Women's Wages

Smart, William, 1853-1915Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.7

Word count: 45K words
Chapters: 5

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Women's Wages by William SmartAuthor: Smart, William, 1853-1915,Language: English, Class: HD: Social sciences: Economic history and conditions, Production, Release Date: Sep 2, 2016

Editor's review

This book is a specialized discussion of women's wages by the British economist William Smart, an early work at the intersection of economics and social history. Its value lies not in providing the latest current data but in showing how scholars from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century understood women's labor remuneration, occupational division, and gender differences, offering a historical reference for today's discussions of equal pay and women's labor participation rates. Smart's writing carries the economic analysis framework of his time, allowing readers to observe how wage theory was applied to the specific subject of women's labor and to see typical contemporary social views on women's employment. The book is not long, and its lines of argument are relatively concentrated, making it suitable as supplementary reading for courses in the history of economic thought or gender studies, as well as for readers interested in the history of labor economics to browse at leisure. When reading, one should note its historical limitations and not apply its judgments directly to the contemporary labor market.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Scholars and students studying the history of labor economics and wage theory
Readers concerned with gender and labor issues who need a historical perspective
Instructors seeking topical material for courses on the history of economic thought
General readers interested in the social conditions of the late nineteenth century

Not a good fit for

Readers seeking the latest contemporary data on women's wages
Readers needing systematic econometric analysis or empirical research methods
Practitioners expecting actionable policy recommendations

Reading tips

Begin with the introduction or opening chapters to grasp the author's central questions and analytical framework.
Mark time-bound judgments as you read and consider them against contemporary research.
Read alongside general histories of labor economics to fill in the broader context.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Are the data and conclusions in this book still applicable today?

The specific data and some judgments bear clear marks of their era and should not be applied directly to analyzing contemporary labor markets. Their main value lies in history and intellectual history—helping readers understand how early economics discussed women's wages—rather than in providing currently usable statistical conclusions.

Can readers without an economics background understand it?

The argument is primarily prose-based, and the terminology is not especially dense, so readers with basic reading ability can work through it. If concepts such as wage theory or marginal productivity are unfamiliar, skimming an introductory book on the history of economics first will make the reading smoother.

Is this the original English edition, and how demanding is the reading?

The book is an English work, drawn from the public-domain text on Project Gutenberg. The English is at the usual level of modern academic prose: sentences tend to be long, but the vocabulary is not obscure. Non-native readers can read slowly with a dictionary, focusing on grasping the argument's structure rather than parsing every word.

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About the author

Smart, William, 1853-1915 Author · British · 1853–1915

William Smart (1853–1915) was a British economic historian. Public information on his full name and life is limited, and his scholarly identity is known mainly from bibliographic records in the history of economics. One work by him is held in this collection, Women's Wages, which examines the wages of working women in nineteenth-century Britain and relates wage levels to economic conditions such as employment structure and living costs; it belongs to empirical writing at the intersection of economic history and labour questions. Smart's prose emphasizes the ordering of historical facts and data rather than abstract argument, and his plain, restrained account offers chronicle-style material useful to later research on women's pay in the nineteenth century. He is also known for a chronicle of nineteenth-century economic history, indicating that his scholarly focus lay in recording and organizing British economic history of that century.