606Chapter 30
1910 and 1950 Europe was devastated by multiple ca-
tastrophes—World War I, the Russian Revolution, the
Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War
II, the Holocaust—and European economies suffered
terribly. The internal peace of the cold war and the
economic miracle between 1950 and the Revolutions of
1989, however, overcame the catastrophes of the first
half of the century to build a stronger economy. Econo-
mists claim that the prosperity of 1990 rests on a
stronger economy than the prosperity of 1910 by
showing that the participation rate had grown, despite
the collapse of 1910–50, and by correlating participa-
tion with productivity.
This arcane tool of economic analysis is more inter-
esting to historians who ask “Who is participating in
the economy? Who is working and who is not?” Be-
tween 1870 and 1940, for example, age became a sig-
nificant factor in the changing participation rate.
Compulsory education laws subtracted millions of
teenagers from the labor force, thereby reducing the
participation rate. The economic role of older ages has
also affected the participation rate. In 1900 few pro-
grams guaranteed a paid retirement, so many people
remained in the labor force beyond age sixty-five,
thereby keeping the participation rate higher. Put dif-
ferently, the compulsory education laws and the wel-
fare programs of the twentieth century have sharply
changed the answer to the question “Who works?”
At the same time that the economic participation
rate was being reduced by new social attitudes toward
age, the labor movement succeeded in its long battle to
reduce the workweek. Full-time employment in 1900
typically meant a six-day, fifty-five-hour workweek;
many occupations still expected sixty to seventy-two
hours per week. When European countries began to
regulate the workweek, standards set in the 1920s were
usually close to a forty-eight-hour week; only during
the massive unemployment of the Great Depression of
the 1930s did countries start to adopt the century-old
labor dream of a forty-hour workweek. During the Eu-
ropean prosperity of the late twentieth century, workers
in many countries of the European Union (led by Bel-
gium and Sweden) obtained workweeks of thirty-five to
forty hours.
The twentieth-century labor movement also won
paid vacations. Norway introduced the first paid vaca-
tions, guaranteeing all workers two weeks by a 1919
law. Several other Western countries—including Britain
and France—adopted this concept in the 1930s. It be-
came the universal standard in postwar Europe as well
as the minimum standard, because France and the Scan-
dinavian countries increased paid vacations to three
weeks. After 1970 the same prosperity that allowed
workweeks of less than forty hours provided minimum
paid vacations of four weeks in EU countries, while the
most progressive granted five or six weeks.
The consequence of this century of transforming
traditional labor was to cut both its participation rate
and its productivity rate. Economic historians estimate
that the annual total number of hours worked by each
individual worker has been cut in half. Despite all the
changes that achieved this—won by the young, the el-
derly, and the labor movement—other factors were so
dramatic that the total participation rate and total pro-
ductivity increased. One final economic trend explains
this apparent paradox: the growing, and changing, em-
ployment of women.
Throughout modern history, working women have
been a large and essential part of the European econ-
omy, although not always in ways that were noted in
economic statistics. In the household economy of the
eighteenth century, women worked alongside men in
farms or shops. In the family wage economy of the in-
dustrial era, women entered the wage-earning labor
force and their numbers in economic statistics grew sig-
nificantly. At the start of the twentieth century, women
formed 30 percent to 35 percent of the salary and
wage-earning labor force in western Europe. Those per-
centages did not shift dramatically for most of the
twentieth century, although historical circumstances
sometimes caused noteworthy trends. For example,
much greater employment of women was evident dur-
ing both world wars and for brief postwar periods when
large numbers of men were lost. (In the USSR, the
death rate in World War II so reduced the postwar la-
bor pool that women remained employed at a high rate
for the entire next generation.) The employment of
women sometimes fell sharply as a consequence of con-
servative social policy based on the theory that women
belonged in the home; Mussolini, for example, man-
aged to reduce women’s share of jobs from 32 percent
in 1910 to 23 percent in 1930. Despite such secondary
trends, the foremost trend was that the employment of
women did not significantly change between 1910 and
1970 (see table 30.7). In the first two-thirds of the cen-
tury, it rose just 3 percent in Britain and 2 percent in
Sweden, while falling 3 percent in France and 6 percent
in Italy.
In the last third of the twentieth century, the em-
ployment of women in western Europe changed signifi-
cantly. Between 1970 and 1990 women went from 32
percent of the British labor force to 44 percent; that is,