How have markets and trade shaped women's lives historically?

Consider what daily life looked like for a woman in 1800. Several hours of every day went toward tasks that are now automated: hauling water, grinding grain, washing clothes. Childbirth was dangerous. In pre-industrial Europe, maternal mortality ran to roughly 1,000–2,000 deaths per 100,000 live births, meaning a woman who bore several children faced a cumulative lifetime risk that was genuinely life-threatening. Most of life was consumed by domestic labour and the demands of survival.

What changed this was the prosperity generated by industrialisation and expanding trade. That prosperity funded public health infrastructure — safe water, sewage systems — which cut infectious disease and brought maternal mortality down to single digits per 100,000 births in most developed countries today. It produced the technologies that reduced domestic labour: running water, fuel-efficient stoves, washing machines. And it created labour markets in which employers, competing for workers, had a material incentive to hire women into roles from which they had previously been excluded.

That incentive became undeniable during the World Wars, when acute labour shortages forced employers to hire women into skilled industrial roles — mining, engineering, manufacturing — that had previously been declared unsuitable for them. Women performed capably across every field they entered. The assumptions about their unsuitability collapsed not because attitudes changed first, but because competitive pressure made exclusion expensive.

Trade extended these effects beyond industrial economies. Access to global markets raised incomes in ways that reduced child mortality, which in turn reduced the number of births women needed to have. As family sizes shrank and domestic burdens lightened, the conditions for women’s participation in economic life shifted accordingly.

Early industrial conditions were harsh, and the gains were unevenly distributed. But the direction of change was clear: expanding markets and trade did more to alter the material conditions of women’s lives than any deliberate social programme of the era.