Book Review

Women's Work? is a rare example of collaborative and interdisciplinary scholarship, with the historian Joel Perlmann and the economist Robert A. Margo teaming up to reexamine when and why teaching, especially in the primary grades, became synonymous with "women's work." Their working premise is that the predominance of this nationwide employment pattern in the twentieth century has obscured a critical historical phenomenon; namely, that the feminization of the teaching profession did not proceed uniformly across the United States but was characterized, instead, by sharp regional variations (even when controlling for rural/urban differences) that persisted throughout much of the nineteenth century. Region, they posit, mattered, especially prior to the Civil War, when a much higher percentage of women found employment as teachers in the Northeast than in the South. Even more telling for Perlmann and Margo was the persistence of this North-South divide as Americans migrated westward: "Patterns established in New England and in the southeastern states migrated with the settlers to other parts of the continent."

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