1. Nickless Pamela J. , “Changing Labor Productivity and the Utilization of Native Women Workers in the American Cotton Textile Industry: 1825–1860,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University, 1976,
2. The 1820 and 1832 proportions of the manufacturing labor force composed of women and children were estimated by weighting the proportions of particular categories of firms, to adjust for potential biases. Our method uses the definition
3. The evidence on the ratio (wp/wm) in manufacturing from 1885 to 1960 is from Goldin Claudia , Economic Change and American Women (in progress).
4. In a conventional two-sector, two-input model, when one sector grows more rapidly than the other, it necessitates bidding inputs away from the other sector. As a result, the return to the input in which the more rapidly growing sector is intensive, will rise relative to the return of the other factor. See Goldin and Sokoloff, “The Relative Productivity Hypothesis,” for a more formal treatment.
5. There is, however, evidence that during the early period, 88 percent of women working in the large textile mills at Lowell were under 30 years old. See Dublin, Women at Work, p. 258, footnote 9. Even in 1888, after manufacturing had become far more concentrated in urban areas, about 86 percent of all female industrial workers were under 30 years old.