27/02/2025 Jane Humphries – The Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Lecture

Date: 27/02/2025
Category: ,
Speaker: Jane Humphries
Institution: Trinity College Dublin
Format: In Person

 

Professor Jane Humphries will give the Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Lecture on Thursday 27th February 2025 at 17:00 in the Neill Lecture Theatre of the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin: ‘Caring about care: The economic history of caring labour’.

Abstract: Economists pay little attention to caring labour provided commercially and ignore it if unpaid.  Disregard is theoretically indefensible, unjust, ignores services that have significant value, and probably misleads accounts of income and growth.  In this lecture I will use some of my recently published research as well as new work to demonstrate the importance of care, particularly unpaid care.   I look at three kinds of caring work: domestic labour or housework; breastfeeding; and end of life care.   Following the conventional methodology, I infer the value of such work according to the costs/prices of contemporary market equivalents and relate aggregated values to estimates of national income.  Historically unpaid domestic labour represented some 20 per cent of the value of total output, while breastfeeding represented another 1-2 per cent, or even more depending on the choice of commercial substitutes.  While demonstrating care’s importance, a market equivalent valuation misses two important points. First, as care is sometimes exchanged for money and sometimes given for free, it is sometimes included in conventional estimates of output and sometimes not.   With no change in actual activities, these accounting shifts are spurious.  Bizarrely, national income would fall if a woman decided to breastfeed her baby!  Economic historians must ask whether such changes could have misled accounts of growth.   Second, unpaid care often provides effects beyond the individuals directly involved, generating externalities that are ignored by the market and so the ‘as if marketed’ imputation strategy.     Many of these externalities relate to health and welfare and so lead to questions about the adequacy of modern GDP and its historical equivalents as measures of wellbeing. To fully understand care’s importance, economic historians must extend their macro statistical scaffold to recognize activities beyond the measuring rod of the market. 

Please register your attendance here.

 

The Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Award is awarded annually by the Centre for Economics, Policy, and History (CEPH) to an economic historian who has made a major contribution to the discipline.

In accepting her award, Professor Humphries notes, ‘I am pleased and proud to receive the Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Award.  The medal, awarded by the Centre for Economics, Policy and History (CEPH) for major contributions to the discipline, is named in honour of Alice ‘Effie’ Murray (1877-1951), the first woman to receive a D.Sc. Econ. degree from the London School of Economics.  She was a member of a group of women economic historians including Ellen McArthur and Lilian Knowles, both of whom taught Effie, whose work deserves broader recognition.  My current research focuses on a different kind of work, mainly done by women, which is also undervalued: caring labour.  I look forward to presenting my public lecture at Trinity College Dublin, February 27th Caring about care: The economic history of caring labour.’

 

Biography

Professor Jane Humphries is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Oxford University, a Fellow of All Souls College, and Emeritus Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A distinguished economic historian, her research has transformed our understanding of labour markets, industrialization, and the roles of women and children in these fields. Her groundbreaking studies of wages, family incomes, and economic growth have earned numerous honours, including the Arthur H. Cole Prize, Ranki Prize, Royal Economic Society Prize, and she has earned honorary degrees from Uppsala, Sheffield, and Helsinki universities.

Beyond her scholarship, Professor Humphries has held leadership roles as President of the Economic History Society and the American Economic History Association and has served on editorial boards of top journals. A Fellow of the British Academy and Commander of the British Empire, she is a pioneer in feminist economic history and a champion for recognising women’s contributions to economic analysis. Her career exemplifies intellectual excellence and a commitment to advancing historical understanding.

 

Award

Professor Jane Humphries is world renowned for her contributions to our understanding of the role of women, child labour and family dynamics in economic development over the past millennium. In particular, her work emphasizes the importance of incorporating women’s and child labour into broader economic narratives. In this regard, she has made at least three major contributions to economic history.

First, her work has challenged traditional economic histories that have often overlooked the role of women in the economy. Her research highlights how women’s labour, both paid and unpaid, significantly contributed to household economies and broader economic growth, particularly in pre-industrial societies. For example, Professor Humphries has constructed wage series for women’s wages in England from 1260 to 1850 and has measured women’s labour force participation during European industrialisation.

Second, Professor Humphries has examined at length how the Industrial Revolution affected the labour market, gender roles, and family structures. Her work critically analyses how the Industrial Revolution resulted in women’s increased financial dependence on men and the rise of the male-breadwinner family.

Third, Professor Humphries has carefully documented how child labour rose during the Industrial Revolution. Her history from below of this dark side of the Industrial Revolution paints images of great suffering and stoicism on the part of working-class children. Her work put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into our understanding of the Industrial Revolution and those dark satanic mills.