The Wages of Virtue

If children complicated the issue of subsistence wages, so too did women, who were typically paid less than half what men earned. This discrepancy was explained in both natural and moral terms: women belonged in the home and should remain there.

Women had long participated in the market as workers in a family enterprise. Guild restrictions that made it impossible for young women to acquire a trade on their own nonetheless gave them latitude, as wives or widows, to engage in business. In rural areas, access to common property resources allowed women access to fuel and fodder that made important contributions to their families' standard of living.⁴⁰ If enclosures of common land pushed women into factories, the pull of higher wages speeded them along. By the 1830s single women had begun to spill out of domestic service into forms of piecework and wage employment in which they competed more directly than ever before with men. By 1850 women accounted for about one third of the industrial labor force in both France and England.⁴¹ Their level of participation was similarly high within the New England region of the U.S., though not in the South or the West.

Male wage earners in trades that did not require a great deal of physical strength, such as typesetting, were particularly vulnerable to competition, and made concerted efforts to limit women's participation.⁴² Most trade unionists were more concerned with the wage effects of an increased supply of labor than with the potential to increase the earnings of their sisters, daughters, or wives.

Spokesmen for employers, such as Andrew Ure, defended the practice of hiring women, noting with satisfaction that the wages paid them were so low that they would not be able to neglect their family duties (see epigraph to this chapter).⁴⁴ Other discussions of women's work were infused with moral language. Lord Shaftesbury, serving as the first President of the Society for the Employment of Women, wrote that women's work could be defined as that which required ‘‘tact, sentiment, and delicacy.’’⁴⁵ He might well have added, that which ‘‘does not pay them enough to allow them to become assertive.’’

The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, an admirer of Malthus’s theory of population, made a more systematic effort to explain women’s low wages. His Treatise of Political Economy, published in 1801, was widely cited in the English-speaking countries as well as his native France. While his views on women’s pay were not particularly original, they were unusually explicit.⁴⁶ They received considerable elaboration at the end of the nineteenth century, in discussions of a male family wage (see Chapter 18).

Say argued that a man’s wages should include the costs of supporting a wife and children, but a woman’s wages should not.⁴⁷ He reasoned that the interplay between the family and the labor market would automatically lead to this result. Women wage earners seeking to support themselves on their own would always face competition from wives and daughters who were primarily supported by their husbands, and were therefore willing to work for a lower wage.

Say’s analysis, like that of his English contemporaries, ignored the unpaid domestic services that wives and daughters typically provided in return for their support, the limits that such unpaid work put on their supply of market labor, and their lack of property rights over their own earnings. It also ignored the logic of a perfectly competitive market that should, in principle penalize men as well as women for commitments to dependents. All else equal, men with children should earn the same wages as men without. An increase in the supply of men with no children should drive wages down. The only floor would be the costs of subsistence for a single worker. The resulting equilibrium wage would suffice only to support an adult without dependents.

In other words, ‘‘subsistence’’ means something different in the long run than the short run. Say seemed to recognize the problem more clearly than his peers. But he absentmindedly suggested that the market would antici­pate the problem. Male wages would not decline, because this would drive the birth rate down only to drive wages up again. It was as though Say believed that Malthusian logic would work for women but not for men. The inconsistency in his reasoning can only be explained by his firm conviction that women were naturally designed to specialize in family work. He described women who try to ‘‘push ahead of men” as unnatural, represent­ing a ‘‘third sex.^,,4⁸ Those women who failed to find a husband could be allowed to seek employment in those occupations for which they were naturally suited—dressmaking, hairdressing, and cooking. So much for the virtues of competition.