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Women's Liberation: What's in It for Men?

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Author Info
Matthias Doepke
Michèle Tertilt

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Abstract

The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We show that men face a tradeoff between the rights they want for their own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy. Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights increases educational investments in children. We show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights in England and the United States.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 13919.

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Date of creation: Apr 2008
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13919

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
E13 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Neoclassical
J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
N30 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Income, and Wealth - - - General, International, or Comparative
O43 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Institutions and Growth

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Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Graziella Bertocchi, 2007. "The Enfranchisement of Women and the Welfare State," IZA Discussion Papers 2922, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Raquel Fernandez, 2007. "Culture as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century," NBER Working Papers 13373, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Greenwood, Jeremy & Guner, Nezih, 2008. "Social Change," IZA Discussion Papers 3485, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  4. Michael Burda & Daniel S. Hamermesh & Philippe Weil, 2007. "Total Work, Gender and Social Norms," IZA Discussion Papers 2705, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  5. Hanno Lustig & Stijn Van Nieuwerburg & Adrien Verdelhan, 2007. "The Wealth-Consumption Ratio: A Litmus Test for Consumption-based Asset Pricing Models¤," Boston University - Department of Economics - Working Papers Series WP2007-030, Boston University - Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  6. Matthias Doepke, 2008. "Humankapital, politischer Wandel und langfristige Wirtschaftsentwickung," IEW - Working Papers iewwp356, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - IEW. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  7. Matthias Doepke, 2007. "The Research Agenda: Matthias Doepke on the Transition from Stagnation to Growth," EconomicDynamics Newsletter, Review of Economic Dynamics, vol. 8(2), April. [Downloadable!]
  8. Fernández, Raquel, 2007. "Culture as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labour Force Participation Over a Century," CEPR Discussion Papers 6451, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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