Gender and Well-Being in Europe

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Lina Gálvez, Bernard Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317130239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book is the first of four books based on a series of symposia funded by COST, which is an intergovernmental framework for the promotion of European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research. It draws on both historical and contemporary European case-studies to offer a sophisticated account of the relationship between gender and well-being. The authors focus on key discussions of the changing conceptions of well-being from early twentieth century calculations of the relationship between income and the cost-of-living, to more recent critiques from feminist writers. Their fascinating answers allow them to significantly challenge the issue with the idea that well-being is not only associated with income or opulence but also relates to more abstract concepts including capabilities, freedom, and agency of different women and men and will be of considerable interest to economic and social historians, sociologists of health, gender, sexuality and economists.

Chapter 1
Gender and Well-Being from the Historical and Contemporary Perspective

Bernard Harris, Lina Gálvez and Helena Machado

As the Series Editors have already explained,1 this book is based on a selection of papers which were originally presented to the introductory symposium of COST Action A34: Gender and well-being: work, family and public policies. All the papers have been extensively revised in light of the discussions which took place at the symposium and subsequent comments. One of the main features of COST Action A34 has been the broad range of social-science disciplines which have been represented within it and we hope that this interdisciplinarity has also been reflected in the construction of this volume. Although many of our contributors would describe themselves as either economists or as economic and social historians, the volume also includes contributions from individuals whose own disciplinary backgrounds include medicine, anthropology and sociology.

The interdisciplinary nature of the volume is also reflected in the organisation of this introductory chapter. In Part I, we begin by looking at the ways in which the relationship between gender and well-being has been studied by economic and social historians, with particular reference to the long-running debate over the development of the ‘standard of living’ during the course of the British industrial revolution. We then consider the ways in which new ideas about the conceptualisation and measurement of well-being in the disciplines of economics and sociology have been reflected in the development of such concepts as ‘relative poverty’, ‘social exclusion’ and ‘human development’, before moving on to explore the emergence of alternative concepts of well-being in the more recent past.

Industrialisation and the Standard of Living

As the previous section has already suggested, the relationship between welfare, well-being and the standard of living constitutes one of the most important and long-running questions in the field of economic history. During the first half of the twentieth century, historians of Britain’s industrial revolution devoted considerable attention to the calculation of changes in real wages during the period between circa 1770 and 1850, in the belief that even if wages were not exactly synonymous with the ‘standard of living’, they were nevertheless a primary determinant of it (see, e.g., Clapham 1926; Gilboy 1936). This approach has continued to play a very important role in the subsequent development of the discipline, as more recent work by Feinstein (1998), Clark (2001; 2007) and Allen (2001) amply demonstrates.

However, even though it would obviously be foolish to ignore the extent to which incomes and wages are related to well-being, it is also important to recognise their limitations as measures of well-being. Even if we were to confine our attention to the individual wage-earner, it would still be necessary to take account of a wide range of other factors including (but certainly not limited to) such issues as the nature and quantity of the work needed to obtain an individual income, the costs associated with the acquisition of the skills necessary to acquire such work, the conditions under which it is undertaken, and the goods and services which can be acquired as a result of it. However, even this would not allow us to take a full account of the relationship between individual wages rates and the well-being of society as a whole. As Hans-Joachim Voth (2003: 274) has argued:

To the extent that wages rise because they compensate for urban disamenities or the riskiness of particular kinds of work, measuring income may seriously overstate gains in the standard of living. Also, while income at low levels of development is essential for purchasing additional food, housing or health care, it is also often associated with the purchase of products that harm physical well-being, such as alcohol and tobacco.

Several writers have also criticised the traditional approach to the measurement of living standards from a more explicitly feminist standpoint. As Horrell and Humphries (1995a; 1995b) have argued, we know rather more about changes in male wage rates than we do about either the wages or the labour force participation rates of women and children, and this has often led historians to neglect the contribution which these individuals might also have made to the aggregate income of the household as a whole (see also Camps-Cura 1998; Sarasúa 1998). It is also important to recognise the importance of non-monetary contributions to household well-being. Even when women and older children were not earning money, they were nevertheless making a vital contribution to the well-being of their own and other people’s households through the provision of a wide range of different forms of care and support (Chinn 1988; Ross 1993).

