Socioeconomic Effects on the Stature of Nineteenth-Century US Women

Abstract

Using a new source of nineteenth-century state prison records and robust statistics, this study contrasts the effects of social conditions on the stature of comparable African American and white women during the economic development of the United States. Across the stature distribution, Great Lakes, Plains, and Southern women were taller than women with other US and international nativities. Women from the Northeast and Middle Atlantic were the shortest within the US, but were taller than British and European immigrants. White women were consistently taller than black women. Stature also varied over time with industrialization and emancipation. Across the stature distribution, women in outdoor, unskilled occupations were taller than women in indoor, skilled occupations. These results show that US women's average statures reflect net nutritional conditions that are not available in traditional measures of economic well-being.

Keywords:

• Height
• physical stature
• women
• nineteenth-century US women
• quantile

JEL Codes:

• J15
• J71
• N32

Acknowledgements

I appreciate comments from John Komlos, Tom Maloney, and Haimanti Bhattacharya. Bryce Harper provided excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are my own.

Notes

Mulatto is a person of mixed African and European ancestry.

I am currently collecting nineteenth-century Irish prison records. Irish prison enumerators also used light, medium, dark, fresh, and sallow to describe white prisoners in prisons from a traditionally white population. To date in this research, I have not found a record of an inmate in an Irish prison with a complexion consistent with African heritage.

The coefficient vector θ is obtained using techniques presented in Roger Koenker and Gilbert Bassett (1978) and Wallace Hendricks and Roger Koenker (1992).

The white–black stature advantage among women was not as large as it as it was for men (Carson 2009a).