TY - JOUR T1 - Municipal Housekeeping JF - Journal of Human Resources JO - J Hum Resour SP - 837 LP - 872 DO - 10.3368/jhr.50.4.837 VL - 50 IS - 4 AU - Celeste K. Carruthers AU - Marianne H. Wanamaker Y1 - 2015/10/02 UR - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/50/4/837.abstract N2 - Gains in 20th century real wages and reductions in the black-white wage gap have been linked to the midcentury ascent of school quality. With a new data set uniquely appropriate to identifying the impact of female voter enfranchisement on education spending, we attribute up to one-third of the 1920–40 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. ER -