ling, market work, and home work of post-adolescent daughters suggested that experiences early in the life cycle of women might have greatly affected their market involvement when older. The increased attainment of education for women effected their involvement in both the areas of market work and home work. Due to schooling, single women spent less time working in the home with their mothers. Also, at the time when these women finished their schooling there were more opportunities for them to work in the clerical sector of the market economy. The cohorts who experienced schooling and early work force participation were those whose labor market participation rates, both in their early years and in their later married years, substantially increased over previous levels.Another theory of change in the economic role of married women falls under Goldin’s category of cohort specific effects. It stresses the concept of relative income and the importance of fertility decisions. Goldin distinguished between changes in the labor force participation rate of younger and older women by using the fertility rate as the prime determinant. The reason for the change in fertility rate was because of alterations of the relative income of younger men, presumably the prospective husbands of the younger women. Goldin defined relative income as income in comparison to what one had anticipated earning, relative to the incomes of older cohorts. The cohort of young men born between 1920 and 1930 was a relatively small cohort. This cohort of young men married in the relatively prosperous post-World War II era. These two facts are important because together they lead to these men marrying young and commanding higher salaries, which lead to a rise in the fertility rate. This increase in the fertility rate meant that there were fewer young women who were able to participate in the labor force. Therefore, there was only a slight increase in the la...
