CFP: WEHC 2012 Session 228: Gender and the Labor Market

Call for Papers: Session 228 of the XVIth World Economic History Congress,Stellenbosch, 9-13 July, 2012:

Gender and the labor market: women’s work and household strategies in Europe and elsewhere, 1870-1930

Session organizers: Jessica Bean (Denison, OH, USA) and Maria Stanfors (Lund, Sweden)

In this session we invite economic and social historians to contribute to our understanding of gender and labor market participation and outcomes in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and elsewhere.

A 2010 workshop held in Hackeberga, Sweden, entitled “New Perspectives on Work and Wages,” brought together economic historians from all over the world to discuss new and innovative research on historical labor markets. One strong theme that emerged focused more specifically on gender and the role of women in the household economy and in the development of industrial labor markets at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. This session will reunite some of the original presenters and allow them to present updated research, but also aim to incorporate new presenters and papers on related topics. Participants in this session should present papers that relate to the development of women’s labor supply and work experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in various national contexts.

The period surrounding 1900 was a transitional period in women’s work, with industrial home work starting to decline, changing payment systems and incentive structures, and a rapidly shifting occupational structure, and was in many places a low point in the employment of married women. Examining the labor supply decisions of households, the occupational and industrial choices facing female workers, and the labor market conditions affecting their work and pay at the beginning of the twentieth century is a very important, and yet relatively under-studied, step in explaining the dramatic changes in women’s labor force participation later in the century. The papers collected so far examine the roles of mothers and daughters in household labor supply in interwar London, the motherhood wage penalty in late 19th century Sweden, and the experiences of female home workers, factory operatives, and white-collar workers in the 1910s and 1920s in Sweden and the UK. They all make use of new data sources to advance our understanding of how women experienced the labor market around the turn of the twentieth century; data collected from detailed household surveys, matched employer-employee data, labor statistical surveys and tax records all allow modern issues in labor economics to be addressed in the historical case. While the papers so far collected for this session relate to northern Europe – Sweden and the UK – it is hoped that several more could be added that expand the comparison and examine similar issues at a similar time in the United States and other parts of Europe.

Please send paper proposals to Jessica Bean at Denison University (beanj@denison.edu) no later than February 29, 2012. All proposals should include a title, abstract of 300-500 words, with a detailed explanation of the data sources and methods employed, and contact information for the author(s). Presenters will be notified by March 15, 2012.