Women’s Work: Using U.S. History to Explain Mexican Women’s Differential Work Strategies in Mexico and the United States

Abstract

Mexican women, particularly married women, living in the United States appear to allocate far more of their time to waged work than do women in Mexico. The fierce debate among social scientists over the sources of American women’s steadily rising labor force participation rates during the twentieth century provides hypotheses that all plausibly explain a part of this phenomenon, including a misapprehension of the phenomenon due to the failure of official sources to recognize nonwaged work, the importance of higher wages for pulling women into employment, the growth of work perceived as “women’s work,” the desire of women to provide for their families new goods that they cannot produce at home, the increasing competition of commodity production with home production, and the impact of different social norms.