Hero Ashman (Harvard CRISES)

"Family Formation and the Racial Division of Reproductive Labor: Evidence from the Great Migration, 1910-1940"

Domestic workers the world over provide labor necessary for the care of better-off families. In the United States, this division of labor has long been structured by racial hierarchies, often referred to as the racial division of reproductive labor. Despite research demonstrating the reliance of privileged families on domestic workers, we do not know whether this affects family formation in the first place. In other words, does the ability of some people to have a family depend on their control over the reproductive labor of other people? I use the historical case of Black women’s occupational segregation into domestic work in the early twentieth century to explore this question. Using full count Census data, I test whether Black women’s urban migration to cities was associated with increases in marriage and fertility among White women. I find that in cities with higher rates of migration, White women married at younger ages. I also find that Black women’s migration was associated with increases in the number of children born to White upper-class married women. Taken together, these results advance the idea that relations of reproduction produce unequal outcomes in who gets to have and care for a family.