The Theory the Sex-Role Revolution

It is fascinating to see how fast gender roles have changes in the over 100 years. In the 1890 only 2% of married women worked outside the home and recently in 2006 there were 100% of married women in the workforce. Kingsley Davis believes their were many factors that played into this migration into the workforce.

One reason Davis claimed had an effect on women in the workforce was rise and fall of the Breadwinner system. In the breadwinning system, husbands provided income for the family while the wife tended to the home and children. This type of system made very distinct roles for women and men, not only figuratively but physically. Men actually spent their time working long hours away from home in cities to provide for their families, while women did everything in the home to make sure the family was functional. In the late 1900s, the median age of giving birth was 40 years old while the life expectancy was only 57 years old, which meant, wives actually spent their whole life rearing and raising children. This duty of rearing children made it virtually impossible for women to work outside the home for a long period of time (especially if their husbands were not raising their children).

By the 1940s, the breadwinner system started to crumble. The industrialization made a high demand for workers and women were now starting to have their last child in their late 20s. This newly freed time and demand made work more appealing. Also the new fear of divorce played push factor for women to start provide financial support for themselves.

My question is if this trend of migrating to the workforce and having a more egalitarian system occurred at a faster rate in the African American community than in the White community that this data is seem to refer? I know Black women needed to work to make a living wage for their family and also they were forced to work in earlier centuries because of slavery. Did this accelerate their sex-role revolution?