Women and Wages

It’s no surprise that women were limited on the type of work they could do in Early Modern Europe. As Wiesner-Hanks states, “Women rarely received formal training in a trade,” they were given an informal type of education if any, and “religious opinion and the language of laws and records made it difficult for women to even see themselves as members of a certain occupation” (103). But despite this, women still had a strong presence in the workforce. Though they couldn’t call themselves physicians or label their shops as apothecaries, this doesn’t mean that they weren’t used by their communities. In fact, from the study on the London labor market in 1700, statistics show that expanding economies largely depended on women, which is how the Industrious Revolution came to be (Wiesner-Hanks 134). It would be a disservice to our review of history to say that women mainly stayed at home during this time period.

However, the treatment of working women is not an entirely positive one. Wages, especially show themselves to be an area where women were (and are) discriminated against. For example, professionalization, a term that women were not allowed to use, allowed men to charge at least ten times what women could charge for essentially the same service (Wiesner-Hanks 103). Another reason often used to justify paying women less for the same task as man performed was “because they were either single and had only themselves to support or married and so were simply helping their husbands out” (Wiesner-Hanks 105). Despite this, however, many widowed women worked on these bad wages, to support their families. And in seasons when the husband didn’t gain wages, the family’s financial burdens were dependent on the year-round kind of products/services the wife provided (Wiesner-Hanks 107).

I think there is a bigger lesson that people today can learn from this: the lesson that women HAVE had a big impact in the workforce. They have accomplished great works under the pain of bad wages, supporting families at times when the man could not. They still do. So to think that women still get paid $0.77 to every man’s dollar is perplexing to me. Should we not learn from the past and realize that this is something to be fixed? Women have already proved that they can live on lower wages than men, but should they continue to still?