2026 Dorothy S. Thomas Award Recipient

Congratulations to Hero Ashman, graduate student from University of California, Berkeley, as the 2026 recipient of the Dorothy S. Thomas Award. The Thomas award is presented annually for the best graduate student paper on the interrelationships among social, economic and demographic variables.

Ashman's Award Winning Work

Hero Ashman received the 2026 Dorothy S. Thomas Award for her winning paper, titled “Marriage and the racial division of reproductive labor: Evidence from the Great Migration, 1910-1940."

 Her paper demonstrates that, during the Great Migration, white women married at younger ages in cities with greater migration of Black women, particularly where Black women were employed in domestic labor. By highlighting the role of reproductive labor—not just economic resources—in facilitating marriage, the study shows how the family formation patterns of advantaged groups were supported by the labor of less advantaged groups. This innovative perspective provides new insights into the relationship between race, labor, and marriage in the United States.

Abstract

Increases in immigration to the US can increase the fertility of high-income native-born women by lowering the cost of childcare and other domestic services. Feminist scholars refer to this as the international or racial division of reproductive labor: the process by which the domestic labor required to maintain higher-status families is done for pay by lower-status women. This division of labor reproduces advantages for families with race and class privilege. Does it also produce the conditions for families to form in the first place? To answer this question, I use the case of Black women’s concentration in domestic labor during the early Great Migration (1910-1940). Using full count Census data and two-way fixed effects models, I show that in cities with higher rates of migration among Black women, White women married at earlier ages. The effects are strongest in cities in which Black women were heavily concentrated in domestic labor, suggesting that outsourcing domestic tasks to lower-status women eased the transition to housewife for White women. My results extend theories of marriage timing to consider how marriage among advantaged groups is patterned by their access to the reproductive labor of disadvantaged groups.

Award Committee

Chair Sasha Killewald, University of Michigan; Monica Alexander, University of Toronto; Fernanda Rojas Ampuero, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Dennis Feehan, University of California, Berkeley; Erin Ice, University of Texas at Austin; Beth Jarosz, Georgetown University; Ralph Ignacio Lawton, Harvard University; Jenna Nobles, University of California, Berkeley

Presentation

I am so grateful to have received the Dorothy S. Thomas award at PAA, and to have found a welcoming and inspiring home in this community. Thank you to everyone on the award committee. A big thank you to my advisors, Chris Muller and Deirdre Bloome, whose invaluable guidance has shaped this project from its inception. This paper draws extensively on feminist and Black feminist scholarship, without which the central question would not have been visible. I am especially indebted to the work of Enobong Branch, Mignon Duffy and Evelyn Nakano Glenn. I hope my work contributes to a long conversation about what feminist frameworks make possible within demographic research.