This study investigates patterns of seasonal variation in hours worked by women employed in home-based industrial production in Sweden in the early 20th century. Previous studies often describe workers in this type of production as the most flexible segment of industrial workers, and highly dependent on seasonal fluctuations in supply and demand. However, few have studied this empirically. This study relies on data from interviews with home-based workers. Principal component analysis is used to identify seasonal patterns and OLS regressions to identify the factors driving these fluctuations. The results show surprisingly stable patterns in hours worked, most women worked 8–10 hours per day all year. Thus, while home-based workers were flexible in the sense that they all worked on piece-work contracts and provided their own means of production and place of work, their work was not essentially irregular or largely fluctuating by supply- or demand-driven seasonal variations.
AbbottE (1909) Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History. New York: Appleton.
2.
AhlbergerC (1988) Vävarfolket hemindustrin i Mark 1790–1850. Göteborg: Institutet för lokalhistorisk forskning.
3.
AlbrechtSL (1982) Industrial home work in the United States: Historical dimensions and contemporary perspective. Economic and Industrial Democracy3(4): 413–430.
4.
AllexandreM (1906) L’Industrie à domicile salariée. Université Caen.
5.
ÅmarkK (2005) Hundra år av välfärdspolitik välfärdsstatens framväxt i Norge och Sverige. Umeå: Boréa.
6.
ArgyleJBoothC (1892) Life and Labour of the People in London. London: Macmillan.
7.
BacchettaMEkkehardDBustamanteJP (2009) Globalization and Informal Jobs in Developing Countries: A Joint Study of the International Labour Office and the Secretariat of the World Trade Organization. Geneva: International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization.
8.
BarrientosS (2007) Gender, codes of conduct, and labor standards in global production systems. In: Van StaverenIElsonDGrownCCagatayN (eds) The Feminist Economics of Trade. London and New York: Routledge.
9.
BeanJS (2014) ‘To help keep the home going’: Female labour supply in interwar London. The Economic History Review68(2): 441–470.
10.
BeneríaL (2003) Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered. New York: Routledge.
11.
BeneríaL (2007) Gender and social construction of markets. In: Van StaverenIElsonDGrownCCagatayN (eds) The Feminist Economics of Trade. London and New York: Routledge.
12.
BergMHudsonP (2002) Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
13.
BorderíasC (2013) Revisiting women’s labor force participation in Catalonia (1920–36). Feminist Economics19(4): 224–242.
14.
BorisE (1994) Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
15.
CarrMChenMATateJ (2000) Globalization and home-based workers. Feminist Economics6(3): 123–142.
ChilosiDMurphyTEStuderR, et al. (2013) Europe’s many integrations: Geography and grain markets, 1620–1913. Explorations in Economic History50(1): 46–68.
18.
DaunJ (2016) Vägen till den moderna familjen: fruktsamhet i den växande industristaden Borås cirka 1830–1930. Göteborg: Institutionen för historiska studier, Göteborgs universitet.
19.
DeVaultIA (2013) Family wages: The roles of wives and mothers in U.S. working-class survival strategies, 1880–1930. Labor History54(1): 1–20.
20.
EdwardsLNField-HendreyE (2002) Home-based work and women’s labor force decisions. Journal of Labor Economics20(1): 170–200.
21.
EverittBLandauSLeeseM, et al. (2011) Cluster Analysis. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
22.
FieldAMilesJFieldZ (2012) Discovering Statistics Using R. London: Sage.
23.
FraundorfMN (1979) The labor force participation of turn-of-the-century married women. The Journal of Economic History39(2): 401–418.
24.
GoldinC (1979) Family strategies and the family economy in the late nineteenth century: The role of secondary workers. In: HershenbergT (ed.) Toward an Interdisciplinary History of the City. New York: Oxford University Press.
25.
GranthamG (2012) Occupational, marital, and life-cycle determinants of women’s labor force participation in mid nineteenth-century rural France. Feminist Economics18(4): 97–119.
26.
GreenNL (1997) Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
27.
