Question

Discuss the role of secondary workers in the family economy in the late 19th century, and discuss the differences by ethnic background, age, gender, and family head’s income.

Answer 1

From the late-nineteenth century to the1920s, female workers in the labor market, as opposed to those working in the household or family business, were generally young and unmarried. They were often piece workers in manufacturing or labored in the service sector as domestics and laundresses. These women experienced little or no learning on the job and saw only slight gain from formal human capital beyond common or elementary school, if that.

Ascant minority were professional workers, often teachers and clerical employees, a group that expanded enormously beginning in the 1910s.The vast majority of women workers were poorly educated, often from low-income house-holds and those headed by a foreign-born individual. During this phase, the average married woman worker was less educated than the population average, suggesting that the income effect greatly swamped the substitution effect.Prior to the 1920s, women almost always exited the workforce at marriage, although some in poorer homes and among the more highly educated did not. Substantial social stigma regarding the work of wives outside the home existed due in large measure to the nature of the work. Jobs were often dirty, dangerous, repetitive, and long in hours per day and days per week.The income elasticity was therefore large,whereas the substitution elasticity was small,although its precise magnitude is uncertain. The result was that the (negative) income effect from increased husbands’ income greatly exceeded the (positive) substitution effect from increased wives’ earnings.6With a very inelastic labor supply function,the increase in female labor force participation rates from 1890 to 1930 —9.5 percentage points for women 25 to 44 years old and 7.3 percent-age points for married women 35 to 44 years old—must have resulted largely from shifts in the labor supply function. In addition,the large negative income effect means that positive supply shifts had to have been substantial in magnitude to outweigh the negative effect of increased husbands’ income.

The field of modern labor economics, like that of market work for married women, was nascent at the dawn of the twentieth century.Female workers were of interest to economists because of social policy issues, such as wage equity, the minimum wage, and maximum-hours laws.

This was whole plight of the late nineteenth century