Impediment or Stimulant? Marital Status and Graduate Education

This paper examines the effect of marriage upon the student role of men and women in American graduate education. Maried women are caught between two conflicting prime roles-student and spouse. They appear to be the least successful graduate students. Married men, on the other hand, do not feel such a conflict and appear to be productive and happy. For women, divorce appears to be a liberation from the role conflict. Divorced women appear to be very productive and very involved in the student role, while divorced men have lost a source of psychological support and appear unhappy and less productive than their female counterparts. Marital status is, therefore, an important variable that must be taken into account in examining the role performance of graduate students.