Migration, Marriage, and Social Mobility: Women in Sweden 1880-1900

We study the social mobility of women by looking at the connection between migration and marriage outcomes using complete count census data for Sweden. The censuses 1880-1900 have been linked at the individual level, enabling us to follow 100,000 women from their parental home to their new marital household. Marriage market imbalances were not an important push factor for migration but we find a strong association between migration distance and marriage outcomes, both in terms of overall marriage probabilities and in terms of partner selection. These results highlight the importance of migration for women’s social mobility during industrialization. This paper has been done within the research project “The Rise and Fall of the Industrial City”, funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. We are grateful to the SweCens project at the Swedish National Archives, and especially Mats Berggren for providing the data and valuable assistance in developing the census linkage. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the conference Women in Changing Labor Markets, Lund University, March 2015, the annual meetings of the Economic History Association, Nashville TN, September 2015, and the Social Science History Association, Baltimore MD, November 2015, and at the Department of Economics, Northwestern University. We are grateful to participants at these occasions, and especially Ineke Maas, Laura Salisbury, and Richard Zijdeman for valuable comments and suggestions.