The Significance of Brawn

It has been interesting to follow Joyce Burnette's work over the last few years and to see its culmination in Gender, Work, and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (2008). As will be obvious to the book's readers, much of it is an argument with me and several other feminist economic historians who have a different take on the reason that female wages were, in general, so much lower than male wages in the period 1750–1850. It is worth saying at the outset that Burnette has the a priori assumption that economic forces are the crucial determinant of behavior. Burnette's explanation also has a different departure point from mine. Hers is to explain why men’s pay is so much higher than women’s pay. Mine is to explain why payments to women are so much lower than those to men.