'Bread and a Pennyworth of Treacle': Excess Female Mortality in England in the 1840s

Jane Humphries

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1991, vol. 15, issue 4, 451-73

Abstract: This paper documents and analyzes the geographical distribution of excess female mortality in certain age groups in early nineteenth-century England. Female mortality disadvantages in late childhood, youth and mid-life were not mechanically linked to the changing opportunities for women and girls to participate in the economy. Two differently hostile environments are identified. The first was dangerous to women and girls as weaker and ill-fed dependents. The second was hostile because it involved labor for which women were biologically and culturally unfitted and demanded that they combine this with the heavy duties of nineteenth-century motherhood and housework. Dependence sometimes had its benefits and productive labor sometimes its costs. Copyright 1991 by Oxford University Press.

Date: 1991
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