How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home? Perhaps you could ask some women. You'll also find that there's no

How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home? Perhaps you could ask some women. You'll also find that there's not exactly a shortage of literature on this topic. I'll offer just one feature: If you have a job outside the home, you are free to quit your job and take a better job when conditions change. Not so easy to "quit" the "job" of raising your kids, or of living in your home when you have no other home to live in and no work experience that you can use to find a job somewhere else. US literacy rates from 1850 to the present These have little to say about the question. Literacy rate in the USA is a poor proxy for "education" because it's just too basic (you can be considered literate in American English and still have only a fourth-grade education) and is covered by the universal primary education system that we've had for years. The US population has grown largely through immigration since 1850, which makes it misleading to attribute changes in literacy rate directly to trends in childhood education. And, even apart from that, the major factor in the US literacy rate from 1850 to the present is likely to be the difference in education available to different subsets of the population, and the relative sizes of these subsets: http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp In 1870 80% of the black population was illiterate, presumably because it was composed of former slaves who had generally been forbidden to learn to read. And this illiteracy rate among the black population declined fairly slowly and remains higher than among the white population, a fact which has a lot to do with the hundred-year period of Jim Crow segregation that started soon after the Civil War was over and continued through the civil rights movement, with legacy effects lasting to this day.