Between 1950 and 1973, overall labor force participation of women rose by one third. Although women who have never married have been and continue to be much more likely to work, the distinction between never married and other categories of women in terms of their labor market activity is rapidly disappearing. While the labor force participation of never-married women rose 13 per cent between 1950 and 1974 (from 50.5 per cent to 57.2 per cent), it rose over 80 per cent for married women who were living with their husbands (from 23.8 per cent to 43.0 per cent).
Since the mid-1960s, the greatest increase in labor force participation of women has been among those in the 25-34 age range-the ages during which women are most intensively involved in child-rearing, and the ages at which female labor force participation has traditionally been lowest. Among women 25-34, the proportion in the labor force has risen from 36 per cent in 1960 to 50 per cent in 1973 -an increase of close to 40 per cent in 13 years (U.S. Department of Labor, 1975).
Several reasons can be given for the changing composition of the female labor force over the past several decades, some of which have already been highlighted. The rise in the educational attainment of young women in the past several decades has given women access to jobs that were previously inaccessible to them because they lacked the requisite training. Demographic trends have also played a role in encouraging increasing numbers of women to enter the labor force, and to stay there. Because young women have been postponing marriage, and postponing childbearing within marriage, they experience a relatively long period of time after completing high school or college during which they may advance in their careers. And increasingly, women are finding it difficult to give up the economic independence, as well as the challenge, recognition, and satisfaction they derive from their jobs. Over a third of married women with preschool children were in the labor force in 1974, as contrasted with only 12 per cent in 1950.
In a study of female labor market activity using data from the 1960 U.S. Census, Sweet (1973) found that women with more education were more likely to be in the labor force while their children were preschoolers than were those women with less than a high school education. Sweet suggests two reasons for these findings: differences in child-spacing patterns and differences in previous labor market experience. If women with less education are likely to have the second child relatively quickly, they will be pregnant again while the first child is still a preschooler, and thus less interested in returning to the job. And with good reason: The jobs less educated women perform tend to be more hazardous than the jobs open to women with a college education.
Well-educated women are more likely to have worked both before marriage and before childbearing, and for a longer period of time. This fact has two consequences: (1) the family's consumption patterns have become adapted to two incomes, a level of living difficult to abandon; and (2) these women, with their relatively recent work experience, have greater contact with the labor market and knowledge of job opportunities and are more likely to find employment when they want it.
In addition to affecting the number of women in the labor force, demographic trends have also affected the composition of the female labor force, more particularly the shift from a young, unmarried female labor force to a middle-aged, married one. This shift has been explained, in part, by the concept of a life cycle squeeze (Gove, Grimm, Motz, and Thompson, 1973; Oppenheimer, 1974). Expenses are particularly high two times during the typical family life cycle: the first occurs soon after the couple is married, when the acquisition of home and other accoutrements of married life usually takes place; the second occurs when children reach adolescence. Both are times when the husband's income alone is not likely to be sufficient to cover these expenses: the first because he is at the beginning of his career at the time that he is beginning his marriage; the second because the time when the costs of maintaining the family are highest (adolescence of children) may not coincide with the time when his income reaches its peak. Oppenheimer (1974) finds that men in occupations where the peak median earnings in 1959 were $7,000 or more were much more likely to have their incomes rise roughly in proportion to increases in the cost of maintaining their families. However, men in occupations with peak median incomes under $7,000 in 1959 were likely to experience peak child-care costs at a time when they were not earning much more, and sometimes less on average, than were younger men with younger and therefore less expensive children. These situations create strong economic pressures for an additional income, and are undoubtedly one reason why young brides continue to work after marriage, and why women in their forties and fifties have entered or reentered the labor market in record numbers in recent years.
Changes in the U.S. economy in the 20th century have also encouraged women to enter and remain in the labor force. The industries and occupations that have expanded most rapidly (particularly during the period after 1940) are those that were the major employers of women.
This trend has been characterized as a shift from the goods-producing economy prior to World War II to the service-producing economy of the 1970s (Waldman and Whit more, 1974). The post-World-War-II baby boom created the need for an expansion of a wide variety of services-educational, medical, governmental, and recreational among them-services in which most women workers were concentrated.
But while the demand for female labor was rising, the women who traditionally filled these jobs-the young and the single-constituted a stable or declining population, at least until the late 1960s. The dramatic expansion and changing composition of the female labor force in post-World-War-II America, then, are seen in part as the response of older married women to the growing demand for female labor (Oppenheimer, 1970).
Let us consider for a moment the notion of a demand for female labor and the question of the sex labeling of jobs and professions. It is well known that women are highly concentrated in a few occupations in which they constitute an overwhelming majority of all workers. For instance, in 1960, elementary school teachers and registered nurses accounted for almost 54 per cent of all female professional employment; in 1970, they were still just over 46 per cent of all female professionals (Fuchs, 1975). Oppenheimer (1970) has argued that the U.S. labor market is actually two markets-male and female-and that men and women in most cases do not really compete for the same jobs. The expansion of "women's" occupations after World War II led not to a demand for additional labor but to a demand for additional female labor.
