Wives' Employment and Marital Happiness: Assessing the Direction of Influence Using Longitudinal Couple Data

Robert Schoen, Pennsylvania State University
Stacy Rogers, Pennsylvania State University
Paul Amato, Pennsylvania State University

We investigated the relationship between marital happiness and wives' full-time employment using the 1987-88 and 1992-94 waves of the National Survey of Families and Households. In the first analysis, we sought to predict wives' employment between the two waves using marital happiness and other Time 1 characteristics. The results showed a significantly higher level of wives' employment when the wife was not happy at Time 1. In the second analysis, we examined whether, controlling for Time 1 happiness and other factors, wives' employment between Times 1 and 2 influenced marital stability and marital happiness at Time 2. We found that wives' employment increased marital stability, but had no effect on the happiness of intact couples. Unhappy wives are more likely to work and unhappy couples are much more likely to dissolve their marriages, but contrary to frequently invoked social and economic theories, wives' employment plays a positive not a negative role in marital stability.