Municipal Housekeeping: The Impact of Women's Suffrage on Public Education

Celeste Carruthers and Marianne Wanamaker ()

No 20864, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Gains in 20th century real wages and reductions in the black-white wage gap have been linked to the mid-century ascent of school quality. With a new dataset uniquely appropriate to identifying the impact of female voter enfranchisement on education spending, we attribute up to one-third of the 1920-1940 rise in public school expenditures to the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet the continued disenfranchisement of black southerners meant white school gains far outpaced those for blacks. As a result, women’s suffrage exacerbated racial inequality in education expenditures and substantially delayed relative gains in black human capital observed later in the century.

JEL-codes: H75 I24 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his and nep-ure
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Published as C. K. Carruthers & M. H. Wanamaker, 2015. "Municipal Housekeeping: The Impact of Women's Suffrage on Public Education," Journal of Human Resources, vol 50(4), pages 837-872.

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