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Families at Work: An Analysis by Sex of Child Workers in the Cotton Textile Industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Susan A. Matthies
Susan A. Matthies
Affiliation:
Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
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Abstract

Differences in the school and work experience of young girls and boys are explained by factors related to the demand for household production including the presence of young children, boarders and lodgers, and home ownership. Gender based differences in job characteristics and hourly earnings associated with occupational segregation contributed to the observed pattern of higher schooling investment by girls and earlier work experience by boys.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 173 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1982

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References

1 Goldin, Claudia, “Household and Market Production of Families in a Late Nineteenth Century American City,” Explorations in Economic History, 16 (1979), 111–31Google Scholar, and Fraundorf, Martha N., “The Labor Force Participation of Turn-of-the-Century Married Women,” this JOURNAL, 39 (06 1979), 401–17.Google Scholar

2 U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1910), is a nineteen-volume study mandated by the U.S. Senate. The first, largest, and most detailed volume concerns the cotton textile industry. In addition to numerous descriptive and comparative tables the authors included a nearly complete catalog of the information collected about each working woman and child in their survey of 2,421 “representative” textile workers' families, the observations used in this study.Google Scholar

3 U.S. Bureau of Labor, “Child Labor in the United States,” Bulletin No. 69 (Washington, D.C., 1907).Google Scholar

4 The ten states are Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.Google Scholar

5 Dawley, Thomas, The Child That Toileth Not (New York, 1912).Google Scholar

6 Young, T. M., The American Cotton Industry (New York, 1903), p. 24.Google Scholar

7 Report, vol. 1, pp. 245–46.Google Scholar

8 Ibid. pp. 540–41.

9 By 1907 five of the six southern states had a legal minimum age of 12 years. Mississippi had no minimum. All four New England states had a legal minimum age of 14 years. See Report, vol. 1., pp. 166–72.Google Scholar

10 For a description of the underlying model of family resource allocation and a more complete interpretation of the coefficients in Table I, see Matthies, Susan, “Families At Work: A Comparative Analysis of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the Cotton Textile Industry,” Ph.D. dissertation in progress, Stanford University.Google Scholar

11 Since observations were provided only on those currently employed, ordinary least-squares estimators may not have desirable properties. Insignificant coefficients on some variables could be a result of the selectivity bias. This problem is also addressed in my dissertation.Google Scholar

12 Aldrich, M. and Albelda, R., “Determinants of Working Women's Wages during the Progressive Era,” Explorations in Economic History, 17 (10 1980), 323–41.Google Scholar

13 McHugh, C., The Family Labor System in the Southern Cotton Textile Industry 1880–1915, Ph.D. Dissertation (Stanford University, 1981).Google Scholar

14 Dublin, Thomas, Women At Work (New York, 1979), p. 150.Google Scholar