Reproducing racial elites: Black domestic labor and White fertility in the Great Migration, 1910-1940

• In Event: Families and Migration (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Population Section)

Abstract

Is the fertility of racial elites affected by their access to the labor of lower-status women? Existing research shows that the concentration of immigrant women in the childcare sector can increase the fertility of non-migrant women by lowering the costs of outsourcing childcare. Although the first wave of the Great Migration (1910-1940) created similar conditions—pushing Black women migrants into domestic labor—no population-level studies exist on the relationship between Black women’s migration to cities and the fertility of White women in those cities. Using full-count Census data and two-way fixed effects models, I show that Black women’s migration to cities in the early twentieth century is positively associated with increased fertility among married White women in these cities. These associations are not explained by nationwide shocks to migration, city-specific characteristics, or time- and city-specific predictors of migration. Instead, I hypothesize that White women increased their fertility by outsourcing some of the work of having additional children to Black domestic workers. I find some support for this hypothesis: in the Midwest, the associations are stronger among upper-class White women—those most likely to hire a domestic worker—and, in the South, cities in which Black women had fewer employment options beyond domestic work had stronger associations. My results suggest a novel historical mechanism affecting fertility among racial elites: the racial division of reproductive labor.

Author

• Hero Ashman, University of California-Berkeley