NBER Working Paper No. W13919
MATTHIAS DOEPKE, Northwestern University, Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Economics, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Email: doepke at econ.ucla.edu MICHELE TERTILT, Stanford University - Department of Economics Email: tertilt at stanford.edu
The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We show that men face a tradeoff between the rights they want for their own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy. Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights increases educational investments in children. We show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights in England and the United States.