Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP7485
Authors: Lena Cecilia Edlund; Cecilia Machado
Abstract: Women?s economic emancipation arguably took off in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While ubiquitous, its origins are not well understood. In an influential paper, Goldin and Katz [2002] pointed to the role of unmarried women?s access to the oral contraceptive (the Pill), ushered in by the extension of legal rights to "mature minors" in the late 1960s early 1970s. However, the Pill was FDA approved already in 1960, and many states allowed a minor to marry, thereby emancipating her with respect to medical treatment, including the Pill. By the mid-1970s, the minimum marriage age had been lowered to 18 in almost all states. Exploiting changes in the legal rights of young adults by state, we find evidence that the Pill made early marriage more attractive and facilitated women?s educational and occupational attainments. Marriage combined with the Pill, we speculate, may have provided women with the means to pursue higher education at a time of limited student aid and ability to borrow against future earnings.
Keywords: contraceptive pill; education; marriage; occupation
JEL Codes: J13; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| lowering of the minimum marriage age to 18 (J12) | raised the probability of marriage among women aged 18 and 19 (J12) |
| access to the pill (I19) | made marriage more attractive to young women (J12) |
| women who married at an earlier age (J12) | more likely to pursue higher education and professional careers (I24) |
| minimum marriage age set at 18 (J12) | statistically significant increase in the probability of women being in professional occupations (J44) |
| marriage rights at ages 18 and 20 (J12) | significant impact on the fraction of college graduates who became doctors and lawyers (I24) |
| early access through marriage (J12) | did not result in significantly higher educational attainment (I24) |
| marriage acted as a facilitator for women's educational and professional achievements (J12) | during the era of the pill (J18) |