Male and female payment patterns ca. 1950: Some examples from the Cashbook of the Netherlands project

Abstract

In the strand of studies on money circulation what happened to the money on entering the household has remained underexplored. This article studies private cashbooks to research the nancial role division between husbands and wives in the Netherlands in the early 1950s. This is an interesting period because the role division between Dutch husbands and wives was generally very strict: men were households’ sole wage earners and women were fulltime housewives. I draw two main conclusions. First, there were roughly two ways in which the income was distributed between husband and wife. Second, women were involved in more nancial transactions than men, but men on average spent higher sums of money. Therefore, men principally used banknotes and women coins and currency notes.