Rui Duan’s research examines whether parliamentary enclosure of common land in 18th and 19th century England affected the gender pay gap in the agricultural sector. Did the spread of enclosure alter the relative position of women agricultural worker?
From 1730 to 1850, 5,265 enclosure Bills were enacted by Parliament, affecting nearly seven million acres of open fields and common land. Often these Bills enclosed small strip fields to form larger holdings exclusively held by a farmer. Large-scale farming may have increased workforce participation for women, if it truly increased productivity. A counter argument is that new labour organisation decreased women’s employment in pastoral and field work. Pastoral work, in particular, was an area of agriculture in which women labourers made up most of the workforce.
While earlier studies into the impact of enclosure have focused on workforce participation, my research focuses on gender pay inequality. Understanding gender pay dynamics will help to clarify the impact of enclosure.
Tracking changes in pay and land enclosure
To track gender pay ratios, I used county-level wage data from 1750 to 1850. I relied on the work of Bowley and Hunt for male weekly wages as well as eleven scholarly works for female wages. Female wage data included daily weekly, and annual wages.
I calculated women’s daily and weekly wages by taking the weighted average of individual workers’ wages and county-level average observations. I then calculated the gender pay ratio for daily and weekly wages by dividing the average female wage by the average male wage. For annual female wages, I divided by 52 before dividing them by men’s weekly pay unless female servants’ working weeks were specified. Lastly, I took the weighted average of the gender pay ratios to arrive at my dependent variable.
As my main independent variable, I used the proportion of land enclosed within a county. I transcribed this data from English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Turner, M.E., 1980).
Small changes appear after parliamentary enclosure
Figure 1 shows the gender pay ratio plotted across time. Although my dataset did not have figures for the southern counties before 1771, my calculation of the gender pay ratio in the north was close to the national average in Burnette’s research. Key periods of enclosure occured during 1760-90 and the Napoleonic Wars (1795-1813). Corresponding to the timing of these enclosures, there is a sharp drop in female relative pay from 1750 to 1824. After 1825, the gender pay ratio saw some recovery in the north and reached a figure overtaking that in the south. In the southern counties, however, it stayed low.
My regression analysis finds that from the period 1750-70 to the period 1796-1824, when the proportion of land enclosed increased by just over 31 per cent, the gender pay ratio decreased by 2.17 per cent. Parliamentary enclosure had a small negative effect on the gender pay ratio in agriculture.
What mechanisms might have caused the negative effect?
The loss of common land for pasture caused the demand for dairy labour to plummet. Agricultural production shifted towards more profitable goods, such as corn. In the short term, this shift led to an increased gender pay gap, since the dairy sector had been a lucrative sector for female labour.
In Southeast England, women’s engagement in harvest work became confined to the tasks of weeding and haymaking. Some women dropped out of crop farming altogether.
During the Napoleonic Wars, in counties with less intense wartime enclosure, and as conscripted men were pulled out of agriculture, women’s relative earnings benefited more from expanding demand for manual labour and suffered less from the opportunity loss caused by enclosure.
However, the wartime and post-war revival of the demand for female labour was only strong enough to stabilise the gender wage ratio at around 0.4, below the ratio of 0.7 that existed between the genders in the mid-18th century.
Conclusion
My analysis shows that the largest share towards the overall decline in the gender pay ratio that parliamentary enclosure contributed was 7.2 per cent. In most of the other sub-periods in my study, the percentage of enclosed land contributed only a small share of the decline in the gender pay ratio. I conclude that the parliamentary enclosure increased gender wage disparity, but the largest drivers of a wider gender pay gap in agriculture lay in other factors.
