Women’s Employment in the United States After the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Abstract

Lasting changes in women’s employment followed the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States. In the decades before the pandemic, consistently fewer women reported an occupation in cities that would go on to have longer interventions targeted at curbing influenza. This gap narrowed after the pandemic, and by 1930 cities with longer interventions experienced a 3.9 percentage point improvement in women’s employment rates on average, relative to cities with shorter interventions. These gains were concentrated in cities in which women had the right to vote prior to 1920.