¹ Lindert, Peter H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., “English Workers' Living Standards During the Industrial Revolution: A New Look”, Economic History Review, XXVI (1983), pp. 1–25Google Scholar, exemplifies the neoclassical approach. Barrett, Michele and McIntosh, Mary, “The ‘Family Wage’: Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists”, Capital and Class, 11 (1980)Google Scholar locates the emergence of the male breadwinner family within capitalist patriarchy, as does Humphries, Jane, “Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family”, Cam-bridge Journal of Economics, 1 (1977), pp. 241–258Google Scholar, but these authors draw different conclusions. For an excellent recent reappraisal of the debated rise of the male breadwinner family, see Creighton, Colin, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (1996), pp. 310–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Creighton, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family”, p. 310.

³ For a survey of the literature on the different routes to dependency see Honeyman, Katrina and Goodman, Jordan, “Women's Work, Gender Conflict, and Labour Markets in Europe, 1500–1900”, Economic History Review, XLIV (1991), pp. 608–628CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ This is surprising in that the English empirical tradition has been strongly evident in the historiography of women's work and the golden age controversy has been informed by a number of empirical studies based on British evidence. As in the evaluation of industrialization more generally, the British experience (for all its possible idiosyncrasies) poses as the archetype.

⁵ The issue of timing is discussed in Humphries, Jane, “Women and Paid Work”, in Purvis, June (ed.), Women's History: Britain, 1850–1945 (London, 1996), pp. 85–106Google Scholar.

⁶ This paper takes up the injunction in Creighton's survey to develop an account of the development of the male breadwinner family which is sensitive to variations by region, trade and industry.

⁷ For full details of the sources, the information they contain, and the geographical, occupational and temporal distribution of the budgets see Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, “Old Questions, New Data, and Alternative Perspectives: Families' Living Standards in the Industrial Revolution”, Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992), pp. 849–880, appendix 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Laslett, Peter and Wall, Richard (eds), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laslett, Peter, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anderson, Michael, Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914 (London, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a full discussion of the comparison of household size from the budgets with other sources see Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, “‘The Exploitation of Little Children’: Child Labor and the Family Economy in the Industrial Revolution”, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), pp. 485–516CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ The broad occupational breakdown for heads of household is as follows: agriculture subdivided into high- and low-wage counties according to Hunt, E.H., “Industrialization and Regional Inequality: Wages in Britain 1860–1914”, Journal of Economic History, 46 (1986), pp. 935–966CrossRefGoogle Scholar; mining and metalworkers; textile factory workers; outworkers (including handloom weavers, glove and stocking makers, silk weavers, framework knitters, winders, sewers, combers, shoemakers, tailors and nailers); trades (compositors, cutlers, carpenters, glaziers, masons, blacksmiths, millers, sawyers, coopers, carters, ostlers, spectacle framers, clerks and teachers); and casual and labouring jobs (railroad and road builders, dockyard workers and travellers).

¹⁰ The full details of the comparisons made are discussed in Horrell and Humphries, “Old Questions”, pp. 854–858 and are extensively documented in “Male Earnings Estimates from Household Accounts”, available from the authors on request. For example, comparisons of occupational earnings were made with wage series taken from Bowley, A.L., “The Statistics of Wages in the United Kingdom During the Last Hundred Years: I. Agricultural Wages”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 61 (1898), pp. 702–722Google Scholar; Flinn, M.W., The History of the British Coal Industry. Vol. 2, 1700–1830 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar; Lyons, John, “Family Response to Economic Decline: Handloom Weavers in Early Nineteenth Century Lancashire”, Research in Economic History, 12 (1989), pp. 45–91Google Scholar; Wood, G.H., “The Statistics of Wages in the United Kingdom During the Nineteenth Century: XVI. The Cotton Industry Section II”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1910), pp. 128–163Google Scholar.

¹¹ For the employment weights used to construct the aggregate figures see Horrell and Humphries, “Old Questions”, n. 40. The main sources used to calculate the national proportions of males in each occupation were Phyllis Deane and Cole, W.A., British Economic Growth 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1962), p. 143Google Scholar; Mitchell, Brian and Deane, Phyllis, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), p. 60Google Scholar, and Lindert, Peter H., “English Occupations 1670–1811” Journal of Economic History, 40 (1980), pp. 702–704CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Comparisons were made with Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 23; Wood, G.H., “The Course of Average Wages between 1790 and 1860”, Economic Journal (1899), p. 59Google Scholar; and Lindert and Williamson, “English Workers' Living Standards”, p. 7. For full details of these comparisons see Horrell and Humphries, “Old Questions”, pp. 865–869.

