Settlers and Norms

joanne haddad, PhD Candidate

Despite the large literature on cultural formation, gender norms and female labor force participation in settlers societies remain largely unexplored. This paper relates the composition of early U.S. counties settlers to within state variation in gender norms. In 1973, the cultural geographer Wilber Zelinsky famously argued that the first group of settlers of a given area are crucial for cultural formation. I investigate Zelinsky's doctrine of ``first effective settlement'' by focusing on U.S. counties created between 1840--1940 and defining settlers as the inhabitants of these counties at their early stages of cultural and institutional development based on the first Census data available post county creation. I capture settlers' gender norms using their place of origin past female labor force participation, women's suffrage and financial rights. This paper documents the distinctive characteristics of settlers' populations and provides suggestive evidence in support of the spatial (across locations) and vertical (over time) transmission of gender norms. My results show that having more settlers from places with high female labor force participation and where women could vote and had property and earning rights is positively related to women's labor force participation in U.S. counties both in short and long run.

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 Presented in Session 258. Cultural Making of Groups