Time-Dependent Effects of Wives’ Employment on Marital Dissolution
By Scott J. South. American Sociological Review, 2001
170 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The specialization and trading model—the dominant theoretical perspective on marital stability—posits a positive effect of wives’ economic independence on the risk of divorce. Prior evidence for this association is mixed, however. This analysis explores the possibility that the effect of wives’ labor force supply and educational attainment on marital dissolution varies across historical periods and across the marital life course. Event-history analyses of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for 3,523 married couples observed between 1969 and 1993 reveal that the impact of wives’ employment on marital dissolution has become increasingly positive. Moreover, as marriages age, the positive effect of wives’ employment on divorce becomes stronger and the negative impact of wives’ education becomes weaker. Possible explanations for these varying effects include the development of institutional supports for unmarried working mothers, the increasing adoption of nontraditional gender-role ideologies, and trends in workplace sex segregation.
Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d975011838030dfe84fe378ebc08383314a0fdd7
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Citations in the corpus
- A Multifaceted Approach to the Mental Health Advantage of the Married (2006, unknown): “Possibly, this is due to an increase in family responsibilities (especially children) that follow marriage along with conformity to gender role expectations in marriage that the specialization and trading model suggests (Oppenheimer, 1997; South, 2001).”
- Change and Stability in the Social Determinants of Divorce: A Comparison of Marriage Cohorts in the Netherlands (2006, unknown): “Some authors point to the socioeconomic hardship facing the lower educated (Cherlin, 1979; Voydanoff, 1990; Goode, 1993; Jalovaara, 2003), whereas others point to a possible lack of communication skills and cognitive resources that are needed to make a relationship work (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994;”
- Women's economic standing, marriage timing, and cross-national contexts of gender (2003, background): “, a context that is sufficiently attractive for the majority of wives to work), norms and practices in marriage and at work are more compatible with women’s economic contribution and hence yield fewer stresses and inefficiencies (South, 2001).”