The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [43]
The pattern also showed up in the United States of the late eighteenth century. Textile mills offered jobs to unmarried girls, who used their pay to supplement the family income and accumulate a dowry to make them more attractive partners in marriage. But as soon as they married, they left the workforce to care for their families.
American women remained in the home for a long time. By the end of the nineteenth century, only 5 percent of married women in the United States worked outside the home. Indeed, until the late nineteenth century, husbands had legal claims to their wives’ earnings and property. States started passing laws granting women property rights only in the final few years of the nineteenth century. Economists suggest this is because women had very few chances to get a paid job or accumulate assets. But as industrialization opened more opportunities for women in the workplace, this arrangement started getting in the way of development, inhibiting women’s incentives to work.
The pattern described by Goldin fits the curve of economic development in the world today. In extremely poor countries like Rwanda and Tanzania, nine out of ten women of ages forty-five to fifty-nine work. Women’s labor supply declines as countries progress, reaching a low point around the stage of development of Mexico and Brazil, and then bounces back as countries reach the stage of Sweden, Australia, or the United States.
SOCIAL DYNAMICS BEYOND the workplace have evidently contributed to shape the evolving role of women around the world. Between the early 1900s and the 1970s American women gained the right to vote and to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy as part of broad egalitarian movements. Technology helped. From the washing machine to the frozen dinner and the microwave oven, new inventions made it easier for women to seek opportunities outside the home. The mass distribution of the birth-control pill made it cheaper for men to have sex, reducing their incentive to marry. But it also allowed women to take control of their own fertility, delay marriage, and start a career. Women lost a traditional source of material support but gained economic autonomy.
The linchpin of these changes, however, was work. Work increased women’s leverage and impelled them to push for gender equality in the workplace, the home, and beyond, driving broader legal and political changes. Institutional changes then encouraged more women to work, producing a positive feedback loop. For instance, women’s growing clout contributed to the spread of the no-fault, unilateral divorce in the 1970s. The change, which lowered the cost of ending a marriage, increased women’s incentive to work as a form of economic insurance in case it ended.
Women’s labor supply grew sharply throughout the twentieth century. In 1920 less than 10 percent of married women aged thirty-five to forty-four were in the workforce. By 1945 the share was around 20 percent. Women’s educational attainment also grew by leaps and bounds. Outside the American South, high school graduation rates for women jumped fivefold from 1910 to 1938, to 56 percent. This produced a stream of qualified workers prepared for the new clerical jobs opening up across the economy.
Still, educated women faced an uphill battle to find better jobs. By 1950 a quarter of married women in their prime were in the job market, but the census reported that the top women’s jobs were teacher, secretary, and nurse. Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor had a hard time getting a job interview with a law firm after graduating from Stanford Law School in 1952 near the top of her class. When she did, it was for a job as legal secretary. “I was shocked,” she reminisced in 2008, two years after retiring from the Court. “It never entered my mind that I would not be able to get a job.” She ultimately took one in the public