How did industrialization in the nineteenth century affect the well-being of children among American working class families? Two revealing surveys from 1890 and 1907 are used to examine the implications of child labor on schooling decisions and on possible offsetting intrafamily transfers, in...

Recent college graduate women express frustration regarding the obstacles they will face in combining career and family. Tracing the demographic and labor force experiences of four cohorts of college women across the past century allows us to observe the choices each made and how the constraints...

Three cohorts of college women are considered here. The first, graduating from 1900 to 1920, was faced with a choice of "family or career,? while the second, graduating from 1945 to the early 1960s, opted for family and employment serially - that is, "family then job." The third, graduating...

Women earn less than men, and that is especially true of mothers relative to fathers. Much of the widening occurs after family formation when mothers reduce their hours of work. But what happens when the kids grow up? To answer that question, we estimate three earning gaps: the "motherhood...