Greater land size but also inequality? English parliamentary enclosure and the gender pay gap in agriculture 1750-1850

Belonging to a strand of literature on women’s status during the Industrial Revolution, this project empirically investigates how parliamentary enclosure affected the English gender pay gap in agriculture in 1750-1850. Drawing data on women's and men’s pay in agriculture from credible secondary sources, it examines the causal relationship between the gender pay ratio and changes in the proportion of land enclosed. Overall, parliamentary enclosure negatively impacted the demand for female labour and thus women’s relative pay in agriculture. Women’s work in dairy and arable farming was disrupted by farmers’ preferences for grain growing and seasonal male labour force employed in large enclosed farms. The enclosure of common land also eroded an important source of women’s income. This is particularly true for arable counties in the southeast. In some places, such as counties that underwent less intense wartime enclosure and high-wage northern counties, enclosure possibly revived some demand for female labour on the newly enclosed farms and helped narrow the gender pay gap after the French Wars. Nevertheless, alternative explanations do exist, such as changes in crop combinations. These potential positive effects were too small to reverse the general downward trend of the gender pay ratio and women’s, especially wives’ increasing dependence on the male breadwinner. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the negative effects were also small in magnitude. This suggests the main driver of a widened gender pay gap in agriculture lay in other contemporaneous socioeconomic changes.