Occupational Mobility among Women from the Late 1800s to the Late 1900s: The Impact of Family Structure and Parental and Spousal Mortality on Women's Status

Kelsey Carlston, Department of Economics, University of Utah
Thomas Maloney, University of Utah
Ken R. Smith, University of Utah

There are now many studies of intergenerational socioeconomic mobility across long historical periods, tracking the transmission of economic status from parents to children and identifying factors that shape that transmission. These studies mainly examine the mobility of men, reflecting the difficulty of tracking women across Census and similar sources due to changes in their surnames when they marry. We use the Utah Population Database (UPDB) to fill in gaps in our knowledge of women’s occupational mobility, from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. The UPDB is built around a core of linked multigenerational records which address the problem of tracking women across time, whether they marry or not. These records are linked to a variety of sources which provide information on an individual’s work life, including Censuses and vital registries. We use these records to track the occupations held by women born between the 1850s and the 1910s. We observe occupation in the Census when these women were young and single. We then observe occupation in later life in Census records (through 1940) and in the “usual occupation” recorded in death certificates. We will thus be able to examine intra-generational occupational transitions for women from the late 19th century through much of the 20th century Importantly, this includes the era of the fertility transition in Utah as well as the earliest birth cohorts participating in the 20th century rise in married women's labor force participation. Our data also allow us to examine the characteristics of these women’s birth families. Our prior work demonstrates that father’s occupation, early parental mortality, family size, and the presence of extended family all had an impact on the adult occupational status of men. We will investigate parallel effects for women. We will also examine the relationship between spouse’s occupation, fertility, and women's occupational status.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 168. Determinants of Female Labour Market Outcomes