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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 effect 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 effect 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...