The Division of Labor, the New Marriage, and Marital Instability

Work in law and in economics has long suggested that marriages will be more successful if they take advantage of specialization between husband and wife (Becker, 1974). If husbands and wives operate their marriages like trading nations, they could obviously reap large gains from trade if each spent time in its most productive use. In fact, research on married men shows both that they profit substantially from marriage in many ways and that they do better the more specialized, or "traditional," the marriage (Nock, 1998). The last fifty years have worked dramatic changes in the options available to women, as the majority are now in the paid labor force for substantially all of their peak earning years (Spain and Bianchi, 1995). During this same time period, men?s options, as demonstrated by their labor force participation rates, have not changed much. In other words, women's lifetime labor patterns have changed dramatically, and now very much resemble men's. The hope of what used to be called the "women?s liberation" movement was to equalize the housework done by men and women. That way, women would not simply end up working "two shifts" of market and household labor (Hochschild, 1990). This paper looks empirically at what happens when marriage relationships become more egalitarian. When both husband and wife work, will the relationships be more stable if they share household tasks? How much of marital instability is related to feelings of unfairness regarding the allocation of household chores and childcare? Does it matter for the stability of marriage whether men do "women's work" for the household or women "men's"? We consider the two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households, compiled by demographers at the University of Wisconsin (Sweet et al., 1996). Of 13,000 households sampled, 7,984 included a married couple. Both adults were asked numerous questions in 1987-88, and again in 1992-93. We construct a model for the hazard of divorce for spouses in first marriages between the two waves of the study. We include as independent variables a number of factors that prior studies, including Becker, Landes and Michael (1977), use as predictors of marital instability. These include cohabitation prior to marriage, total marital fertility, education of husband and wife, prior marriage of husband and wife, prior divorces of their parents, age at marriage. To these we add factors related to husbands' and wives' labor force participation, their division of household labor (broken into nine categories), and their feelings at the time of the earlier survey about the fairness of the way household tasks, spending, and childcare were allocated in their particular marriage. Laws do not usually regulate the allocation of household labor, but allow spouses to sort out the appropriate proportions themselves. One exception is the former East German FGB ? 10, which mandated equal sharing of household work. From the results of the study we might anticipate whether such laws would likely be successful (either in increasing the hours actually worked by husbands or in promoting better marriages). Assuming women will continue to participate in the labor force, we can also anticipate some of the likely effects of precommitment options (like the new covenant marriage)(Scott and Scott, forthcoming 1998), suggestions for financial recognition of household labor (Brinig, 1997; Silbaugh, 1996), or contracting out of what used to be "women's work" (Carbone and Brinig, 1991).