ABSTRACT
When Marshall’s Principles of Economics first appeared in 1890, one perceptive reviewer noted that its rich contents among other things pinpointed the case for women staying at home.2 That case made its first appearance in Book II, dealing with ‘some fundamental notions’, in the chapter devoted to defining ‘necessities’, with special reference to ‘the efficiency of an ordinary agricultural or of an unskilled town labourer’, along with a ‘well-drained dwelling with several rooms, warm clothing, with some changes of underclothing, pure water, a plentiful supply of cereal food, with a moderate allowance of meat and milk, and a little tea, &c, some education and some recreation’. Marshall lastly listed among the necessities of the labourer, ‘sufficient freedom for his wife from other work to enable her to perform properly her maternal and her household duties’. If deprived of any of these things, the efficiency of the labourer suffered in the same way as that of a horse ‘not properly tended’, or a steam engine with ‘an inadequate supply of coal’ (Marshall 1890: 123; 1920: 69-70). Clearly an aspect of the quality of labour supply, Marshall pursued the matter further under that heading. After approvingly quoting Roscher’s finding that the Jewish population of Prussia had increased faster than the Christian, though its birth-rate had been lower, because ‘Jewish mothers seldom go away from their homes to work’, Marshall commented on the fiscal illusion inherent in families’ thinking and acting ‘as though the family income was increased by all that the mother earns when she goes out to work’. Marshall’s explanation was as follows:
A little consideration would often show that the things she can buy with her earnings are of far less importance for the health and happiness of the family than the mere material services she could have rendered them if she had stayed at home, to say nothing of her moral influence in educating the children, in keeping the household in harmony and making it possible for her husband to be cheered and soothed in his evenings at home. This fact is getting to be understood by the better class of artisans and their wives; and there are not now very many mothers with young families at work in English and American factories.
