Careworn: The Economic History of Caring Labor
Economists ignore caring labor since most is provided unpaid. Disregard is unjust, theoretically indefensible, and probably misleading. Valuation requires estimates of time spent and the replacement or opportunity costs of that time. I use the maintenance costs of British workers, costs which cover both the material inputs into upkeep and the domestic services needed to turn commodities into livings, to isolate the costs of paid domestic labor. I then impute the value of unpaid domestic labor from these market equivalents, and aggregate across households without domestic servants. Historically, unpaid domestic labor represented c. 20 per cent of total income, a contribution that suggests the need to revise some standard narratives.
| Item Type | Dataset |
|---|---|
| Publisher | OpenICPSR |
| DOI | 10.3886/e199041 |
| Date made available | 16 March 2024 |
| Keywords | economic history, labor history, gender issues |
| Temporal coverage |
From To 1270 1870 |
| Geographic coverage | Britain |
| Resource language | Other |
| Departments | LSE |
Explore Further
- Humphries, J. (2024). Careworn: the economic history of caring labor. The Journal of Economic History, 84(2), 319 - 351. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050724000147 (Repository Output)
- Humphries, J. & Thomas, R. (2023). The best job in the world: breadwinning and the capture of household labor in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British coalmining. Feminist Economics, 29(1), 97 - 140. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2022.2128198 (Repository Output)