PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Celeste K. Carruthers
AU  - Marianne H. Wanamaker
TI  - Municipal Housekeeping
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.50.4.837
DP  - 2015 Oct 02
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 837--872
VI  - 50
IP  - 4
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/50/4/837.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/50/4/837.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2015 Oct 02; 50
AB  - 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.