In the two decades between 1910 and 1930, more than ten percent of the black population of the United States left the South, where the preponderance of the black population had been located, and migrated to northern states, with the largest number moving, it is claimed, between 1916 and 1918. It has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that the majority of the migrants in what has come to be called the Great Migration came from rural areas and were motivated by two concurrent factors: the collapse of the cotton industry following the boll weevil infestation, which began in 1898, and increased demand in the North for labor following the cessation of European immigration caused by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This assumption has led to the conclusion that the migrants’ subsequent lack of economic mobility in the North is tied to rural background, a background that implies unfamiliarity with urban living and a lack of industrial skills.

But the question of who actually left the South has never been rigorously investigated. Although numerous investigations document an exodus from rural southern areas to southern cities prior to the Great Migration, no one has considered whether the same migrants then moved on to northern cities. In 1910 more than 600,000 black workers, or ten percent of the black workforce, reported themselves to be engaged in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits," the federal census category roughly encompassing the entire industrial sector. The Great Migration could easily have been made up entirely of this group and their families. It is perhaps surprising to argue that an employed population could be enticed to move, but an explanation lies in the labor conditions then prevalent in the South.

About thirty-five percent of the urban black population in the South was engaged in skilled trades. Some were from the old artisan class of slavery—blacksmiths, masons, carpenters—which had had a monopoly of certain trades, but they were gradually being pushed out by competition, mechanization, and obsolescence. The remaining sixty-five percent, more recently urbanized, worked in newly developed industries—tobacco, lumber, coal and iron manufacture, and railroads. Wages in the South, however, were low, and black workers were aware, through labor recruiters and the black press, that they could earn more even as unskilled workers in the North than they could as artisans in the South. After the boll weevil infestation, urban black workers faced competition from the continuing influx of both black and white rural workers, who were driven to undercut the wages formerly paid for industrial jobs. Thus, a move north would be seen as advantageous to a group that was already urbanized and steadily employed, and the easy conclusion tying their subsequent economic problems in the North to their rural background comes into question.

    In colonial Connecticut between 1670 and 1719, women participated in one of every six civil cases, the vast majority of which were debtrelated. Women's participation dropped to one in ten cases after 1719, and to one in twenty by the 1770's. however, as Cornelia Hughes Dayton notes in Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789, these statistics are somewhat deceptive: in fact, both the absolute numbers and the percentage of adult women participating in civil cases grew steadily throughout the eighteenth century, but the legal activity of men also increased dramatically, and at a much faster rate. Single, married, and widowed women continued to pursue their own and their husbands' debtors through legal action much as they had done in the previous century, but despite this continuity, their place in the legal system shifted dramatically. Men's commercial interests and credit networks became increasingly far-flung, owing in part to the ability of creditors to buy and sell promissory notes (legal promises to pay debts). At the same time, women's networks of credit and debt remained primarily local and personal. Dayton contends that, although still performing crucial economic services in their communities—services that contributed to the commercialization of the colonial economy—women remained for the most part outside the new economic and legal culture of the eighteenth century.