Is Equal Pay Worth It? Beatrice Potter Webb’s, Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s and Eleanor Rathbone’s changing arguments. Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne Introduction1 In February 1918, some British women over 30 gained the right to vote. This political move has been interpreted by many as a reward for women’s efforts during Wold War I.2 In August of the same year, female tramway and bus conductors in London led a successful strike against unequal war bonuses, claiming the same increase of five shillings a week as their male colleagues. The multiplication of “equal pay strikes” led the War Cabinet to set up a committee to examine the “problem” that “women in industry” constituted; the ‘Atkin Committee’ was appointed in September 1918 to examine the relations between men’s and women’s wages in industry. It presented its report the next year. Part of the official inquiry was to determine whether women received a man’s rate when occupying a “man’s job” following the 1915 “Treasury Agreement” with the Trade Unions; and if not, why? The formula “equal pay for equal work” refers to fair conditions of work either being equal (hour or piece) rates or equal scales of payment for men and women.3 In its historical scope, the formula refers to a burning controversy “which touches not only the pocket but the home” (Edgeworth, 1922a, 431). Can women perform the same job as men in time of emergency? Does not equal pay and women’s work destroy what was considered one of the main bases of Victorian society—the differentiation of the sexes (Vaid 1985)? Should women be paid the men’s rate when they are supposedly not supporting a family? During the first world war, these issues became framed as a question of national (and imperial) survival. 1 I would like to thank Kirsten Madden for asking me to write this chapter. François Allisson, Maria Bach, Nicolas Chachereau, Béatrice Cherrier, Harro Maas, Keith Tribe, Armelle Weil and the members of the Centre Walras-Pareto helped me considerably to improve this work. All errors remain mine. 2 Only women over 30 who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property or graduates from British Universities were granted the right to vote by the Representation of the People Act. The Act also extended the franchise by almost 6 million men, especially those men who lost their right during the war. 3 While more general, the formulation is used almost exclusively in reference to gender discrimination at the time. The debate is also referred to as the ‘comparable worth controversy’. 1 Equal pay had been at the core of many political and intellectual disputes since the mid-19th century. The gradual development of labour legislation and the issue of equal pay in the growing Civil Services administration made it even more burning. Why women were paid less was also a theoretical conundrum for economists, and crystalized methodological debates on the status of empirical inquiry. The rise of the marginalist theory of labour productivity has been far from a unified and linear process. The debates on women’s wages encapsulate the difficult transition from a logic of subsistence to a logic of production, a transition from a theoretically-based discipline to an observational one. The gallery of the “facts” on women’s work—gathering data through large scale surveys in the grey zone between social work and the emerging discipline of sociology—were often opposed to the promotion of traditional moral values.4 Though absent from textbooks and Principles and despite the lack of reliable statistics, unpacking the economic status of women resulted in a flow of articles, reviews, and comments in academic journals (Groenewegen 1994). The scholarly, intellectual, public and political debate over equal pay was, if not dominated, at least shaped by women’s contributions. This chapter concentrates on the arguments of three major contributors: Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943), Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) and Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946). They were no Oxbridge armchair economists, yet their positions became pre-eminent in the public sphere and in academic debates, in journal publications and in the press, in intellectual circles and parliamentary discussions. In 1915, Beatrice Webb signed a “Women’s Appeal to Women” to ask for “equal conditions and equal wages for the same work” (War Emergency Workers’ National Committee 1915). That same year, Millicent Garrett Fawcett explained that due to the dramatic increase in women’s productivity which WWI helped to “discover,” women merit equal pay (Fawcett 1917). In 1918, the Family Endowment Committee led by Eleanor Rathbone issued a pamphlet to celebrate the death of the ‘family wage’ as a men-only right.5 My purpose is to outline the personal and intellectual trajectories that led these three major public intellectuals to support equal pay at the end of the war. In doing so, I hope to challenge the tendency to isolate the internal coherence of texts rather than waive together different sources to explore the dynamics of individuals’ thoughts. That they were women 4 If some authors, e.g. A. Marshall and F. Y. Edgeworth, were arguing for the social necessity of “economic chivalry”, the question was increasingly discussed beyond moral arguments; especially within Section F (Statistics and Economic Science) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which funded two major series of works on the issue in 1901-1903 and in 1916-1918 (Howarth 1922, 272-273). 