Social Studies, Human Resources and Adptations

. It examines the ways in which the forms of social structure -- groups, organizations, communities, social categories (such as class, sex, age, or race), and various social institutions (such as kinship, economic, political, or religious) affect human attitudes, actions, and opportunities.

The gender breakdown and age structure remain fairly consistent in the period before 1930. Generally, about 60% of the immigrants were male. As to age structure, about 20% of immigrants were children, 70% were adults up to age 44, and 10% were older than 44. In most of the period and for most countries, immigrants were typically young single males, young couples, or, especially in the era before the steamship, families. For particular countries, such as Ireland, a large number of the immigrants were single women (Cohn, 1995).

Nevertheless, the average married woman in the United States did about three times as much cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other routine housework in the 1990s as the average married man. Household work continues to be divided according to gender, with women performing the vast majority of the repetitive indoor housework tasks and men performing occasional outdoor tasks (Coltrane 2000).

Getting married increases women's domestic labor, whereas it decreases men's.

Educational differences between spouses are rarely associated with divisions of labor, and men with more education often report doing more housework, rather than less, as resource theories predict. Similarly, total family earnings have little effect on how much housework men do, though middle-class men talk more about the importance of sharing than working-class men. Some studies show that spouses with more equal incomes— usually in the working class—share more household labor, but women still do more than men when they have similar jobs

United States Historical Census Data Browser to find raw data for projects. You may search census data by decade from 1790 to 1970. There is a wealth of information here.