Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates 1850-1920

We document that women's economic mobility improved nearly a century before married women gained broad labor market opportunities.Using Massachusetts marriage registers linked to U.S. censuses (1850-1920), we create new father-child links for women to estimate intergenerational mobility and assortative mating, overcoming a key historical linkage barrier.Estimates from a structural marriage market model suggest assortative mating fell 61% from 1850-1870 to 1900-1920.Counterfactuals imply women's mobility would have been far lower absent the decline in assortative mating.Had late cohorts faced early cohort sorting, the rank-rank slope between a woman's father and husband would have been 2.5 times higher.