Claudia Goldin: Nobel Prize Winner
Harvard Economist Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in economics. I have long been a follower of her work. I thought that I would share one thing that I learned from her that has stuck with me.
Goldin’s words below:
One of the chapters is about Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” published in 1963. I had read the book and known that Friedan was a great journalist and that much of what she said in the book was overstated. But while researching the data on women in the workplace during the period she was looking at, I realized that many of the statistics cited in the book were completely wrong! The 1950s were not a regression or reversal of educated women’s lives. The college-educated women of “The Feminine Mystique” were no different from the women who preceded them; they just had different constraints and different opportunities. The women of the earliest generation I studied often chose between having a family or a job (sometimes a career). But women graduating college in the 1940s and 1950s had a greater ability to get married after college, to have kids, and then use their training to re-emerge in the workforce. Friedan was studying them while they were married and having children, and she could see that many of them were unhappy in that place, but it wasn’t as retrograde as she claimed because they didn’t have to make the more difficult choice between a job and a family. They could have both. Just not always at the same time.