Woman & Children in the Laborforce

Women and Children in the Labor Force of Antebellum America

Women and children had a strong impact in the labor force of America during the pre-Civil War era. Through the readings of Lee Craig, Claudia Goldin and Kenneth Sokoloff, we can make assumptions about women and children in labor force. The differences in utilization of women and children are dramatic between the Northern and Southern regions of country. The North included women and children in their labor force for manufacturing and textiles. In contrast, women and children in the South worked in family owned plantations and businesses which also added to the labor force, but in ways that were much harder to measure. Craig’s article, The Value of Household Labor in Antebellum Northern Agricultural focused on the different roles of women and children in the three main regions of Antebellum United States. Goldin and Sokoloff’s article, Women, Children, and Industrialization in the Early Republic: Evidence from the Manufacturing Censuses centered on the growth in manufacturing industries and their impact on the labor force. Using these two articles this paper will confirm the importance of women and children in both regions.

In the Northeast between the years of 1820 and 1850, women and children became a permanent fixture in the textile and other manufacturing industries. This is largely in part to the fact that the North “devoted a much larger share of its resources to the manufacturing sector than did the South, and the Northeast’s leadership in this regard was particularly pronounced in those industries most intensive in females”

Goldin and Sokoloff use the table below to show an increase in this portion of the labor force. This increase partially relates to the expansion of women and children in this sector. The expansion of women and children in the labor force is due to the fact that manufacturers began to substitute unskilled labor for skilled labor

According to Craig, women and...