Economic Change and Sex Discrimination in the Early English Cotton Factories
38 Pages Posted: 30 Aug 2000
Date Written: March 1994
Abstract
This paper considers sex discrimination in the early English cotton factories. Intrinsic differences between men and women offer a less compelling explanation for sex discrimination than much of the literature suggests. A labor sorting model offers an alternative explanation of how discrimination could be transmitted from established labor markets to the new factory labor market. While the relevance of this model to the early factory workforce has not been recognized in the literature, the historical evidence indicates that it might provide an economic rationale for discrimination between men and women in the early English cotton factories.
JEL Classification: N330, J160, O150
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation