The Sex Factor
Page 8
Markets that provided opportunities for women gave them a release valve, a release valve that enabled them to stand up to early marriage and take some control over their own lives,69 something that changed the way families functioned and, with it, population dynamics and ultimately the mechanization and technological base of the economy.
2 Investment and skills
Women's freedom and the associated development of more consensual nuclear families also affected saving and skills, both of which are vital for rising prosperity.
Unlike in traditional families, in nuclear families the children one day have to make their own way in the world.70 That required preparing them for life outside, particularly by investing in their skills. Marrying later in life – in their mid-twenties as opposed to teens ‒ also meant that young people had the time needed to invest in or acquire their skills, such as through apprenticeships. Furthermore, by marrying later and so having smaller families, parents could now better afford to educate their own children, increasing the skill base of the economy. Evidence certainly suggests that bigger families are more likely to live in poverty, even today, and that children with more siblings ‒ particularly more younger siblings ‒ can suffer a penalty.71 Jane Humphries finds, for example, that children in larger families during the Industrial Revolution were, out of necessity, sent out to work as child labourers at a younger age, cutting their schooling short.72 Jacob Weisdorf and Marc Klemp find that one less child per family boosted literacy by 7.3 per cent and those entering skilled jobs by 7.9 per cent.73 All of this suggests that the smaller families that came along with family systems in which women were relatively freer helped to boost the skill base of the economy.
Smaller families also made it easier for parents to save for the future. And, as nuclear families meant that you could no longer rely on your children looking after you in old age, it became absolutely necessary to do so. This increased incentive to save helped to provide a greater pot of investment for the economy.74 It encouraged the development of private capital markets, including pensions and life annuities.75 These in turn provided a ready demand for government bonds as a safe place for financial institutions to invest the contributions they collected, thereby supporting the ability of the state to borrow and invest. As we will see later in the book, Britain's fiscal system led the way in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
3 Capitalist spirit
According to Max Weber, a ‘Protestant work ethic’ is responsible for the rise of the West: the Reformation, in other words, gave birth to capitalism. Protestantism supposedly encouraged a culture of entrepreneurism, hard work and higher savings in a country like Britain.76 However, this ‘capitalist spirit’ deserves to instead be seen as a product of women's freedom. And to see why, we need to compare traditional and nuclear families.
In traditional families, where parents are in charge of the marriage decision and where newly married couples are absorbed into the household of the groom's parents, young women (and sometimes also young men) have relatively little control over their private lives. It is the wealth of your family that will determine your ability to marry and whom you marry. In the nuclear family system, by contrast, young couples instead choose their own partner and set up their own independent households after marriage. This was particularly the case in England, where very little support was provided by parents upon marriage.77 This meant that young couples simply could not afford to get married until they had the independent financial means to do so. Your ability to have an independent home life depended entirely on your own efforts – on whether you yourself were doing well enough at work and how much of your income you had managed to save. Unless you earned enough to support a family, you could not afford one. In a world before reliable birth control, marriage meant children – children that no one other than you and your partner would pay to feed and clothe. In other words, if you wanted to have sex with your partner, you needed to be in a strong enough financial position to support the consequences that would likely result from it. Tough love ruled, creating an acute incentive for individual effort and aspiration. No private life ‒ and no sex ‒ without your own hard labour.78
The capitalist spirit ‒ working hard, skilling up, being entrepreneurial and saving for the future – was in part a response to the kind of family system which supported as opposed to suppressed women's freedom.79
4 Democracy and the state
Economists have noted that stronger kinship ties mean that families tend to look after themselves. With nuclear families, by contrast, people need to interact and work with non-family members. This helps to develop the type of cooperation and generalized trust levels that are needed for the emergence of the state.80 But nuclear families only tend to emerge in situations in which women are (relatively) free: where they are free to make their own independent decisions about marriage. The state and women's freedom are, therefore, intimately linked.
Furthermore, if our state is to be democratic as opposed to authoritarian, women's freedom is even more important. According to Emmanuel Todd, democratic norms are rooted in the family.81 It is within the family that we each have our first taste of life – that we are each ‘socialized’. Where families are patriarchal – where women have little voice and where an ‘elder’ dominates – we learn to respect authority and to keep our mouths shut. Status trumps merit. Where families are more consensual – where men and women are equal and where young people are allowed a voice – we become socialized into democratic norms from an early age. We get used to having a say, to forming an opinion through discussion and debate and to holding others to account. We speak up rather than shut up.82 Authoritarian and undemocratic political institutions are, in other words, rooted in authoritarian family forms. Rather conveniently, patriarchy, by giving everyday men some power within the home, placates those who might otherwise rise up and challenge undemocratic rule.
It is not too surprising, therefore, to find democratic institutions successfully taking root sooner in north-western Europe, where the family system offered women a greater degree of agency and equality. It also suggests that ‘bad’ institutions – of the kind that limit economic prosperity ‒ cannot be tackled without at the same time questioning inequalities of power within the home. Autocracy and patriarchy stand or fall together ‒ another reason why feminists are right to argue that ‘personal is political’.
