Research 

 Due to data limitations, long-run changes in women's economic mobility are not well understood. Using a set of marriage certificates from Massachusetts over the period of 1850-1920, we link women and men to their childhood and adult census records to obtain a measure of occupational standing across two generations. Intergenerational mobility was higher for women than for men in the earliest 1850-70 cohort. Men's mobility increases by the 1880-1900 cohort, whereas women's does not, leading to a convergence. During a period with low married women's labor force participation, the choice of a partner was crucial for women's economic status. We find evidence of strong and increasing assortative matching prior to 1880, followed by declines to the 1900-20 cohort. Absent the increase in marital sorting, married women would have experienced the same increases in intergenerational mobility as did men in the sample. Finally, both men and women in the youngest cohort experience an increase in mobility and decreases in marital sorting, consistent with the widespread expansion of educational attainment during the ``High School Movement."  

We study women’s labor market participation in England between 1851 and 1911 using newly digitized census microdata. We document three novel facts. First, women’s labor force participation rate slightly decreased between 1851 and 1911, driven by a 40% decrease among married women. Secondly, examining synthetic cohorts reveals that the drop in married women’s labor force participation is driven by younger cohorts choosing not to join the workforce, rather than older cohorts exiting at increasing rates. Lastly, we observe that women were predominantly employed in the textile and domestic service sectors. Our theoretical model suggests that increasing societal barriers may have influenced married women’s labor market engagement over time.