Marriage Bars, Women’s Work, and Intergenerational Gender Norm

Stefania Marcassa, Cergy Paris Université

This paper asks whether expanding married women’s access to paid work reshaped gendered labor supply across generations. In early twentieth-century U.S. public schools, many districts enforced “marriage bars” that required women to leave teaching upon marriage or refused to hire married women. Two rare statewide prohibitions—North Carolina (1933) and Kentucky (1938)—restricted districts’ ability to apply these rules. I leverage this staggered policy change to estimate its downstream effects on children’s adult outcomes: (i) daughters’ labor-market attachment and (ii) sons’ household specialization, measured by the labor supply and occupations of their wives. I construct linked life histories from the IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel (MLP) full-count censuses. Starting from children observed in 1930, I attach parental characteristics within households and link individuals forward to 1940 and 1950 to measure adult work and occupation. For married sons, I link to co-resident spouses to observe wives’ labor supply. The empirical strategy is a cohort-based difference-in-differences design comparing KY/NC to neighboring Southern states, exploiting variation in exposure by age at reform and in treatment intensity based on maternal teaching attachment and pre-reform county teacher composition. Event-study specifications assess pre-trends, and robustness checks address mobility, selective linkage, and selection into marriage/co-residence. To distinguish a norms/role-model channel from schooling-quality shocks, I examine educational outcomes and sensitivity to WWII-era cohorts. The results provide new evidence on how women’s employment rights propagate across generations, shaping both women’s own work and the work patterns of the next generation of households.

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 Presented in Session 107. A Day in the Life