Forgotten family: the influence of women and children on the nexus of wage earning and demographic change in England, 1260–1860

Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: E. A. Wrigley identified the responsiveness of nuptiality and marital fertility to changes in male wages. Others have theorized the importance of women's decision‐making in the timing of marriage, but without much empirical evidence. Combining new long‐run series of annual wages for men, for married and single women, and for children with existing demographic data, the influence of women and children's remuneration on household formation is investigated. Women played a key role in the functioning of early modern preventive checks. High wages encouraged single women to delay marriage, reducing marital fertility. This counterbalanced the encouragement of nuptiality stimulated by high male earnings, which helped balance population and economic growth. Juvenile earnings had little influence on family formation, challenging links suggested in accounts of protoindustrialization or proletarianization. Demographic evidence suggests that economic circumstances contributed to the timing of medieval marriage, but poverty more often than prosperity prompted celibacy.

Keywords: work and pay; Britain; long-run; marriage patterns; fertility decisions; feminist economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2024-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-gro and nep-his
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Published in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1, September, 2024, 54(3), pp. 529 – 558. ISSN: 1082-9636

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