Women’s Income and Marriage Markets in the United States: Evidence from the Civil War Pension

Although economic opportunities for women are thought to influence marriage market outcomes today, they receive little attention in accounts of 19th century American marriage patterns. The principle behind this mechanism is simple: women may choose to substitute away from marriage as alternatives become more attractive. However, providing evidence for this behavior is challenging because choices about marriage and career jointly determine one another. In this paper, I demonstrate that women’s income had a causal effect on their behavior in the marriage market during the late 19th century by analyzing the way in which Civil War pension income altered the marital outcomes of Union Army widows. Eligibility for a widow’s pension depended only on her first husband’s military service and the circumstances of his death, so it should be uncorrelated with the widow’s own characteristics; moreover, pensions terminated upon remarriage. Thus, pensions should have affected marital outcomes only insofar as they shifted the balance of costs and benefits women associated with marriage. Using a new database that I compile from widows’ pension files, I estimate that receiving a pension lowered the rate of remarriage by 40 percent, which implies an increase in the median time to remarriage of approximately three years. This indicates that women were willing to substitute away from marriage during this period if the alternatives were favorable enough. By offering evidence for this behavior, the results extend beyond the 19th century to shed light on marriage markets in later periods. ∗Boston University. I thank Robert Margo, Claudia Olivetti, Daniele Paserman, Carola Frydman, and Shari Eli for invaluable advice. Comments from Joseph Burton, Louis Cain, Dora Costa, Joseph Ferrie, Frank Lewis, Aloysius Siow, Richard Steckel, and seminar participants at Boston University, Harvard, Northwestern, CPE-University of Chicago, Toronto, Guelph, National Bureau of Economic Research, and the annual meetings of the Economic History Association are also gratefully acknowledged. I also thank Noelle Yetter at the CPE, and the helpful and knowledgeable staff at the National Archives in Washington, DC. I acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation (SES-1227471), the Economic History Association, and the Institute for Economic Development at Boston University. Any errors are mine.