Combining Marriage and Career: The Marital Adjustment of Professional Women

By.focusing on very highly educated women, the present study serves to further test the comprehensiveness of role theory as an explanation of the complex relationship between female employment and marital adjustment. The data are from a sample of 663 women who received high-level graduate degrees from a large midwestern university between 1964 and 1974. Because females with high-level degrees expected to make use of their training and pursue their careers, it was thought that in this instance the marital adjustment qf working women would be higher than that fbr nonworking women. The findings are in the predicted direction. However, looking at the various regression equations, it appears that it is not employment status per se that is important in determining marital adjustment but rather the extent to which family experiences accommodate the wife's employment. Having a supportive husband seems to be a major factor, i.e., one who is willing to quit his job and move to advance the wife's career; one who does not insist that the wife quit her job and move to advance his career; and one who shares similar values and beliefs, especially about women's employment, as represented by educational homogamy. Freedom from childbearing responsibilities is also important.