Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity.

• Author: Fishback, Price

Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity

By Claudia Goldin

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021

Pp. xii, 325. $27.95 hardcover

Over the past five decades Claudia Goldin has had a magnificent career. She won multiple awards for her magisterial 1990 book on the history of women in the labor force, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press). While producing award winning research on the race between education and technology (for example, The Race between Education and Technology, 2008, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, co-authored by Lawrence F. Katz), she has continued her research on women in the economy. Her new book examines how college-educated women have managed the complicated relationships between family and careers since the late 1800s. It is written for a general audience and therefore emphasizes a few points and does not have much of the technical detail found in her earlier books. Yet the forces she emphasizes are powerful and clearly play a major role in the choices women have made between careers and family over the past 120 years. She should probably make room on her bookshelf for more awards, because the book is an excellent examination of the topic.

As an economic historian, Goldin is used to discussing the complexity of history. Yet much to her amazement (p. 23), she discovered that the evolutionary story for college-educated women could be told simply by dividing them into five distinct cohorts over time. The women within each cohort faced the same constraints, had the same aspirations, married at the same rate, chose similar ages at which to marry and give birth, and had similar timing in their career choices. Meanwhile the differences between cohorts were substantial, and the breaks between groups were due mainly to forces outside the control of the families who were making decisions. The cohorts are neatly summarized in Figure 2.1 and pp. 24-45, and then each cohort is discussed in depth in separate chapters.

The first cohort, born between 1878 and 1897 and graduating between 1900 and 1919, was a relatively small group that chose between Family or Career. Half never had children and those generally worked for pay at some point in their lives. The Job then Family cohort, born between 1898 and 1923 and graduating between 1919 and 1945, often started out in a job and then formed a family. Most who eventually married had children. Their...