Occupational, Marital, and Life-Cycle Determinants of Women's Labor Force Participation in Mid Nineteenth-Century Rural France
利用1851年法国人口普查中关于妇女和儿童市场导向工作的独特数据，分析了法国北部农村女性劳动参与的决定因素，发现贫困是主要驱动力，而非市场吸引力。
Abstract The French population census of 1851 is unique among France's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century censuses, as it is the only census to provide information on the market-oriented work of women and children within and outside the home. This study utilizes that information to analyze the demographic, structural, and economic determinants of women's labor force participation in a sample of rural communes in northern France. The data reveal an industrious population in which two-thirds to three-quarters of women in farm families engaged in market-oriented work. The data suggest that women were pushed rather than pulled into the rural labor force, and that poverty was the primary factor driving rural women's participation. The census data throw statistical light on the labor market participation rates of women and children in a preindustrial setting and are likely to produce major revisions in understandings of productivity growth in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France.