“Women’s Liberation: What’s in it for Men?” – An economic perspective
The channel we investigate in this paper is related to the fact that many laws that put constraints on women did so for married women, but not single women. This suggests that husband’s were benefitting from these constraints. It seems quite plausible that a husband prefers to keep his wife’s outside option low because this will give him a better bargaining position with his wife.4 This hypothesis is supported by some of the arguments made by the anti-suffrage movement. People were concerned about the threat to families if women gained the right to vote (e.g. Orestes Brown, a prominent protestant minister, argued in 1873 that the family would fall apart as soon as women were allowed to enter the public sphere). Why, then, would men ever agree to grant more rights to women?
The idea put forth in this paper is that there is a trade-off between what rights men want for their daughters relative to their wives. We interpret rights broadly here and model it as a bargaining parameter in marriage. That is, women without rights have no bargaining power relative to their husband, while full rights will be captured through equal bargaining power. Men ideally want their wives to have no rights, while they do want full rights for their daughters. We assume that rights are extended by law and thus will affect all women (i.e. daughters and wives) equally. If daughters have no rights, then their future husbands will treat them poorly, which fathers of daughters would like to avoid. In addition, a wife’s education matters for producing high-quality children. A husband prefers his children to find high-quality mates, and therefore stands to gain from increasing the power of his children’s mothers-in-law. If men can vote on the extent of women’s rights, they will vote to give them rights just enough to equalize the marginal loss from rights to their wive with the marginal benefit from rights to other men’s wives (daughters and mothers-in-law of own children etc.). We argue that this trade-off changes over time, because of an increasing importance of human capital. More specifically, as returns to human capital increase, the efficiency loss from under-investment in human capital increases. Eventually, men will benefit from voting for full rights for all women.
From http:economics.uwo.ca/newsletter/misc/2007/tertilt_dec7.pdf
Interesting article. Seems obvious after reading it.
