In a February 2025 blog post, I created a chart showing male and female work patterns both inside and outside the home, going back to 1900. The data was for the United States, and the general trends were more female work in the paid labor force, more male work in the household (rather than paid labor force), but overall total hours of work being roughly constant from 1900 to 2023 (on average, of course).
Despite women always working, 1900 did look a lot different: adult working-age women in the US spent about 50 hours per week working in their own household, and a little under 10 hours per week in the formal paid labor force. Men were almost a mirror image of this (though working a few hours less per week in total).
So the gradual change over the 20th century was a huge shift in gender roles, and by 2023 women on average spent about the same number of hours in household and paid work. But the US is something of an anomaly here. Female labor force participation was higher — in some cases much higher — in other developed countries around 1900. Using data collected by Claudia Olivetti, here are female labor force participation rates for working age women (generally ages 15-64) around 1890-1900 (I average across years if there are multiple estimates):
- Italy: 49.4%
- France: 46.3%
- Denmark: 43.0%
- Belgium: 40.5%
- Portugal: 39.2%
- United Kingdom: 38.2%
- Norway: 36.1%
- Australia: 31.5%
- Sweden: 30.9%
- Netherlands: 26.3%
- Finland: 25.5%
- Spain: 21.5%
- United States: 19.5%
- Canada: 13.7%
For those of that live in the United States, it is perfectly natural to be interested in our own history. But it is also useful to understand the history of our peer nations (other high-income democracies), and from this history we see that half of countries with available data already had more than one-third of women working in the paid labor force around 1900, with a few approaching 50 percent. There is not one model of gender roles in the labor force that dominated in 1900 among the most developed countries at the time.
These rates are all looking at the paid labor force. If we broaden the definition to include working on family farms and other unpaid labor (that still looks like formal labor of the time), the United States had much higher labor force participation in that era: about 57% for free (mostly white) women in 1860, and in 1920 it was 48% for white women and 68% for black woman. Of course, this is asking a different question, so we shouldn’t compare those figures to the list of other countries above. But it does speak to the different way the US economy was structured in the late 19th century relative to other countries. Canada, also with a low female participation rate around 1900, had an economy that was similarly rural/agriculturally dominated.
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