The Effects of Prohibiting Marriage Bars: The Case of U.S. Teachers

Married women in the early twentieth-century United States faced “marriage bars,” a form of employer discrimination that barred them from paid employment. However, because the end of marriage bar use coincided with shifting social norms and labor market conditions, it is unclear how the end of marriage bars affected women’s employment. We study the effects of the state-level prohibition of marriage bars in teaching during the 1930s. A difference-in-differences design shows that the prohibitions increased the share of white married women teachers by 4.1 p.p. (26 percent), with no effect on Black teachers.