The impact of demand for labour and economic structure on Dutch unmarried women’s labour force participation, 1812-1929

"Extensive research has demonstrated that female labour force participation (FLFP) in Western Europe decreased during the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period, in the Netherlands, FLFP was even lower than in surrounding countries such as England and Belgium. Until now, most scholars have argued that social norms were driving this development. This study argues that social norms were merely one side of the coin and it combines factors of supply as well as demand in a logistic regression based on nearly 2 million marriage records from the period 1812-1929. Our results show that sectoral shifts in the Dutch economy explain almost half of the decline of FLFP over the entire period. We exploit regional variation to demonstrate the importance of considering local labour markets when investigating FLFP. Furthermore, we support our results from the logistic regression with qualitative information from nineteenth-century labour surveys. As such, this research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods."