The Effects on the Labor Market

The chapter offers a new explanation for the “great conundrum,” or why population growth accelerated in England in the second half of the eighteenth century while growth in literacy and human capital stagnated. Reviewing various attempts to reconcile this anomaly, the authors discuss (a) the switch from the post–Black Death labor scarcity to a labor surplus, which harmed the economic position of women; and (b) changes in the structure of agriculture, which led to the rise of large-scale, capital-intensive and labor-extensive farms with limited demand for female wage labor. Moreover, the decline in wages had important effects on England’s demographic development, reflected in a decline in the average age of marriage between 1600 and 1800 and an increase in fertility. As a consequence, the authors link the “great conundrum” to the changing position of women in the labor market and within marriage.