¹³ Continuous, annual data were not available and some years have only one or two observations, so we averaged over several years to mitigate this problem.

¹⁴ Other empirical evidence suggests that working wives were not necessarily married to the poorest workers and that local labour market conditions could override predictions made solely from considering the family economy. For example, Savage has shown that, in Preston in 1881, the largest percentage of working wives were married to cotton and metalworkers and not to the least well-paid men: see Savage, M., The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ E.H. Hunt argues that the participation rates of women and children were positively correlated with men's earnings because high male earnings meant robust demand for labour which spilled over into women's and children's employment opportunities and pay rates: see Hunt, E.H., Regional Wage Variations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ The remaining components of household income were poor relief and income-in-kind, for instance gleaning and coal provided by the employer. Figure 1 demonstrates the relative unimportance of this other income beyond 1815 and outside the agricultural sector. Families were heavily dependent on earnings. Poor relief formed much the largest part of other income, but this was unimportant for factory, mining and outwork families and it is only found in 1821–1840 for our broadly defined trades families, constituting 7 per cent of total income. The main recipients were agricultural families, but it was less than I per cent of total income on average and was virtually non-existent by the final period. The exception was low-wage agriculture in 1821–1840 when 8 per cent of family income was from poor relief.

¹⁷ The surveys were taken from two unpublished sources: A Census of the Poor of Ashton and Haydock, 1816, Warrington Library, Cheshire County Council and Tottington, Lanca-shire, A Survey of the Poor 1817, Manchester Public Library. The sample sizes for each occupation are: agriculture 30, mining 51, factory 15, outwork 174, trades 26. They were combined to give an average picture using the male employment weights stated in Horrell, Sara, “Home Demand and British Industrialization”, Journal of Economic History, 56 (1996), pp. 561–604, n. 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ The exception is one factory family which had a lot of investment income in the 40–49 age group.

¹⁹ Adult equivalents were calculated as man 1, wife 0.9, child aged 11–14 0.9, child 7–10 0.75, child 4–6 0.4, child 0–3 0.15. These values were suggested in a US study for the late nineteenth century as given in Higgs, Henry, “Workmen's Budgets”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 56 (1893), pp. 255–285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), 1843, vol. XV.

²¹ PP, 1842, vol. XV, p. 19.

²² PP, 1842, vol. XVI, p. 461.

²³ For a summary of relevant evidence, see Pollock, Linda A., Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (London, 1983), pp. 62–63Google Scholar and Humphries, Jane, “Protective Legislation, the Capitalist State and Working-Class Men: The Case of the 1842 Mines Regulation Act”, Feminist Review, 7 (1981), pp. 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ For a detailed examination of the expenditure data from these household budgets see Horrell, “Home Demand”.

²⁵ Necessity expenditure is taken to be expenditure on bread, flour, potatoes, other grains, meat, lard, fish, eggs, cheese, milk, butter, tea, coffee, sugar, treacle and rent. Expenditure on fuel, clothing and other food was excluded to compensate for some element of discretionary, rather than subsistence, expenditure on food and housing. Adult equivalents were calculated as man I, wife 0.7, other household members 0.5 as the ages of all members of the household were not always recorded in the surveys.

²⁶ Malcolmson, R.W., “Ways of Getting a Living in Eighteenth-Century England”, in Pahl, R.E. (ed.), On Work: Historical. Comparative and Theoretical Approaches (Oxford, 1988), pp. 48–60Google Scholar.

²⁷ King, Peter, “Customary Rights and Women's Earnings: The Importance of Gleaning to the Rural Labouring Poor, 1750–1850”, Economic History Review, XLIV (1991), pp. 461–476CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Humphries, Jane, “Enclosures, Common Rights and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Britain”, Journal of Economic History, 50 (1990), pp. 17–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ King argues that access to gleaning was reasonably constant from 1750 to 1850 but Humphries suggests that although gleaning was not strictly linked to common rights, it was more difficult to glean over enclosed fields than over open ones and of course the right to glean meant nothing if land was converted to pasture, so it too was threatened by enclosure. There is considerable evidence documenting the late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century curtailment of the poor's access to resources to self-provision: see Humphries, , “Enclosures”; and Neeson, J.M., Commoners: Common Rights, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Only budgets taken from sources where some self-provisioning was mentioned were used for this analysis to avoid non-random bias in the collection of this information by commentators. 250 households engaged in some form of self-provisioning.

