This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land...

We investigate women's fertility, labor and marriage market responses to a health innovation that led to reductions in mortality from treatable causes, and especially large declines in child mortality. We find delayed childbearing, with lower intensive and extensive margin fertility, a decline...

The traditional historical narrative claims that White women were rarely involved in market transactions for enslaved people in the antebellum United States. Using transaction records, notary statements, and runaway advertisements, we provide the first quantitative estimates of the extent of...

We characterize female-owned manufacturing establishments using newly digitized manuscripts from the US Census of Manufactures (1850, 1860, 1870, 1880). Female-owned establishments were smaller than male-owned establishments and had lower capital-to-output ratios, which could reflect...

Women's contribution to the economy has been markedly underestimated in predominantly agricultural societies, due to their widespread involvement in unpaid agricultural work. Combining data from the US Census and several early sources, we create a consistent measure of male and female employment...

This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how shocks to the gender composition of a large organization can persistently shift gender norms. Exploiting city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment driven by...

How, when, and why did women in the US obtain legal rights equal to men's regarding the workplace, marriage, family, Social Security, criminal justice, credit markets, and other parts of the economy and society, decades after they gained the right to vote? The story begins with the civil rights...

This chapter reviews key literature studying the effects of wars on minority and underrepresented groups in U.S. labor markets in the 20th century. These labor markets, characterized by historically pervasive barriers to entry into certain occupations and industries, promotions, and fair pay for...

The Lanham Act was a federal infrastructure bill passed by Congress in 1940 and eventually used to fund programs for the preschool and school-aged children of working women during WWII. It remains, to this day, the only example in US history of an (almost) universal, largely federally-supported...