Is Equal Pay Worth It? Beatrice Potter Webb, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Eleanor Rathbone’s Changing Arguments

First, I briefly present biographical elements to understand from where Fawcett, Webb and Rathbone entered the debate. I then discuss the early positions of Fawcett and Webb in the 1890s as a frontal opposition of two sets of general principles: Fabianism and classical liberalism. In the third section, I show how changes occurring before the war served as the catalyst of new arguments that challenged the “family wage”. The final section analyzes the period during and after the First World War and the emerging fragile consensus in favour of the “equal pay for equal work” principle.