The Garbage Generation cites interesting statistics from The Coming Matriarchy:
Only 61 percent of the working women we surveyed had children, compared with 85 percent of the nonworking women….Our survey also showed that working women have less successful marriages….[A] woman who works was five times as likely to have a disrupted marriage as one who did not work….[W]orking wives are more than twice as likely as housewives to have had affairs by the time they reach their late thirties.
Things get worse as she earns more money. Vassar economist Shirley Johnson calculated that every $1,000 increase in a wife’s earnings increases her chance for divorce by 2 percent.
As I’ve previously written, the wise man who wants a family will marry a nanny, an aerobics instructor or a waitress, the kind of woman who actually wants to get married, have children and make a home. I wonder what old Shirley makes and what caused her to study that question about earnings and divorce.
In ten years, there hasn’t been a single divorce between any of the couples of my extended social circle. This may be entirely coincidental, of course, but that circle is largely made up of Christian homeschooling families where the oppressed wives don’t work and raise an average number of children that is well in excess of the replacement rate at three+. I further note that the only marriage I would consider to be at obvious risk of divorce is a non-Christian couple in which the wife is the primary wage-earner.
The economic element of divorce should have been predictable, of course. Why else would the Sisterhood have have been fighting so long and hard for social acceptance of women’s labor combined with a female-friendly divorce system?