wages, property rights, and in some cases even their consumption choices, were restricted by local communities —again, by corporative institutions (Ogilvie 1997, 2003, 2004, 2010; Dürr 1995; Ryter 1997; Hafter 2007; Ulbrich 1999). Among servants and laborers, the female-male wage ratio lay between 0.6 and 0.7 in early modern England and the Netherlands, but was as low as 0.4 in regions of Germany where wage ceilings and employment restrictions were enforced against women workers—again, by guilds and local communities (Ogilvie 2003, 2004; Van Zanden 2011). In the Netherlands, self-employed spinners earned competitive piece-rates high enough to attract even male workers (Van Nederveen Meerkerk 2010), but in the German territory of Württemberg, where an extreme form of the EMP prevailed (Guinnane and Ogilvie 2014), guilds allied with community institutions to cap spinners' rates, pushing them to the subsistence margins; among men, only the handicapped worked as spinners (Ogilvie 1997, 2003, 2004).…”

Marriage and power: Age at first marriage and spousal age gap in lesser developed countries

“…3 At least for Western Europe, the age at which a woman marries has historically to a large extent determined the level of population growth (Van Zanden, 2011). In what follows, a more fundamental reason for looking at marriage patterns is proposed, namely that they reflect the degree to which a woman has a say in the union, i.e.…”

Mercado de trabajo, género y especialización oleícola: Mallorca a mediados del siglo XVII

“…La hipótesis subyacente que se plantea es que el aumento de la participación de las mujeres en el mercado de trabajo debería conducir a una reducción de la brecha salarial de género y una mejora de sus condiciones de vida. Sin embargo, los resultados hasta el momento no son concluyentes en este sentido (Moor & Zanden, 2010;Zanden, 2011;Dennison & Ogilvie, 2014;Humphries & Weisdorf, 2015, 2016De Pleijt & Zanden, 2018). A su vez, tampoco se ha llegado a un consenso sobre la naturaleza y relevancia del salario en el ingreso de las familias campesinas (Hatcher, 2018).…”