Many writers have also explored the question of inequalities in the distribution of resources within the household. At the beginning of the 1860s, the government inspector, Dr Edward Smith, reported that male labourers in many parts of rural England ‘[eat] meat or bacon almost daily’, whilst their wives and children ‘may eat it but once a week’ (qu. Harris 1998: 418), and this pattern was found in many other parts of Europe during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Germany, Stephan Klasen (1998: 446) has pointed out that ‘several authors discuss contemporary reports about women receiving lowest priority in food allocation, with the survival of women often being considered less important than the survival and well-being of livestock’. In Spain, Borderias, Pérez-Fuentes and Sarasúa (2007: 8) found that ‘although it is extremely difficult to quantify, evidence from travellers, reformers’ reports and doctors clearly [shows] that … women eat [smaller] quantities of food, of poorer quality, lower price, [and] in different places’.

Although much of this literature is based on documented evidence from historical sources, it also draws directly on accounts from contemporary developing countries. In a famous article, originally published in the New York Review of Books, Amartya Sen (1990) alleged that more than one hundred million women were ‘missing’ from the world’s population as a result of sex-specific inequalities in the distribution of resources. It is difficult, and possibly even misleading, to attempt to draw a direct link between the experience of women and girls in today’s developing countries with those of women and girls in the European past, but it is clear that both girls and women suffered different forms of discrimination which had a direct bearing on various aspects of their well-being (see also Klasen and Wink 2002; 2003; Harris 2008).

Feminist researchers have also raised questions about what might be meant, in the broadest sense, by terms such as ‘living standards’ and ‘well-being’. As Sen (1987: 1) himself observed:

the idea of [the standard of living] is full of contrasts, conflicts and even contradictions … You could be well-off without being well. You could be well, without being able to live the life you wanted. You could have got the life you wanted, without being happy. You could be happy, without much freedom. You could have a good deal of freedom, without achieving much. We can go on.

These arguments are as relevant to our understanding of the lives of people in the past as they are to Sen’s own aim of understanding the lives of people today.

During the last three decades, economic historians have utilised a range of measures which have been designed to reflect a broader conception of the nature of well-being. One such approach, inspired by the work of Nordhaus and Tobin (1973) and pioneered among economic historians by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, is to attempt to estimate the extent of the ‘urban disamenities’ associated with industrialisation by adjusting conventional measures of the standard of living to take account of changes in infant mortality and urban density (Williamson 1981; Lindert and Williamson 1983). A second approach involves the search for an alternative index of well-being which is capable of incorporating all the aspects associated with the ‘quality of life’ in a single measure. In 1984, Roderick Floud suggested that the average height of a population might represent one such measure because it ‘already include[s] the effects of environmental or exogenous influences on welfare which are not included within conventional measures of income’ and is therefore ‘much closer to what we think of as welfare or the standard of living than artificial constructs such as national income per capita or the real wage’ (1984: 19–20). However, he also conceded that it was much more difficult to use height as a measure of individual well-being and that it was extremely difficult to isolate any single factor which might influence the growth rate of children at any particular age (Ibid: 22).

In more recent years, a number of authors have sought to develop a third approach, based on the methodology associated with the construction of the United Nations’ Human Development Index. This index, which is directly related to Sen’s original work, attempts to summarise the welfare of different populations by combining information about national income (using the logarithm of gross domestic product per head), literacy and expectation of life at birth (Steckel and Floud 1997: 11). In addition to this, efforts have also been made to extend the ‘conventional’ Human Development Index to take account of other factors, such as civil and political freedom and democratic accountability (Dasgupta and Weale 1992). Crafts (1997: 634) concluded that when all these factors were taken into account:

the correlation between real GDP per person and measures of the quality of life [in mid-nineteenth century Britain] seems to be weaker than for recent times. This suggests that an approach … based on capabilities and well-being may be even more important for economic historians than for contemporary development economists.

Poverty and Social Exclusion: The Absence of Well-Being

While historians are interested in measuring changes in the standard of living over time, economists and sociologists have often been more concerned about identifying sections of the population whose standard of living falls below minimum accepted levels and to compare differences in living standards across populations. However, although many of these investigations are primarily concerned with the identification of the levels of income needed to lift individuals out of poverty, they are also directly connected to broader questions about the definition of well-being.

