What About Married Women Who Quit Working and Return Home?

Abstract

It has become the talk of the town whether married women should quit working and return home. Everybody is talking about it, but there is no consensus of opinion. What do the women themselves think about this? By random sampling, the Institute of Sociology under the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the Shanghai Municipal Urban-Rural Investigation Team surveyed 500 married couples on this issue. Findings from the survey reveal that 23.7 percent of married women are willing to return home to concentrate on household matters provided that their husbands make enough money to keep the whole family well off. Some 1.4 percent of the women noted that it would also be feasible for the husbands to quit working and return home. On the husband's side, however, more of them, 39.2 percent, prefer to have their wives quit working, and only 1.8 percent are willing to resign and return home. Quite a few of those surveyed indicate that allowing one spouse to concentrate on household duties is nothing more than an ex...