³¹ See Horrell, “Home Demand”, for a discussion of how increased urbanization and a reduced proportion of the population engaged in primary sector occupations reduced self-provisioning and increased expenditure on basic necessities.

³² See Humphries, “Enclosures”, for a discussion of the issues and presentation of imputed values for self-provisioned produce.

³³ The number of occurrences of any type of self-provisioning are multiplied by the value ascribed, then all types of self-provisioning were summed and divided by the number of households recording at least one of these activities. This avoids inaccurately representing those households which record more than one form of self-provisioning.

³⁴ No obvious differences were observed in the incomes or male earnings of households according to whether they engaged in self-provisioning or not.

³⁵ For a full discussion of the use of this definition of participation see Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, “Women's Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family, 1790–1865”, Economic History Review XLVIII (1995), pp. 89–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here we use a subset of the husband-wife sample where the husband's earnings are positive and can be identified separately from those of women and children and where the male is employed in a known occupation (1,161 cases). We subdivide the years into five uneven sub-periods. This is a compromise between the conventional perception of a watershed in 1815 and our own interest in separating periods of economic recession, 1816–1820 and 1841–1845, from periods of relatively full employment. The occupation of the male head of household is still used as the organizing criterion as it is taken to be the best summary indicator of local economic conditions and specifically of the job opportunities and types of work available to other family members.

³⁶ Linden and Williamson, “English Workers' Living Standards”, p. 15, shows the severity of the post-war slump. For comparisons of male earnings from different sources, see Horrell and Humphries, “Old Questions”, p. 854, table 6 and n. 25.

³⁷ Declining opportunities for women in agricultural areas after Waterloo are found elsewhere: see Allen, Robert C., Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Snell, K.D.M., Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ This would be consistent with the evidence of Lyons, John, “Family Response to Economic Decline: Handloom Weavers in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire”, Research in Economic History, 12 (1989), pp. 45–91Google Scholar.

³⁹ For a qualitative survey of women's work in several occupations largely supportive of our results, see Bythell, Duncan, “Women in the Workforce”, in O'Brien, Patrick K. and Quinault, Roland (eds). The Industrial Revolution and British Society (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 31–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ The particularly small samples for factory workers' wives for 1816–1820 and 1846–1865 make it hard to comment on their experience.

⁴¹ See Becker, Gary S., “A Theory of the Allocation of Time”, Economic Journal, 80 (1965), pp. 493–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mincer, Jacob, “Labour Force Participation of Married Women: A Study of Labour Supply”, in Amsden, Alice (ed.), Women and Work (Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 41–52Google Scholar.

⁴² Major early empirical work on this topic includes: Cain, G.C., Married Women in the Labor Force (Chicago, 1966)Google Scholar, and Bowen, W. G. and Finnegan, T. A., The Economics of Labor Force Participation (Princeton, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reuben Gronau and James Heckman have contributed to the development of relevant statistical techniques: see, for example, the collection of papers in Smith, J.P. (ed.), Female Labour Supply: Theory and Estimation (Princeton, 1980)Google Scholar.

⁴³ The full explanation of the technique used can be found in Horrell and Humphries, “Women's Labour Force Participation”.

⁴⁴ This effect is found in other historical studies: see Goldin, Claudia, “Household and Market Production of Families in a Late Nineteenth Century American Town”, Explorations in Economic History, 16 (1979), pp. 111–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rotella, Elyce J., “Women's Labor Force Participation and the Decline of the Family Economy in the United States”, Explorations in Economic History, 17 (1980), pp. 95–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meyering, A., “La Petite Ouvrière Surmenée: Family Structure, Family Income and Women's Work in Nineteenth Century France”, in Hudson, Pat and Lee, W. R. (eds), Women's Work in the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester, 1990), pp. 76–103Google Scholar. Modern studies would be more likely to interpret the negative relationship between the presence of children and participation in terms of the effects on the shadow price of time in the home.

⁴⁵ The time trend is in three terms to allow for the possibility of changes in the effect of ideological and institutional influences over time.

⁴⁶ See Rose, Sonya O., “Gender Antagonism and Class Conflict: Exclusionary Strategies of Male Unionists in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, Social History, XIII (1988), pp. 191–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a detailed account of the exclusion of women from certain jobs and Honeyman, Katrina and Goodman, Jordan, “Women's Work, Gender Conflict and Labour Markets in Europe 1500–1900”, Economic History Review, XLIV (1991), pp. 608–628 for a general overviewCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Seccombe, W., “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, Social History, XI (1986), pp. 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar gives an account of the transition, but argues that a male breadwinner ethos was only found in skilled trades prior to 1850. Sonya Rose, “Gender Antagonism”, also discusses the emergence of the breadwinner ideology.

