The Wife's Work Experience and Child Spacing

Abstract

Many of the traditional fertility differentials in industrially advanced countries have been narrowing during recent years.' Two differentials that continue to be significant are those associated with religion and the wife's work experience.2 Several studies have reported data demonstrating the inverse relationship between the number of children borne by the wife and the length of time she works after her marriage.8 This paper attempts to demonstrate that the duration of the wife's employment is significantly related to the spacing of children as well as to their number. It also attempts to show that this relationship persists, with relatively little reduction in strength, in a significant part of the population of the United States, when the effect of a wide range of other variables is controlled. Since religion is an important concomitant of fertility, child spacing, and many other variables treated here, the analysis is done separately for Catholics and non-Catholics.