HedenborgSWikanderU (2003) Makt och försörjning. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
28.
HenningMEnfloKAnderssonFNG (2011) Trends and cycles in regional economic growth: How spatial differences shaped the Swedish growth experience from 1860–2009. Explorations in Economic History48(4): 538–555.
29.
HorrellSHumphriesJ (1995) Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790–1865. The Economic History Review48(1): 89–117.
30.
HumphriesJSarasúaC (2012) Off the record: Reconstructing women’s labor force participation in the European past. Feminist Economics18(4): 39–67.
31.
IsacsonMMagnussonL (1983) Vägen till fabrikerna: industriell tradition och yrkeskunnande i Sverige under 1800-talet. Stockholm: Gidlund.
32.
KarlssonTLundhC (2015) The Gothenburg Population Panel 1915–1943: GOPP Version 6.0. Göteborg Papers in Economic History 18. Available at: lup.lub.lu.se/record/7870561 (accessed 9 June 2016).
33.
KochH (1905) Die deutsche Hausindustrie.
34.
Kommerskollegii (1912) Bidrag till Sveriges officiella statistik. D, Fabriker och handtverk år 1910. Stockholm: Nordstedt & Söner.
35.
KriedtePMedickHSchlumbohmJ (1981) Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
36.
LaneL (2004) Trying to Make a Living: Studies in the Economic Life of Women in Interwar Sweden. Meddelanden från Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen, Handelshögskolan vid Göteborgs universitet, 1403-2864; 90. Göteborg: Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen, Universitet.
37.
MagnussonL (1996) Sveriges ekonomiska historia. Stockholm: Tiden/Athena.
38.
MarxKBohmanI (1974) Kapitalet: kritik av den politiska ekonomin / Bok 1, Kapitalets produktionsprocess. Lund: Cavefors.
39.
NivoliAMAColomFPacchiarottiI, et al. (2013) Treatment strategies according to clinical features in a naturalistic cohort study of bipolar patients: A principal component analysis of lifetime pharmacological and biophysic treatment options. European Neuropsychopharmacology23(4): 263–275.
40.
OlssonK (2012) En västsvensk industrihistoria: tiden fram till 1950. Göteborg: Department of Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg.
41.
PioreMJ (1979) Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
42.
R Core Team (2013) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: www.R-project.org/.
43.
ReichMGordonDMEdwardsRC (1973) A theory of labor market segmentation. The American Economic Review63(2): 359–365.
44.
ReuschDBAlleyRBHewitsonBC (2005) Relative performance of self-organizing maps and principal component analysis in pattern extraction from synthetic climatological data. Polar Geography29(3): 188–212.
45.
RevelleW (2014) Psych: Procedures for Psychological, Psychometric, and Personality Research. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. Available at: CRAN.R-project.org/package=psych.
46.
SchönL (1979) Från hantverk till fabriksindustri svensk textiltillverkning 1820-1870. Arkiv avhandlingsserie, 0347-4909; 9. Lund: Arkiv för studier i arbetarrörelsens historia.
47.
Statistisk årsbok för Göteborg1921 (1923) Göteborg.
48.
SternerB (1973) Textil hemindustri i Sjuhäradsbygden under 1900-talets första hälft. Stockholm.
49.
Svensk hemindustri. D. 1, Utredningens huvudresultat (1917) Stockholm: Socialstyrelsen.
50.
Svensk hemindustri. D. 2, Monografier (1917) Stockholm: Socialstyrelsen.
51.
WohlinN (1909) Emigrationsutredningen. Bil. 9, Den jordbruksidkande befolkningen i Sverige 1751–1900: statistisk-demografisk studie på grundval af de svenska yrkesräkningarna. Stockholm: Nordiska bokh.
52.
Women’s Industrial Council (1908) Home Industries of Women in London: Report of an Inquiry. London: Women’s Industrial Council.
53.
Zucca MichelettoB (2013) Reconsidering women’s labor force participation rates in eighteenth-century Turin. Feminist Economics19(4): 200–223.