⁴⁸ See, for example, Hammond, J. L. and Hammond, Barbara, The Town Labourer (London, 1932), p. 143Google Scholar; Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p. 331Google Scholar; Deane, Phyllis and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1962), p. 294Google Scholar; McKendrick, Neil, “Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution”, in McKendrick, Neil (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974), p. 185Google Scholar; Nardinelli, Clark, Child Labor in the Industrial Revolution (Indiana, 1990), p. 740Google Scholar; Hudson, Pat, The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992), p. 124Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ For example, Pinchbeck, Ivy and Hewitt, Margaret, Children in English Society. Vol. 2. From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ See Nardinelli, Child Labor, for a full discussion of this Parliamentary report.

⁵¹ Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, p. 390; Defoe is cited in Tilly, Louise A. and Scott, Joan W., Women, Work and Family (New York, 1978), p. 32Google Scholar.

⁵² Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, p. 406.

⁵³ Levine, David, “Industrialization and the Proletarian Family in England”, Past and Present, 107 (1985), pp. 935–966CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ Nardinelli, Clark, “Child Labor and the Factory Acts”, Journal of Economic History, 40 (1980), pp. 739–755CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Child Labor.

⁵⁵ Here the sample is reduced to 903 households as we are only concerned with those that have at least one child resident. These households contain 3,841 children.

⁵⁶ Participation is defined as either having an occupation coded or earnings recorded. A number of children did not have earnings recorded separately from those of older brothers or sisters or, in some cases, parents, so an earnings definition alone would understate the numbers working.

⁵⁷ See Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman.

⁵⁸ The aggregate figures are obtained by estimating the proportion of males that would be heads of households with children, using male employment weights calculated for different years to weight the average experience, and using the average number of children in these households to obtain a national picture. For full details of this computation see Horrell and Humphries, “The Exploitation of Little Children”, n. 16.

⁵⁹ Here we are only concerned with the numbers who do some work, not the amount of work performed. A stable participation rate is not necessarily an indicator of stable labour input from children.

⁶⁰ The full working for this computation can be found in Horrell and Humphries, “The Exploitation of Little Children”, pp. 496–499.

⁶¹ Here we looked at the age structure of children in households compared with the population aged 0–19 in England and Wales to try to infer something about the age of leaving home. We find that the number of children estimated as living in households overstates child population 1787–1816, understates it 1817–1839 and overstates it again around mid-century, implying that more children were to be found outside homes in this middle period. For full details of these comparisons, see Horrell and Humphries, “The Exploitation of Little Children”. The estimates of children working are very rough as they only look at the shortfall of the population under 20 missing from our households and assume these people are working outside the home.

⁶² Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil (London, 1845)Google Scholar.

⁶³ Although of course increased demand for juvenile labour underpinned the increased independence manifest in larger proportions of older children living apart from families.

⁶⁴ Nardinelli, Child Labor, p. 154.

⁶⁵ Full details of the technique used is given in Horrell and Humphries, “The Exploitation of Little Children”. Gender differences in the relationship of children's participation to the family economy are also discussed.

⁶⁶ We do not expect this to be important. Consideration of mother's earnings relative to children's earnings shows mothers to be earning less once the children are over 10 years of age in all occupations. As children have an advantage over mothers in the labour market we would not expect to see children substituting for mothers in the home.

⁶⁷ See Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society; Nardinelli, “Child Labor and the Factory Acts”.

⁶⁸ A sample of families headed by women (widows, unmarried mothers and deserted wives) is studied in Humphries, Jane, “Female-Headed Households in Early Industrial Britain: The Vanguard of the Proletariat”, Labour History Review (forthcoming, 1998)Google Scholar. Results from this paper will be cited where relevant.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ See ibid, and sources cited therein.

⁷¹ See Davies, Richard B., Elias, Peter and Penn, Roger, “The Relationship Between a Hus-band's Unemployment and His Wife's Participation in the Labour Force”, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 54 (1992), pp. 145–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷² This was also true of the female-headed households.

⁷³ See Horrell, Sara, Humphries, Jane and Voth, Hans-Joachim, “Stature and Relative Deprivation: Fatherless Children in Early Industrial Britain”, Continuity and Change (forthcoming, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ See Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981), ch. 4Google Scholar.

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⁷⁶ Southall, Humphrey, “The Tramping Artisan Revisited: Labour Mobility and Economic Distress in Early Victorian England”, Economic History Review, XLIV (1991), pp. 272–296CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ Humphries, “Female-Headed Households”.