Not only are democratic states and women's freedom intimately connected, so are women's freedom and the kind of state capabilities commonly taken for granted in the West today. Research has connected votes for women with the expansion of the state into the provision of public goods, health care and education, all of which helped to support increased economic prosperity in the twentieth century.83 It was also in the parts of Europe where women first began to earn their freedom that a welfare system began to emerge.84
In traditional societies, ‘welfare’ is provided within the family.85 Higher-income earners help support those on lower incomes whilst women spend their time taking care of the young and elderly ‒ and even being pawns in the marriage market to enable their family to access more resources. Individual freedom and family needs can, as a result, conflict. Where markets enable people to ‘escape’ such practices ‒ giving them a way out ‒ it leaves a welfare gap that needs to be filled. Through the emergence of a welfare state, the state and the market can therefore work in tandem to both support women's agency and economic prosperity.
Rather than being seen as a burden to market activity, the early English welfare system, known as the Old Poor Law, has been seen in such a light.86 As Thijs Lambrecht notes when comparing the English welfare system with those in place elsewhere in Europe, in England ‘the care of the elderly in particular became a community responsibility’.87 By doing so, it supported women's ability to work and engage in the marketplace.88 According to Lambrecht, we can see the state's endorsement of patriarchal family practices in other countries – practices that place greater caring req
uirements on women – as a strategic means to minimize their expenditure.89 ‘Conservative’ states and patriarchy are natural bedfellows, exploiting the ‘free labour’ of women within the family, which, counterproductively, restricts the ability of the economy to grow. Needless to say that, as Adrienne Roberts90 argues, the English welfare system was far from perfect and had rather mixed effects, with the laws of settlement having received particular criticism. Clearly, there is still room for improvement today.
Conclusion
In 1869, John Stuart Mill argued that the subordination of women was ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’. He was right. Few economists (other than feminist ones91) took note. Evidence from the long span of history is, however, unequivocal: women's freedom is vital for economic prosperity. It boosts wages, skills, saving and entrepreneurial spirit, and it delivers a democratic and capable state.
Table 2.1 Female average age at first marriage before 1790
Average age at first marriage
England 25.2
Belgium 24.9
Netherlands 26.5
Scandinavia 26.1
Germany 26.6
France 25.3
Source: Clark, Farewell to Alms (2007), Table 4.2, p. 76
Notes
1 Foreword, p. xiii. Note that this international agenda has certainly not been without feminist critique. See, for example, Prügl (2016), who argues that it is neoliberalism but with a feminist face.
2 Sometimes referred to as modernization theory. See Inglehart and Norris (2003), pp. 7‒10; Dilli, Rijpma and Carmichael (2015). For an outline of the links in both directions, see Duflo (2012).
3 On the former, see Kabeer and Natali (2013); Morrison, Dhushyanth and Sinha (2007); Duflo (2012). On the latter, see Mies (1986).
4 Studies which find a link include Klasen (1999, 2002); Klasen and Lamanna (2009); Barsh and Yee (2011); Woetzel et al. (2015). On the opposing side, see Seguino (2000a,b, 2011). For a summary, Prügl (2016).
5 Morrison, Dhushyanth and Sinha (2007), abstract and p. 37. Bandiera and Natraj (2013). Also see Duflo (2012) and Prügl (2016). However, Kabeer and Natali (2013) argue that there is a relatively stronger link from gender equality to growth than there is in the opposite direction.
6 Sen (1999).
7 For a feminist reinterpretation, see Hirschmann (2007).
8 Nussbaum (2013).
9 Prügl (2016): 45.
10 For a full discussion, see the 2016 Feminist Economics 22(1) special issue on ‘Voice and Agency’.
11 Van Zanden, Rijpma and Kok (2017).
12 Carmichael, de Pleijt and van Zanden (2016).
13 Ibid.
14 For a comparison of European with other family systems, see Burguiere et al. (1996); Das Gupta (1999); Therborn (2004); Kok (2017); and the references contained therein.
15 Das Gupta (1999): 173.
16 Engels and Hunt (2010).
17 Lévi-Strauss (1956, 1970. For a discussion, see Rubin (1975).
18 Within Asia, for example, South India and South-east Asia had more bilateral kinship systems than elsewhere in the region (such as North India and China), which was relatively more favourable for women (Das Gupta et al. 2003: 9). To quote Kok (2017), ‘[t]he family systems of Sri Lanka and of most regions in Southeast Asia seem to have offered women more “leeway” than they could enjoy in India, China or Japan.’ As Kok notes, here were also differences between southern China and elsewhere in China, whilst in Japan women were in a more favourable position – at least until the eleventh century.
