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Occupational Segregation, Teachers' Wages, and American Economic Growth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Susan B. Carter
Susan B. Carter
Affiliation:
The author is Associate Professor of Economics, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 01063.
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Abstract

National, state, and individual-level data are used to explore the implications of the crowding of educated women into the teaching profession in nineteenth-century America. It is found that the more young women attended school, the lower were teacher wages and the price of educational services. Through this mechanism young women paid for their own education and, by lowering the price of educational services, helped America develop the best-educated population in the world by the century's end.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 1986 , pp. 373 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1986

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References

I am grateful to Sally Dell' Osa and Margaret Whalen for skillful and enthusiastic research assistance and to Michael Carter, Martin Eisenberg, Deborah Haas-Wilson, Roger Kaufman, Cathy McHugh, Richard Sutch, David Tyack, and members of the Smith College Economics Faculty Seminar for criticisms and suggestions on earlier drafts. Funds from the Smith College Committee on Aid to Faculty Scholarship helped support this research. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research provided copies of the “Historical Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970” and Claudia Goldin's “Southern Cities, 1870 and 1880” data tapes.

1 See Engerman, Stanley L., “Human Capital, Education and Economic Growth”, in Fogel, Robert William and Engerman, Stanley L., eds. The Reinterpretation of Economic History (New York, 1971), pp. 274–81.Google Scholar

2 For evidence on American school attendance rates in international perspective see Fishlow, Albert, “Levels of Nineteenth Century American Investment in Education”, in Fogel, and Engerman, , eds. The Reinterpretation of American Economic History, pp. 265–73.Google Scholar

3 Gordon, Sarah H., “Smith College Students: The First Ten Classes, 1879–1888”, History of Education Quarterly, 15 (Summer 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For additional evidence see Solomon, Barbara Miller, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven, 1985), pp. 31–34.Google Scholar

4 Rotella, Elyce J., From Home to Office: U.S. Women at Work 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1981), pp. 32–33.Google Scholar

5 For evidence on the barriers facing women in medicine see Walsh, Mary Roth, Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply (New Haven, 1977).Google Scholar

6 Calcutated from Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, “Historical Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970”, data tape. For additional evidence on the career patterns of male educators in the nineteenth century see Mattingly, Paul H., The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

7 See Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work (New York, 1982), chap. 4.Google Scholar

8 Political forces so severely limited the educational opportunities of blacks that models different from the ones used here would have to be developed to understand their experience. On the education of blacks see Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom (Cambridge, Mass., 1977);Google Scholar and Margo, Robert A., “Race Differences in Public School Expenditures”, Social Science History, 6 (Winter 1982), pp. 9–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See Strober, Myra H. and Lanford, Audri Gordon, “The Percentage of Women in Public School Teaching: A Cross–Section Analysis, 1850–1880”, Signs, 2 (Winter 1986), pp. 212–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 La Bue, Anthony C., “Teacher Certification in the U.S.: A Brief History”, The Journal of Teacher Education, 11 (06 1960), pp. 147–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Troen, Selwyn K., The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System 1838–1920 (Columbia, 1975), pp. 121–32 makes this point.Google Scholar

12 Fishlow, Albert, “Levels of Nineteenth Century American Investment in Education”, pp. 271–72.Google Scholar

13 The coefficient on m, the proxy for marriage opportunities was also insignificant, with a t–ratio of only 0.056. I omitted it from the regression, reran the equation, and achieved to results reported in Table 1.

14 Bernard, Richard M. and Vinovskis, Maris A., “The Female School Teacher in Ante-Bellum Massachusetts”, Journal of Social History, 10 (03 1977), p. 334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Size of the teaching force in 1850 from Fourteenth Annual Report of the Board of Education 1849–50 (Boston, 1851), p. xxvi.Google Scholar

15 Mangum, Vernon Lamar, The American Normal School: Its Rise and Development in Massachusetts (Baltimore, 1928), p. 325. For evidence on the large number of female graduates of New England colleges who went on to become teachers see fn. 3.Google Scholar

16 La Bue, Anthony C., “Teacher Certification in the U.S.,”, pp. 147–72.Google Scholar

17 On teachers' wages as a share of total schooling costs see Burgess, W. Randolf, Trend of School Costs (New York, 1920).Google Scholar

18 Field, Alexander James, “Educational Expansion in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts: Human-Capital Formation or Structural Reinforcement?” Harvard Educational Review, 46 (11 1976), pp. 521–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 For a description of this sytem see Tyack, David B., The One Best System (Cambridge, Mass.,1974), pp. 59–65.Google Scholar

20 Troen, Selwyn K., The Public and the Schools, pp. 121–32 makes this point.Google Scholar

21 Some other results are at odds with the findings of previous studies. For example Katz, Michael, “Who Went to School?” History of Education Quarterly, 12 (Fall 1972), pp. 432–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar found the occupational status of the family head to be highly significant and positive. In my results it is insignificant. Our differences may result from the fact that the data base for most studies of nineteenth-century school attendance comes from a single region and explores differences across individuals who face essentially the same environment. When Angus and Mirel explored differences in school attendance rates across cities and countries which differed in their educational systems and industrial compositions they found the “lion's share” of variance in school attendance rates was explained by structural variables such as country and the industrial composition of employment and that some individual level variables worked in perverse ways. See Angus, David L. and Mirel, Jeffrey E., “From Spellers to Spindles: Work-force Entry by the Children of Textile Workers, 1888–1890”, Social Science History, 9 (Spring 1985), pp. 123–44.Google Scholar

22 For evidence on the contribution of education to early twentieth-century American economic growth see Engerman, Stanley L., “Human Capital, Education and Economic Growth”, in Fogel, and Engerman, , eds. Reinterpretation of Economic History, pp. 274–81.Google Scholar

23 See David, Paul A., “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY”, American Economic Review, 75 (05 1985), pp. 332–37 for an illustration of the essentially historical character of the economic growth process.Google Scholar