Ivy Pinchbeck, (9 April 1898 – 10 May 1982) was a British

economic An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with th ...

and

social historian Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

, specialising in the history of women. Her book of 1930,''Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750 – 1850'' was a pioneering effort in women's history, and highly influential in the next half-century. She concluded that women overall gained more than they lost from the Industrial Revolution, as compared to the dangers and unsanitary and harsh working conditions of the previous era.

Life

Pinchbeck studied at University of Nottingham, graduating B.A. in 1920; at

London School of Economics , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 milli ...

, M.A., 1927 and Ph.D., 1930. She taught in the Department of Sociology, Social Studies and Economics at Bedford College, University of London from 1929 to 1961. In her classic work, ''Women workers and the industrial revolution, 1750–1850'', based on her Ph.D. thesis, Pinchbeck argued that in the long run, the

Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...

increased women's employment opportunities, was beneficial to women's social and economic position and therefore was a liberating factor. This conclusion was in contrast to the earlier view of Alice Clark, who believed that industrial capitalism was responsible for the exclusion of women from paid employment, and thus played a crucial role in modern women's oppression. Pinchbeck's two-volume ''Children in English Society'', co-authored with the help of Margaret Hewitt, a former student, described the conditions of poor and orphaned children, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and discussed how legislative and voluntary responses to them had changed over the period.

References

Bibliography

*I. Pinchbeck, ''Women workers and the industrial revolution, 1750-1850'' (1930) *I. Pinchbeck, ‘Social Attitudes to the Problem of Illegitimacy’ in ''British Journal of Sociology'', 5 (Dec,1954), pp. 309–323 *I. Pinchbeck, ‘State and the Child in Sixteenth-Century England’ in ''British Journal of Sociology'', 7 (Dec,56), pp. 273–285 and 8 (Mar,57), pp. 59–74 *I. Pinchbeck with M. Hewitt, ''Children in English Society. 2 vols'' ( 1969)

Life

References

Bibliography

Further reading