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The Work and Wages of Single Women, 1870 to 1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Claudia Goldin
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Abstract

Single women dominated the U.S. female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of single women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of their earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task-oriented and payment was frequently by the piece. Earnings rose steeply with experience and peaked early; learning was mainly on-the-job. Occupational segregation by sex was a partial product of the method of payment, and the early termination of human capital investment was a function of the life-cycle labor force participation of these women, although the role of the family was also critical.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 81 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1980

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References

1 Little is now known about the labor force participation of women prior to 1870, but existing evidence suggests that the percentage of married women then at work was higher in large cities.

2 See Table 4 of Goldin, “Women in the American Labor Experience,” paper presented at the 1979 Cliometrics meetings. Labor force participation rates for single women by age, nativity, and race are given below for the entire U.S. and for cities of over 100,000 in 1890. It can be seen that part of the rise in the labor force participation of single women after 1890 was probably a function of the movement of population to the cities.

3 See Rotella, Elyce, “Women's Labor Force Participation and the Growth of Clerical Employment in the U.S., 1870–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1977)Google Scholar.

4 Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1888. Working Women in Large Cities (Washington, 1889)Google Scholar, and Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the U.S. in 19 Volumes, Senate Documents Vols. 86–104 (Washington, 1910/1911)Google Scholar.

5 This section is a highly condensed version of material in Goldin, “Women in the American Labor Experience,” and Feminine Economy (in progress).

6 Among all white working women in the U.S. in 1890, approximately 1/3 were employed in domestic and personal service, 1/3 in manufacturing and mechanical trades, 1/10 in trade and transportation, 1/10 in professional jobs, and the rest in agriculture. Only a trivial fraction were clerical workers

7 The lower bound is from the Federal Census of Manufactures, 1890, Part I, Table 5, pp. 92–114, and the upper bound adjusts this figure for the understatement of pieceworkers in cotton and other textile mills. The figure for men is about 11%.

8 The cities included, with the regional divisions used to estimate the earnings functions in Table 1, are: South—Atlanta, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, Richmond, Savannah; North—Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Providence; Midwest—Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Louisville, St. Louis, St. Paul; West—San Francisco, San Jose.

9 This statement excludes reports using census materials, in particular Statistics of Women at Work (Washington, 1907)Google ScholarPubMed based on the 1900 Census.

10 See in particular Mincer, Jacob, Schooling, Experience and Earnings (New York, 1974)Google Scholar. Under a particular set of assumptions, Mincer (p. 91) has shown that:

here Γt, - rate of return to experience; k0 - (C0/É0) - the initial investment ratio which is assumed to decline linearly with time, kt, - k0 − k0(t/T). At time T investment is zero. If T - 10, the results in Table 1, col. 3 yield k0 - 0.33 and Γt, - 0.14; if T - 7, k0 - 0.35, Γt - 0.06.

11 The 3% figure is a maximum because the 1907 study does not include information on prior occupations. To the extent that there was a return to experience on other jobs the coefficient on the age at beginning work would include it.

12 See, for example, Salop, Joanne and Salop, Steven, “Self-Selection and Turnover in the Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90 (Nov. 1976), 619–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who state that “the firm could pay for piecework, thereby allowing the worker to receive the full value of his own marginal product and eliminating the firm's interest in this information [turnover costs]” (p. 627).

13 Salmon, Lucy M., Domestic Service, 1897 ed. (rpt. New York, 1972), stated:Google Scholar In the two occupations the wages in which have been compared with those in domestic service [teaching and factory work] while the general average wages are low, it is possible to reach through promotion a comparatively high point. The fact that the wage plane is a high one is one inducement for women of average ability to enter the occupation [servant]. On the other hand, the fact that the wage limit, high as it is, is soon reached must act as a barrier in the case of others (pp. 103–04).

14 See Hannon, Joan, “The Immigrant in the Promised Land: Human Capital and Ethnic Discrimination in the Michigan Labor Market” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1977)Google Scholar, Table 3.5 for male earnings equations in 1889.