A Methodology for Revising Estimates: Female Market Participation in the U.S. Before 1940

Abel, Marjorie; Folbre, Nancy

doi:10.1080/01615440.1990.10594207

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Taken-for-granted ideas about caste, class, and gender shaped both official questions and poor people's answers and molded nascent labor statistics, with cautionary implications for historians interested in women's work and women workers. There is now a large literature that shows why and how the definitions, procedures, and operational practices of enumerators hid women's work and undercounted women workers in many times and places (Lourdes Benería 1981Benería , 1992Edward Higgs 1983, 1987, 2005Deacon 1985; Marjorie Abel and Nancy Folbre 1990;Andrew August 1994;Sara Horrell andJane Humphries 1995, 1997;Humphries 1995;Amanda Wilkinson 2010).…”

Section: Why Women's Work Was Left Off the Recordmentioning

confidence: 98%

Off the Record: Reconstructing Women's Labor Force Participation in the European Past

Humphries¹,

Sarasúa²

2012

Feminist Economics

165

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Conventional histories of women's labor force participation in Europe conceptualize the trends in terms of a U-shaped pattern. This contribution draws on historical research to challenge such an account. First, it demonstrates that the trough in participation is in part statistically manufactured by uncritical reliance on official sources that systematically undercount women workers. Second, it exploits nonstandard sources to construct alternative estimates of women's participation. Third, it analyzes the reconstructed rates to determine their congruence with neoclassical economics and modern empirical studies. Not all posited relationships time travel. Supply-side factors such as marital status and number and age of children are major determinants of modern women's decision to enter the labor force, yet appear less prominent in historical contexts. Instead, the demand for labor seems decisive. Finally, the Ushaped curve is not entirely a statistical artifact, but appears to evolve at higher levels of participation than usually suggested. KEYWORDSEconomic development, economic history, economic growth, women's labor force participation, family wage, labor market inequality JEL Codes: J01, J16

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Section: Why Women's Work Was Left Off the Recordmentioning

confidence: 98%

Off the Record: Reconstructing Women's Labor Force Participation in the European Past

Humphries¹,

Sarasúa²

2012

Feminist Economics

165

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“…Few women worked outside of agriculture and, when involved in non-agricultural activities, were either self-employed or unpaid labor in various family enterprises (Carlsson 1968;Richards 1974). Their productive activities were less regular than men's, seasonal, part-time, and commonly combined with unpaid care and domestic activities (Abel and Folbre 1990;Goose 2007;Atkinson 2012). Hence, they were ordinarily ignored.…”

Section: Measurement Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The forest and the trees: Industrialization, demographic change, and the ongoing gender revolution in Sweden and the United States, 1870-2010

Stanfors¹,

Goldscheider²

2017

DemRes

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“…The effort to incorporate women into sociological stratification theory as wives, housewives, and paid workers has spawned a burgeoning literature (see Acker 1980). Occupation, a problematic social locator for women, is also of suspect worth in describing their economic function in the past (Conk 1981;Bose 1987;Folbre and Abel 1989;Abel and Folbre 1990;Goldin 1990;Folbre 1993). In historical terms, whether a woman performed paid work in the market (her labor force participation) has probably been more significant than the kind of work she did, given the limited range of work options and the link between life course and work for women.…”

Section: Occupational-income Scoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Work, Status, and Income

Sobek¹

1996

Social Science History

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The historical record rarely presents researchers with precisely the evidence they desire. This is particularly true for social historians and like-minded scholars, whose subjects left precious few signs of their passing. Consequently, certain data have borne a disproportionate evidentiary load in social-historical research. The occupation a person pursued is one key piece of information on which scholars have come to depend. Our understanding of the historical social structure and where people fit into it is bound up with the interpretation of occupations. But this reliance on occupation as the primary social locator in historical research depends on some largely unexamined premises. Whether scholars group occupations or convert them into numerical status measures, they make assumptions about the nature of the occupational structure. When researchers incorporate change over time into their analyses, they suggest that the meaning of occupations remained stable for the purpose of measuring social mobility, class position, or group status-attainment. This assumption has been the subject of little discussion and even less research. For all the use to which historians have put occupation, there has been little effort to assess systematically its stability as a social or economic indicator.

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A Methodology for Revising Estimates: Female Market Participation in the U.S. Before 1940

Cited by 17 publications

References 7 publications

Off the Record: Reconstructing Women's Labor Force Participation in the European Past

Off the Record: Reconstructing Women's Labor Force Participation in the European Past

The forest and the trees: Industrialization, demographic change, and the ongoing gender revolution in Sweden and the United States, 1870-2010

Work, Status, and Income

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