RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Municipal Housekeeping
JF Journal of Human Resources
JO J Hum Resour
FD University of Wisconsin Press
SP 837
OP 872
DO 10.3368/jhr.50.4.837
VO 50
IS 4
A1 Carruthers, Celeste K.
A1 Wanamaker, Marianne H.
YR 2015
UL http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/50/4/837.abstract
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.