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In the 1940s the average real weekly wages of black women nearly doubled, thereby narrowing the racial wage gap among nonfarm, working women by a full 15 percentage points. At the same time, the proportion of employed black women holding formal sector jobs increased from 27 to 50 percent. According to our best estimates of the racial wage gap, the 1940s marked a dramatic departure from African-American women's experiences earlier in the twentieth century, as they took a large first step towards greater economic equality.
Previous research has focused on the decade's significance in spurring the labor-force participation of white women and wage growth among black men. But black women's labor market outcomes evolved quite differently from those of other groups since 1940. Consequently, their economic history cannot be understood as a mere combination of the existing stories for white women and black men.
By developing a detailed ecology of black women's labor market experiences in the 1940s and setting it in contrast to previous and subsequent decades, this article contributes to a central theme in American economic history: the story of how race, gender, and labor markets interacted over the course of the turbulent twentieth century. Our argument is twofold. First, we claim that the 1940s were a watershed decade for African-American women's integration into formal sector employment and marked a turning point in the growth path of their wages relative to those of white women. The labor market gains during the 1940s were not continuations of pre-existing trends, and the relative wage gains in the 1940s are comparable to those achieved during the 1960s and commonly associated with the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, the 1940s advances were sustained. Over the 1950s, black women's wages and occupations did not revert to their pre-World War II distributions, nor did the wage gap between black and white women widen.
Second, using a semiparametric decomposition methodology pioneered by John DiNardo, Nicole Fortin, and Thomas Lemieux, we quantify the importance of changes in the wage structure after accounting for changes in black and white women's productive and personal characteristics and in their representation across jobs and locations. We find that large wage gains in domestic service jobs (where black women were concentrated) relative to clerical jobs (where...