Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: David Meredith
Author-Workplace-Name: Faculty of History, University of Oxford
X-Author-Email:
Author-Name: Deborah Oxley
Author-Workplace-Name: Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Author-Email:deborah.oxley@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
Title: Blood and Bone: Body Mass, Gender and Health Inequality in 19th Century British Families
Abstract: In 2009, Horrell, Meredith and Oxley used trends in body mass to argue that poor
London women in the later 19th century suffered declining access to household
resources over their lifetimes. The authors evaluated competing models of household
behaviour, rejected the unitary model of equal distribution throughout the household,
saw some support for a safety-first model, but on the whole concluded that resources
were allocated in accordance with bargaining power linked to the economic worth of
family members. As (particularly married) women's labour-force participation fell, so
too did their share of the food diminish, and with this they lost weight. This unequal
distribution was supported by a moral economy of the family: a set of shared values
about obligations and entitlements which protected earners and prioritized the needs
of children secured by maternal sacrifice. The current paper explores further the role
of power in the family. The contention of a bargaining household is supported
through a very different but contemporaneous case study: the modern industrial town
of Paisley. The paper juxtaposes a service economy (Wandsworth near London) with
a modern manufacturing sector (Paisley near Glasgow) in order to contrast how
economic form and opportunities in the market sector shaped relations and outcomes
in the household sector. Again, our measure is lifetime nutrition and our data are
drawn from prisons. We find that families bargained over the allocation of resources;
that bargaining position was heavily influenced by economic value, mediated by
maternal sacrifice; that this was an earner bias rather than a gender bias; and that new
industrial work for women and children supported a more egalitarian distribution that
improved everyone's health status via superior heights and heavier weights. It is a tale
of two cities, of blood and bone, of flesh and families.
X-Classification-JEL: 
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Length: 40 pages
Creation-Date: 2013-09-13
Number: _118
File-URL: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/12885/Meredith%20118.pdf

File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_118