5 The ‘family wage’ is a fiction based on a two-parents, three-children family primarily dependent on the father’s wage to survive. For a history, see Clark 2000. 2 bears to some extent a relation to the fact they work on “women’s problems”.6 But it does not explain their different and changing argumentative strands. For this apparent consensus on equal pay is underpinned by altogether different intellectual, social and political arguments and public images. In the public eye, Fawcett, Webb and Rathbone became epitomes of different political figures: the liberal feminist, the socialist “feminist”, and the new or “welfare feminist.” 7 My contribution is focused on the dialogue between the intellectuals; on their ambiguities, unease and changes of mind regarding the under-researched problem of equal pay in history of economic thought.8 Remarkably, Webb, Fawcett and Rathbone had all initially exhibited a staunch pre-war opposition to the “equal pay for equal work” principle, here too for very different reasons. Webb thought equal pay as a threat to the standard of living of the working class—a standard based primarily on the wage of male breadwinners. Fawcett entered the equal pay discussion from a classical liberal point of view, favouring unrestricted competition on the labour market. She initially opposed equal pay because she thought women would lose the competition game due to their lack of training and education. In the early 1900s, Rathbone saw the formula as a “trap” set by the Trade Unions movement to decrease women’s employment. How did then these three intellectuals eventually find themselves defending the same “erroneous” (Fawcett 1892, 176), “ambiguous” (Webb 1919, 223), or “vague and ill- defined” (Rathbone 1917, 58) formula of “equal pay for equal work” at the end of the war? Unpacking the heterogeneous trajectories which lay beneath my protagonists’ common social background—the three women came from Victorian middle-upper class families with high intellectual and political capital—will allow me to highlight how personal motives, political commitments, epistemic stances and intellectual constructions combined into positions that evolved in reaction to events. I concentrate on their public conversation. If the three intellectuals knew each other and met several times, their “dialogue” is explored through exchanges within the Press, academic journals, and reports. 6 Family relations also shed some light on why many men decided to work on the ‘woman question’. On Sidgwick, Mill and (Henry) Fawcett, see Caine (1994). On Edgeworth, see Chassonnery-Zaïgouche and Cot (2014). 7 The word feminism was first used in France in the 1830s and spread in the UK in the 1900s. Webb never identifies herself as a feminist. Fawcett used the term suffragist or “women’s movement”. Rathbone identified to “new feminism”. 8 Two exceptions are Henderson (1992) and Pujol (1992). 3 First, I briefly present biographical elements to understand from where Fawcett, Webb and Rathbone entered the debate. I then discuss the early positions of Fawcett and Webb in the 1890s as a frontal opposition of two sets of general principles, fabianism and classical liberalism. In the third section, I show how changes occurring before the War served as the catalyst of new arguments which challenged the ‘family wage’. Section 4 analyses the period during and after WWI and the emerging fragile consensus in favour of “equal pay for equal work” principle. Section 1. Three Public Intellectuals Fawcett, Webb and Rathbone entered this debate from different foundational experiences, but not from different milieus.9 Their eminent families included a wealth of successful business leaders, members of parliament, and philanthropists whose commitment were fuelled by Unitarian spirituality and Liberal politics for the Rathbones, utilitarianism and a Tory sensibility for the Potters, conservative turned liberal for the Garretts. If they have in common a childhood in a mansion and a difficult relationship to their mothers, they also reflect in their writings a very similar heroic representation of their fathers, successful Victorian businessmen supporting the emancipatory aspirations of their daughters.10 Despite their shared Victorian middle-upper class background, the three women had entirely different early intellectual experiences and contrasting domestic environments. Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) is remembered for her early commitment to “the Cause”—the campaign for the enfranchisement of women—and as leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) between 1897 and 1914.