In Britain, one of the earliest attempts to measure the incidence of poverty ‘scientifically’ was undertaken by the chocolate manufacturer, Seebohm Rowntree, in his home city of York, in northern England, in 1899. Rowntree tried to estimate the number of people living in what he called ‘primary poverty’ by comparing the normal weekly income of each household with the cost of those items which he regarded as necessary for the maintenance of ‘merely physical efficiency’. He also used the term ‘secondary poverty’ to describe those households which displayed signs of ‘obvious want and squalor’ even though their incomes were theoretically sufficient to lift them above the ‘poverty line’ (Rowntree 1902: x, 296–8). At the time of publication, Rowntree’s attempt to estimate the overall extent of poverty (including both primary poverty and secondary poverty) on observational or impressionistic grounds was strongly criticised, and this led him to focus most of the energy he devoted to the study of poverty in subsequent surveys on the application and development of the ‘primary poverty’ line (Harris 2000: 72).

In order to estimate the number of families in primary poverty, Rowntree needed to be able to identify those goods which were deemed necessary for the maintenance of ‘merely physical efficiency’. When he conducted his initial survey, he divided these goods into four main areas – food, fuel, clothing and rent. However, because he recognised that there was a difference between the concept of a poverty line and the experience of poverty, he also attempted to modify this poverty line in order to take account of the kinds of expenditure which were associated with living a ‘normal’ life in the society of his day. This meant that when he published his second survey of York in 1941, he based his findings on a revised list of ‘essential’ items, derived from his studies of the ‘human needs of labour’ in 1918 and 1937. This list included a number of additional items, including expenditure on newspapers, incidental travel, recreation, children’s presents, beer and tobacco, subscriptions to religious organisations and membership of sickness and burial clubs, stamps, writing-materials, hair-cutting, and drugs (Harris 2000: 71–5).

As this list suggests, Rowntree’s conception of the nature of poverty extended well beyond the concept of subsistence, but he was reluctant to go further and acknowledge that one of the logical corollaries of the concept of human needs was that the meaning of poverty was also likely to change over time, and this was the major difference between his conception of poverty and the conception articulated by the leading British sociologist, Peter Townsend, at the beginning of the 1960s (see Harris 2000: 75). Townsend (1962: 210) went much further than Rowntree in arguing that ‘both “poverty” and “subsistence” can only be defined in relation to the material and emotional resources available at a particular time to the members either of a particular society or different societies’. In his landmark study of Poverty in the United Kingdom he expressed this idea in the following terms:

Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged and approved, in the societies to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities (1979: 31).

Townsend’s idea of relative poverty is arguably the most important conceptual contribution to British empirical social research in the postwar period. It influenced a generation of poverty studies in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Mack and Lansley 1985; Gordon and Pantazis 1997), and is closely related to the concept of ‘social exclusion’, which has played an increasingly important part in the development of European social policies since the 1970s (see, e.g., Atkinson and Davoudi 2000). However, as several authors have pointed out, the concept of social exclusion is also more wide-ranging than the concept of poverty, because it recognises that individuals may be excluded from the normal activities of their society by factors which are not, in themselves, directly or exclusively associated with the lack of material resources (see, e.g., Barata 2000; Sen 2007). This is also reflected in the Council of the European Union’s (2004: 9) definition of social exclusion, which reads as follows:

Social exclusion is a process whereby certain individuals are pushed to the edge of society and prevented from participating fully by virtue of their poverty, or lack of basic competencies and lifelong learning opportunities, or as a result of discrimination. This distances them from job, income and education opportunities as well as social and community networks and activities. They have little access to power and decision-making bodies and thus often feel powerless and unable to take control over the decisions that affect their day to day lives.

From the point of view of this volume, the concept of social exclusion is particularly important because of the extent to which it recognises that gender itself can be a cause of exclusion from ‘normal’ social life. This is only partly related to the fact that women often face a higher risk of poverty as a result of differences in employment rates, pay and lifetime earnings. As the European Commission’s Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion and Employment has recently concluded, ‘there are [also] gender differences in how men and women experience the stresses and social isolation of life on a low income, as well as gender differences in health and life-expectancy, the experience of crime, and homelessness’ (Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion and Employment 2006: 7).

Development and Well-Being

As the previous section has demonstrated, many sociologists and social investigators h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Gender and Well-Being from the Historical and Contemporary Perspective
• PART I GENDER AND WELL-BEING IN THE EUROPEAN PAST
• PART II CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER AND WELL-BEING
• Index