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"Wages United States History 19th century."
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Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800-2015
This article proposes explanations for the transformation of American families over the past two centuries. I describe the impact on families of the rise of male wage labor beginning in the nineteenth century and the rise of female wage labor in the twentieth century. I then examine the effects of decline in wage labor opportunities for young men and women during the past four decades. I present new estimates of a precipitous decline in the relative income of young men and assess its implications for the decline for marriage. Finally, I discuss explanations for the deterioration of economic opportunity and speculate on the impact of technological change on the future of work and families.
Journal Article
Organizing America
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers, political subversion, environmental destruction, and \"wage slavery.\" How did a nation committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power become transformed in one century?
Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry and privatizing the railroads. Despite resistance, the corporate form became the model for the next century. Bureaucratic structure spread to government and the nonprofits. Writing in the tradition of Max Weber, Perrow concludes that the driving force of our history is not technology, politics, or culture, but large, bureaucratic organizations.
Perrow, the author of award-winning books on organizations, employs his witty, trenchant, and graceful style here to maximum effect. Colorful vignettes abound: today's headlines echo past battles for unchecked organizational freedom; socially responsible alternatives that were tried are explored along with the historical contingencies that sent us down one road rather than another. No other book takes the role of organizations in America's development as seriously. The resultant insights presage a new historical genre.
eBook
Hirelings
InHirelings, Jennifer Dorsey recreates the social and economic milieu of Maryland's Eastern Shore at a time when black slavery and black freedom existed side by side. She follows a generation of manumitted African Americans and their freeborn children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, associations, and communities in the early nineteenth century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but before the American Revolution they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the Eastern Shore's economy and society, earning their livings as wage laborers while establishing thriving African American communities.
As free workers in a slave society, these African Americans contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters' authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited the needs of their households, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers as a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers' control. They demonstrated that independent and free African American communities could thrive on their own terms. In all of these actions the free black workers of the Eastern Shore played a pivotal role in ongoing debates about the merits of a free labor system.
eBook
Health and welfare during industrialization
In this unique anthology, Steckel and Floud coordinate ten essays that bring a new perspective to inquiry about standard of living in modern times. These papers are arranged for international comparison, and they individually examine evidence of health and welfare during and after industrialization in eight countries: the United States, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. The essays incorporate several indicators of quality of life, especially real per capita income and health, but also real wages, education, and inequality. And while the authors use traditional measures of health such as life expectancy and mortality rates, this volume stands alone in its extensive use of new \"anthropometric\" data—information about height, weight and body mass index that indicates changes in nations' well-being. Consequently, Health and Welfare during Industrialization signals a new direction in economic history, a broader and more thorough understanding of what constitutes standard of living.
eBook
Even More Is Required: Confronting the Teacher Pay Crisis in the United States
Low and stagnant teacher pay has been a perennial issue in the United States public school system since the early decades of the nineteenth century. Women teachers, then as now, confronted the issue head-on by organizing together. For example, women primary school teachers in Boston, Massachusetts successfully petitioned for more pay in 1835, but an emerging policy to pay women less ensured that such victories would be few and far between. Nevertheless, we can draw two critical lessons from these women teachers and their petition. First, a broader understanding of historical context and gendered narratives about labor is necessary to confront the teacher pay crisis today. Second, sharing teachers’ stories from the past now can help shape policy debates on teacher pay, turning a crisis into a new vision for the teaching profession.
Journal Article
The syntax of class
The Syntax of Classexplores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of wealth and power.
As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the \"dangerous classes.\" At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of \"home\" as a figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively classless nation. This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict.
This welcome book is a finely achieved study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.
eBook
THE DIASPORA OF AFRICANS LIBERATED FROM SLAVE SHIPS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
This article uses the extensive documentation of Africans liberated from slave vessels to explore issues of identity and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It tracks the size, origin, and movement of the Liberated African diaspora, offers a preliminary analysis of the ‘disposal’ of African recaptives in societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and assesses the opportunities Liberated Africans had in shaping their post-disembarkation experiences. While nearly all Liberated Africans were pulled at least partly into the Atlantic wage economy, the article concludes that recaptive communities in Freetown and its hinterland most closely met the aspirations of the Liberated Africans themselves while the fate of recaptives settled in the Americas paralleled those who were enslaved.
Journal Article
The marriage boom and marriage bust in the United States: An age-period-cohort analysis
In the 1950s and 1960s there was an unprecedented marriage boom in the United States. This was followed in the 1970s by a marriage bust. Some argue that both phenomena are cohort effects, while others argue that they are period effects. The study reported here tested the major period and cohort theories of the marriage boom and bust, by estimating an age-period-cohort model of first marriage for the years 1925-79 using census microdata. The results of the analysis indicate that the marriage boom was mostly a period effect, although there were also cohort influences. More specifically, the hypothesis that the marriage boom was mostly a response to rising wages is shown to be consistent with the data. However, much of the marriage bust can be accounted for by unidentified cohort influences, at least until 1980.
Journal Article
Neither So Low nor So Short: Wages and Heights in Bourbon Spanish America from an International Comparative Perspective
This paper offers new quantitative evidence on living standards in Bourbon America through a pioneering study of both wages and heights. Wages were not low, nor were heights short, by the international standards of the period. The living standards of Spanish Americans thus compare favourably with those of other regions of the world, including Europe. As in many parts of the West, one can observe a trend towards the deterioration of real wages in Spanish America at the end of the period. Our findings suggest that the ‘Great Divergence’ in living standards between Spanish America and the developed Western countries might have taken place mainly after independence and that currently available GDP per capita estimates might be too low. Este artículo ofrece nueva información cuantitativa sobre los niveles de vida en la América borbónica mediante el estudio de salarios y estaturas. Ni los salarios ni las estaturas eran bajas en términos comparativos internancinales, Europa incluida. Como en muchas partes del mundo occidental, los salarios reales tendieron a deteriorarse al final del período estudiado. Nuestros resultados sugieren que la ‘Gran Divergencia’ en niveles de vida entre los países occidentales desarrollados podría haber ocurrido principlamente después de la independencia y que los PIB per capita disponibles podrían estar infraestimados. Este artigo oferece novas evidencias quantitativas acerca dos níveis de qualidade de vida na América bourbônica a partir de um estudo pioneiro que abrange salários e estaturas. Pelos padrões internacionais da época, salários não eram baixos, tampouco as estaturas das pessoas. Os padrões de vida de hispano-americanos podem portanto ser comparados de maneira favorável a outras regiões do mundo, incluindo a Europa. Assim como em várias regiões do ocidente, pode-se observar uma tendência em direção à redução dos salários reais na América espanhola no final do período. Nossas conclusões sugerem que a ‘Grande Divergência’ nos padrões de vida entre a América espanhola e os países desenvolvidos ocidentais pode ter ocorrido principalmente após a independência e que as atuais estimativas de PIB per capita podem ser demasiado baixas.
Journal Article