19 Howell (2010), pp. 116‒17; Wiesner-Hanks (2015).
20 Edlund and Lagerlöf (2006); Edlund (2006): 622.
21 Edlund and Lagerlöf (2006): 304‒7.
22 Das Gupta (1999): 178.
23 Das Gupta et al. (2003).
24 Agarwal (1998).
25 See Eswaran (2014), ch. 5.
26 Kok (2017).
27 Kok (2017); Therborn (2004).
28 Van den Heuvel (2007); De Moor and Van Zanden (2010); Ogilvie (2011), pp. 91, 183, 187, 414; Howell (2010), pp. 100‒1; Fontaine (2014), pp. 134, 146.
29 Howell (2010), pp. 100‒1, 110, 140; Fontaine (2014), pp. 142‒3.
30 Fontaine (2014), p. 138.
31 Howell (2010), p. 100. Also Fontaine (2014), pp. 135, 147.
32 Kok (2017); Coquery-Vidrovitch (1997).
33 Kok (2017); Robertson (1988): 446.
34 Kok (2017); Sheldon (2017); Berger and White (2008); Mandala (1984): 142; Coquery-Vidrovitch (1997): ‘it was mainly women who farmed.’
35 Berger and White (2008), p. 6; Robertson (1988): ‘Sub-Saharan African women have borne and now bear the major social recognised responsibility for providing substance for themselves and their children.’
36 Austin (2016).
37 On the economic causes of polygamy, see Boserup (1970) and Becker (1981).
38 Robertson (1988): 441.
39 Coquery-Vidrovitch (1997): p. 10.
40 Robertson (1988).
41 Platteau (2014).
42 Robertson (1988).
43 Anderson (2007); Eswaran (2014), p. 224. On the causes of both, see Eswaran (2014), ch. 7.
44 Botticini and Siow (2003).
45 Rao (1993, 2007).
46 Wrigley and Schofield (1981); de Moor and van Zanden (2010); Clark (2007), table 4.2, p. 76.
47 Kok (2017).
48 For a discussion of child marriage in India, see Kok (2017). Some parts of Asia, such as in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, where the family system was less adverse to women's freedom, the age of marriage was higher than in India or China.
49 Wiesner-Hanks (2015), p. 148.
50 Ibid., pp. 103, 176, 199.
51 Ibid., pp. 105, 107. See Humphries and Weisdorf (2015) for more detail, which shows strong longer-term fluctuations.
52 Kok (2017).
53 Van den Heuvel (2007); de Moor and van Zanden (2010; Ogilvie (2011), pp. 91, 183, 187, 414; Howell (2010), pp. 100‒1; Fontaine (2014), pp. 134, 146.
54 Wiesner-Hanks (2015), p. 77.
55 Wiesner-Hanks (2015).
56 Ibid.
57 McClintock (1995); Morgan (2004); Campbell, Miers and Miller (2008); Hartman (2016).
58 Kok (2017).
59 Alesina and Giuliano (2010).
60 De Moor and van Zanden (2010).
61 Ogilvie and Carus (2014). Fontaine (2014) notes how women have historically relied more on informal markets due to discriminatory practices in those commonly used by men.
62 Dyer (2009), p. 218.
63 Foreman-Peck (2011); Bateman (2016e).
64 Bateman (2016c).
65 Hajnal (1982).
66 There has been some debate. See Dennison and Ogilvie (2014) and Carmichael et al. (2015).
67 White et al. (1988).
68 Tertilt (2005).
69 Humphries and Weisdorf (2015) have disputed the extent to which women's wages rose with the Black Death, but it is still likely that they were greatly in demand (perhaps more so).
70 De Moor and van Zanden (2010): 22.
71 Black, Grönqvist and Öckert (2017); Humphries (2012), Table 2. For modern-day evidence on the higher poverty rates for larger families: ‘Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD countries,’ OECD (2008), p. 138.
72 Humphries (2012), p. 22.
73 Also see Klemp and Weisdorf (2018).
74 De Moor and van Zanden (2010): 24.
75 Fontaine (2014), p. 150.
76 See McCloskey (2010) for a detailed discussion and critique.
77 Lambrecht (2013).
78 On sex as a powerful economic force, see Adshade (2013).
79 Laslett (1988).
80 Greif (1994, 2006); Alesina and Giuliano (2010, 2011).
81 Todd (1988, 2011).
82 Alesina and Giuliano
(2011) find that in the modern day, stronger kinship ties are associated with less political participation.
83 Eswaran (2014), pp. 322‒5.
84 Van Bavel and Rijpma (2015); Alesina and Giuliano (2010) note that preferences for redistribution are stronger amongst women.
85 Esping-Andersen (2000); Offer (1997); Alesina and Giuliano (2010).
86 Smith (1986), pp. 205‒6; Wrigley (1988), pp. 118‒22; Solar (1997). This view has been tempered by Hindle (2004), pp. 398‒405, 410.
87 Lambrecht (2013).
88 Alesina et al.(2015) find that stronger kinship ties are associated with lower mobility of labour (as the emotional costs of moving are greater), and with it there is a greater desire to regulate local labour markets.