The Great Divergence debate, resulting from Kenneth Pomeranz’s work comparing pre-industrial levels of development in Europe and China, stimulated significant new research into the techniques for measuring and comparing standards of living over time and space. These techniques were derived from work on England and tended to assume that household incomes largely depended on the market wage of a male ‘breadwinner’. However, more recent work by feminist economic historians has begun to show that women in fact performed a wide range of productive labour, paid and unpaid, in pre-industrial and industrialising European economies. Moreover, recognition of the continuing contribution of women’s work, unpaid labour and subsistence production to household income can be shown to have a significant impact on the assessment of living standards and their comparison across time and space.