Girls and their families in an era of economic change

Jane Humphries

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

Abstract: The paper uses autobiographical accounts by 227 working women alongside a larger sample of men's life stories to compare girls’ and boys’ experiences of first jobs, schooling and family life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It asks whether girls were disadvantaged in seizing the opportunities and fending off the threats to wellbeing occasioned by economic change. Girls were more likely than boys to experience sexual harassment and this constrained the ways in which they could earn a living and live their lives. Fathers as breadwinners merited respect and often affection, but it was mothers with whom girls identified.

JEL-codes: N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2020-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Continuity and Change, 1, December, 2020, 35(3), pp. 311 - 343. ISSN: 0268-4160

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/106702/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:106702

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager (lseresearchonline@lse.ac.uk).