Wife's Status and Family Social Standing

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Abstract
In this article, I analyze the effect of husbands' and wives' statuses on class self-placement. While the effect of wife's occupation is greater for employed wives than it is for their husbands, both employed women and their husbands attribute far greater importance to the husband's occupation. For couples in which the wife is a housewife, the class self-placement of both husbands and wives is far more strongly affected by husband's status than by wife's education. Overall, wives' characteristics make little difference either to husbands' or to wives' estimation of their social standing. The somewhat higher class self-placement of members of couples in which the wife has no paid job suggests the persistence of a patriarchal one-earner norm.