The second chapter of Career and Family introduces the five groups of women whose lives we follow throughout the book. These women were born between 1878 and 1978, offering a century-long view of the evolution of women’s career and family paths in the United States.

As the table below illustrates, career and family were seen as highly competitive goals for women in the early 1900s, with most women able to achieve only one and low marriage rates limited many women’s opportunities to have children during this period.

Group Two women, entering the job market in the early to mid-1900s, were determined to experience both work and family life. In contrast, Group Three women shifted the timeline, prioritizing family first and pursuing careers later. Group Four women returned to the pattern of establishing careers first and then building families, much like Group Two. Finally, Group Five women appear to be pursuing career and family simultaneously, reflecting a more integrated approach.

Chapter Insights

The upcoming chapters offer deeper explanations and a closer look at the lives of these five groups. However, for now, here are some historical insights and observations drawn from this chapter:

• Women’s employment increased over the century, offering women more job and career opportunities.
• Black college-graduate women consistently had high employment rates across all groups. For example, among Group Three women in their late 40s, 75–85% were in the labour force, compared to an even higher 88–93% of Black women. It would be nice to read Goldin’s explanation for this in the chapter for Group Three.
• In the early 1900s, fewer than 1 in 30 young people were college graduates, with the rates being even lower for Black Americans.
• By around 1980, women overtook men in the number of college graduates.
• Single-sex schools dominated in the early 1900s, but this later shifted toward co-educational schooling. I am not sure about today, but single sex schools were still dominant in other countries, e.g., Nigeria, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
• Women who attended college around 1900 generally came from wealthier families than later generations. However, while family background was important, it remained relatively constant and does not fully explain the shift in women’s priorities and choices regarding career and family paths, as shown in the Table above.
• Views (of men) on ideal marriage significantly influenced trends across groups.
  • In Group One, college-graduate women were 20 percentage points less likely to marry by age 50 compared to non-college women.
  • In Group Three, this gap narrowed to -5 percentage points.
  • By Group Five, the trend had reversed, with college-graduate women being 5 percentage points more likely to marry than their non-college counterparts.