A Look Back Into History: The Wage Gap During the Industrial Revolution
Written by Nancy Javkhlan | Edited by Anshu Yarramseti
Imagine if all your clothes were handmade, exclusively for you. You ate organically grown food from your local farm and meat from animals in stress-free environments, nothing like the factory farms in America today. Chances are, you lived before the Industrial Revolution, before the 1750s.
Life before the Industrial Revolution replicates the traditional lifestyle expected of women and men. Men go out and work on the fields while women stay home to raise the children, the typical system of agrarian societies. However, the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain changed the dynamics of work for both men and women. Technology and innovations pushed out farmers from the agrarian lifestyle and into factory work, increasing the economic productivity of larger society, yet decreasing the quality of life for many people on the lower rungs of society.
A rise in new economic system, which we are all familiar with, capitalism led to the focus on creating new wealth and created new opportunities for lower class individuals to climb up the social ladder. However these opportunities came at the expense of worker exploitation. Specifically, women and children.
Joyce Burnette, an economic historian with a PhD from Northwestern, analyzes the reason for why “the gap between men’s and women’s wages was large. The female-male wage ratio generally varied from one-third to two-thirds, depending on the type of work and the location”. While that would calculate to a 30–60 percent wage gap, in 2022, the global wage gap was still 17 percent (John 22). The rise in capitalism and industrialization led to a need for cheaper workers, where the “first” gender wage gap came to exist.
While there’s a lack of primary sources dating back to the Industrial Revolution and the wage gap, historians suggest that “[e]mployers did not offer a “living wage” to the female or child since they assumed that she was dependent upon a household headed by a male and therefore did not depend only on her wages for subsistence” (Burnette 1997). The influence of a man’s traditional role as primary breadwinner in an agrarian society translated into an industrialized society where men are still assumed to be the primary breadwinner. However, looking into our current and modern society, it’s clear that women are gaining their own independence and prioritizing independent financial stability that it’s important to recognize long generational assumptions regarding a woman’s salary.
Another common argument for a woman’s minimal wage was due to her “productivity”. Women simply were reasoned to not have the ability to remain productive compared to a man, and their wages reflected that. However “Valenze explains the wage gap as a result, not of productivity differences, but of the fact that employees saw women as Dependent” (Burnette 1997).
The suffering of factory work and poor wages sparked the need for change and caused some of the most important feminist movements in history. It was during the rise in socialism and utopian ideas that women rose up and demanded important changes. The right to vote, access to an education, and ability to take part in political society were huge values of achieving equal rights.
In fact, girls from one of the most popular factory textile mills during the Industrial Revolution claims that “mill girls worked an average of nearly 13 hours a day. It was worse than “the poor peasant of Ireland or the Russian serf who labors from sun to sun.” Lucy Larcom started as a doffer of bobbins when she was only 12 and “hated the confinement, noise, and lint-filled air, and regretted the time lost to education” (AFL).
These conditions created change led by protests and followed by political action. And the start of change, led by women with greater aspirations in life, created a cycle of trying the decrease the wage gap each year and each generation. Since the Industrial Revolution, women have joined unions to increase their working conditions and decrease harmful working hours. These solutions have not changed in our modern society and it’s important to recognize the women from history that have influenced our lives and our ability to support ourselves. This isn’t the 1800s anymore, it’s 2023, and at this point, eliminating the wage gap should be more important than creating flying cars.
- Burnette, J. (1997). T. S. Ashton Prize: Winning Essay: An Investigation of the Female-Male Wage Gap during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The Economic History Review, 50(2), 257–281. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2599060
- John, L. (2022, October 13). 2022 gender pay gap statistics (infographic). Connecting Talent with Opportunity JOHNLEONARD Employment Services. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.johnleonard.com/blog/2022-gender-pay-gap-statistics-infographic
- Lowell Mill Women create the First Union of Working Women: AFL-CIO. AFL. (n.d.). Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events/lowell-mill-women-form-union
