Gender Ideology, Marital Disruption, and the Employment of Married Women

Abstract

After peaking around 1980, period rates of divorce seem to have stabilized in the United States. Nonetheless, there is still a great deal of theoretical and empirical interest in the determinants of marital instability. Conventional wisdom has long linked marital instability to the employment of married women, but the empirical findings in this literature are far from unequivocal. One of the more consistent findings is the of wife's employment: Nearly every empirical study suggests that there is a positive monotonic relationship between marital instability and the wife's number of hours employed per week. There are several different kinds of effects of wives' paid employment on marital stability presented in the literature. One school of thought holds that there is something inherent in the employment of married women that serves to destabilize the marriage, for example, by upsetting traditional marriage norms or by decreasing the husband's marital satisfaction. Another line of reasoning argues that the employment of married women and the expectation of continuing employment outside of marriage serves to make divorce more attractive. This viewpoint posits the employment of wives as a facilitating factor in divorce, not actually producing marital conflict but making divorce more likely for those couples for whom conflict already exists. The so-called absence effect argues that employment outside the home takes the wife away from traditional homemaking responsibilities, with possible effects of increasing stress and conflict within the marriage. Whether this explanation is correct or not, the of hours worked outside the home is well documented in the empirical literature. Mott and Moore (1979) found a positive relationship between number of hours of paid employment and probability of divorce for White women but not for Black women: White women who are employed 35 hours per week or more have a 60% greater risk of marital disruption over a 5-year period. Huber and Spitze (1980) found that wife's work history is positively related to thoughts of divorce. Greene and Quester (1982) observed that women in groups at high risk for divorce are more likely to be in the labor force, more likely to have higher wages, and more likely to work more hours than women in low-risk groups. Booth, Johnson, White, and Edwards (1984) found that total hours on the job and being employed over 40 hours per week are associated with a construct measuring marital instability. Spitze and South (1985) found that number of hours paid employment is significantly related to probability of divorce for women who work at least 35 hours per week (not controlling for income), while South and Spitze (1986) observed that being in the labor force and number of hours employed are related to divorce. Greenstein (1990) found that women who are employed more than 35 hours per week have more than twice the risk of marital disruption of women who are employed 20-35 hours per week, net of income, relative earnings ratio, and other factors. Greenstein also noted that the negative of hours employed on marital stability is partially offset by the positive effects of wives' income. A shortcoming in this literature is the implicit assumption made by most researchers that the stability of all marriages is affected in the same manner and at approximately the same level of magnitude by the wife's employment. However, those studies that have examined interactions of wives' employment characteristics with other variables have tended to find that the effects of wives' employment do vary. Analyzing the effects of hours employed separately for marriages varying in categories of children present, family income, and husband's attitude toward his wife's employment, Spitze and South (1985) found the effects strongest for childless women and women with preschoolers, for women in medium-and high-income families, and for women who perceive that their husbands disapprove of their employment, while Vannoy and Philliber (1992) found that gender role attitudes interact with wives' employment characteristics in terms of their effects on perceived marital quality. …