The intergenerational diffusion of World War I on female labor

World War I profoundly altered the role of women in the French society. Indeed, the demographic changes caused by the 1.3 million men who died during the war induced millions of women to enter the labor force during the interwar period (Boehnke and Gay 2022). Did these generations of “newly working women” contribute to change socials norms toward female labor and gender roles for later generations? This project aims at understanding mechanisms of the diffusion of this shock across generations, from mothers to daughters and through marriage. In particular, it tries to understand whether the gendered legacy of the war had heterogeneous consequences across the life cycle.