The Effect of State Maximum-Hours Laws on the Employment of Women in 1920
研究20世纪初美国各州最高工时法对制造业女性就业的影响,发现该法不仅减少了女性工时,还降低了就业,尤其对外国出生女性影响显著(最高达30%),而对本土白人女性影响不大。
This paper investigates the effect of early twentieth-century state maximum-hours laws on the employment of women in manufacturing. Maximum-hours laws are found to have reduced not only women's hours of work in 1920 but their employment as well. Further, the effect was not uniform by race and nativity: While the employment of foreign-born women was significantly reduced--by as much as 30 percent in the most restrictive states--the employment of native white women was largely unaffected. This and other evidence adduced in the paper suggest that early support for maximum-hours legislation for women, especially by the emerging American labor movement, may have been motivated in part by the well-documented hostility to immigration during this period.