The Wage Gains of African-american Women in the 1940s

During the 1940s, the average real weekly wages of black women nearly doubled, thereby narrowing the racial earnings gap among women by a full 15 percentage points. Although racial convergence slowed in the 1950s, it is clear that there was no reversion toward the pre-war black/white earnings ratio, and so the large episodic gains of the 1940s proved highly durable. Black men also experienced large relative wage gains in the 1940s (Maloney 1994, Margo 1995), but in general, the racial wage gap among women has evolved quite differently from that for men during the twentieth century (Blau and Beller 1992, Neal 2004). Therefore, the analytical narrative that economists have developed to explain the racial gap among men may be an insufficient guide to the broader history of the labor market implications of race. In this context, the 1940s are an especially important period of change. Previous studies of labor markets in the 1940s have emphasized changes in the distribution of wages among men by skill group (Goldin and Margo 1992) and race (Maloney 1994, Margo 1995, Collins 2000), or changes in the labor-force participation of white women (Goldin 1991). Long-run studies of labor market disparities between black and white women have tended to focus on occupational changes. For example, Sundstrom (2000) documents the dramatic occupational redistribution of black women between 1940 and 1980, with emphasis on their movement into the clerical sector after 1960. Cunningham and Zalokar (1992) also emphasize changes in occupational distributions in the context of examining relative wage gains from 1940 to 1980. However, because their paper examines changes over twenty-year periods (1940, 1960, and 1980), it tends to blur the