Combining Marriage,Motherhood,and Jobs Before World War Ii: Women College Graduates,Classes of 1905-1935

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the demographic and labor force behavior of women college graduates in the first four decades of the twentieth century. These women's behavior differed from that of nineteenth-century alumnae in several notable ways. First, the later graduates married earlier and morefrequent ly. Second, they were markedly more likely to be married and childless. Third, significant proportions of these classes worked after marriage-both before and after childbearing. An economic model that extends the ideas of Richard A. Easterlin is used to understand better these twentieth-century graduates' behavior and why it differed from that of both earlier college women and other women in their own birth cohorts.