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Urban Structure and School Participation: Immigrant Women in 1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

John Rury
John Rury*
Affiliation:
Antioch College
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Extract

Generally uniform and high rates of school participation have become an article of faith in postwar America. But at the turn of the century there was wide variation in school enrollment practices from one part of the country to another. This article will examine the determinants of interurban differences in school participation in 1900. Recent studies of school enrollment have focused on a narrow range of cities and have emphasized the importance of family background variables on the decisions of individual children to remain in school or to drop out (Katz, 1972; Troen, 1973; Kaestle and Vinovskis, 1979). Most studies have focused on the ability of children from different backgrounds to attend school. In his ground-breaking article, “Who Went to School,” Michael Katz (1972) called for more research on interurban variation in school enrollment, but few historians have considered how the social and economic environments of different cities may have conditioned decisions to go to school in the past. In their studies on youth and early industrialization, Katz and Davey (1978a and 1978b) demonstrate that school attendance dropped when industrial jobs became widely available in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, but they made little effort to identify the precise relationship between school attendance and the requirements of different sorts of jobs. Why should the advent of industralism mean lower school participation? This question will be addressed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , Summer 1984 , pp. 219 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1984 

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Footnotes

fn00

Author’s Note: The research for this article was supported by the National Institute of Education, Contract No. 400-79-0019. I would like to thank Carl Kaestle, John Sharpless, Maris Vinovskis, Michael Olneck, and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments on this article or associated research reports. Because I have obstinately resisted elements of their counsel, however, they—along with NIE—should be absolved of guilt by association with what follows.

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