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When we talk about barriers to the entrance of women in the American workforce in the 20th century, the story we tell is largely cultural and economic. Married women with career aspirations had to contend with wage discrimination, marriage bars, and the perception that a working woman was ipso facto a degenerate wife and mother. A neat new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that we often understate the role of basic medical advances when talking about that sudden, collective jump from home to workplace. It's easy to forget how dangerous childbirth used to be; complications associated with sepsis, toxaemia and obstructed labor could ravage a body well into middle age. "Many maternal conditions had very long lasting or chronic effects on health," the researchers report, "hindering women's ability to work beyond their childbearing years."
Using historical data to quantify the effects of various maternal conditions, economists Stefania Albanesi and Claudia Olivetti find that medical advances like the introduction of antibiotics, the standardization of obstetric practice, and the hospitalization of childbirth were absolutely critical to the rise of married women's participation in the labor market over the last century. They also find a very large effect for the introduction of formula as a mainstream alternative to breastfeeding in the 1930s. A typical woman in 1920 between the ages of 23 and 33 would be nursing for something like 40 percent of her potential working time. As Hanna has so forcefully illustrated, our cost/benefit calculations change when we start to consider the possibility that a mother's time might have some kind of value.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was supposed to give the keynote address last week at a conference on women's equality and the law, at Rutgers School of Law-Newark. She couldn't make it, because of her recent cancer-related surgery. But she called, en route from leaving the hospital, to wish the conference goers well and to announce that she was on the mend and feeling good. Justice Ginsburg was clearly sending a message of strength—one that, as Dahlia pointed out, is entirely in line with the forceful approach she took to denouncing the Supreme Court's decision in the Ledbetter pay discrimination case.
The Rutgers conference reminded me of an earlier era of Ginsburg as tireless tigress: In the 1970s, she was an early and forceful litigator for women's rights. It's a story well told by Fred Strebeigh in his new book, Equal: Women Reshape American Law. Fred was my undergraduate writing teacher; this book is an incredibly industrious reporting effort that takes full advantage of his access to Ginsburg's litigation files. A revealing how-far-we've-come moment from 1970: One of Ginsburg's clients, Nora Simon, was a former Army nurse who was barred from further work in the military because she had been pregnant. "Under Army regulations a discharge for pregnancy renders a person ineligible for re-enlistment," Fred reports of the rules then. For Ginsburg, Simon's plight was personal. Five years earlier, as a professor at Rutgers without tenure, Ginsburg herself had gotten pregnant over the winter. Worried about whether her contract would be renewed, she said nothing about her pregnancy all spring, had her baby son in early September, and went right back to work. Tireless, indeed.