From Professor Humphries’ earliest research, including the papers based on household budgets (with Sara Horrell), a hallmark has been the search for new sources and their use in a combined quantitative and qualitative approach to the lived experience of ordinary people, often overlooked and inaccessible using conventional methods and materials. Her paper ‘Enclosures, Common Rights and Women’ which used archival evidence to reconstruct the value of common rights, won the Arthur H. Cole Prize in 1990. Her 2010 book, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, which drew on autobiographies by working men to illuminate children's working and family lives, was awarded the Gyorgi Ranki Prize in 2011. It was the basis for an award-winning BBC4 documentary, The Children Who Built Victorian Britain, which she co-wrote and presented. Recently, Professor Humphries' research has focused on studies of remuneration, resulting in publications on women’s wages (with Jacob Weisdorf), hand spinners’ wages (with Benjamin Schneider), children’s wages (with Sara Horrell), and families’ collective wages (with Sara Horrell and Jacob Weisdorf). Her paper (with Jacob Weisdorf), ‘Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260-1850’ was awarded the Royal Economic Society Prize for the best article in the Economic Journal in 2019. The research on wages has led to investigations of Malthusian accounts of long-run English history and wellbeing over the family life cycle. Professor Humphries’ current research brings women’s paid and unpaid work into the calculus of living costs, the history of care and the measurement of national output. As in many of her contributions, the argument is that these activities must be included in socio-economic analyses not just to make them complete but to make them correct.
Professor Humphries’ research interests include labour markets, living standards, industrialization, economic growth and the history of women and children’s work.
