Women's Education, Marital Violence, and Divorce: A Social Exchange Perspective
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Cody Warner,Richard B. Felson,Derek A. Kreager,Marin R. Wenger |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12018 |
DEREK A. KREAGER,RICHARD B. FELSON,CODY WARNER,AND MARIN R. WENGER
Pennsylvania State University
Women’s Education, Marital Violence, and Divorce:
A Social Exchange Perspective
Drawing on social exchange theories, the
authors hypothesized that educated women are
more likely than uneducated women to leave vio-
lent marriages and suggested that this pattern
offsets the negative education – divorce asso-
ciation commonly found in the United States.
They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of
young adult data on 914 married women from
the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent
Health. The evidence suggests that the negative
relationship between women’s education and
divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse
than when they do not. The authors observed a
similar pattern when they examined the asso-
ciation of women’s proportional earnings and
divorce, controlling for education. Supplemen-
tary analyses suggested that marital satisfaction
explains some of the association among women’s
resources, victimization, and divorce but that
marital violence continues to be a significant
moderator of the education – divorce associa-
tion. In sum, education appears to benefit women
by both maintaining stable marriages and dis-
solving violent ones.
Women’s educational attainment has risen
dramatically in the past three decades, with the
Department of Sociology and Crime, Law, and Justice,
Pennsylvania State University, 211 Oswald Tower,
University Park, PA 16802 (dkreager@psu.edu).
Key Words: couple violence, divorce, National Longitudinal
Study of Adolescence Health (Add Health), social exchange
theory.
yearly number of American women awarded a 4-
year college degree now exceeding men by over
10% (National Center for Education Statistics,
2010). Accompanying this trend is an increas-
ingly negative correlation between women’s
education and divorce (Amato, 2010; Cherlin,
2010). A comparison of American women who
married in 1975 –1979 to those who married in
1990 –1994 revealed a 10% drop in the divorce
rate for women with a 4-year college degree and
an 8% increase in the divorce rate for women
without a high school degree (Martin, 2006).
This divergence creates the current educational
gradient in divorce, whereby college-educated
women are less than half as likely to get a
divorce as women with a high school degree or
less (Martin, 2006; McLanahan, 2004).
The relationship between resources and
divorce is often interpreted using theories of
social exchange (Homans, 1950, 1958; Sayer,
England, Allison, & Kangas, 2011; Schoen,
Astone, Rothert, Standish, & Kim, 2002; Thibaut
& Kelley, 1959). Exchange theories imply that
the relationship between women’s education
and divorce should be negative, not positive;
women who have greater resources should
be less dependent on their husbands because
they have more attractive alternatives. Available
opportunities make it more likely that they will
divorce their husbands when they are dissatisfied
with the relationship. Educated women, for
example, have greater financial security than
uneducated women because they have access
to better paying jobs. Singlehood will not
be as much a financial problem for them.
Journal of Marriage and Family 75 (June 2013): 565 –581 565
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12018
566 Journal of Marriage and Family
Education may also correlate with other human
capital characteristics (e.g., health) that increase
the likelihood of remarriage to a ‘‘better’’
spouse. When women perceive more attractive
alternatives and are not dependent on their
current relationship, they should be more likely
to leave. When they lack options and are
dependent on their spouse, they should be more
likely to stay in relationships, even when those
relationships are troubled (Thibaut & Kelley,
1959).
So why does the social exchange hypothesis
not hold for women’s education and divorce? A
likely explanation is that education increases
marital satisfaction, which then outweighs
attractive alternatives (Amato, 1996). Women
in satisfying relationships are unlikely to spend
time searching for better options, even though
such options are available. Furthermore, rising
rates of educational homogamy concentrate
resources in educated couples, raising the
quality of these marriages and exacerbating the
educational gradient in divorce (England, 2004;
McLanahan, 2004; Press, 2004; Schwartz &
Mare, 2005).
The education – divorce association may
depend on whether the marriage is a happy
one or not—a statistical interaction. It may
be that the independence associated with
education promotes divorce only in unhappy
marriages. Wives in unsatisfactory marriages
have the incentive to contemplate and investigate
alternatives, and if they are educated, their
alternatives are likely to be more attractive.
Wives in satisfactory marriages have no
incentive to consider alternatives or to take
advantage of outside opportunities.
Research suggests that abused women are
more likely to get divorced (e.g., Bowlus &
Seitz, 2006), but, to our knowledge, no one
has examined whether the effects of abuse
depend on a women’s education. Research
on women in domestic violence shelters
provides some support for the proposition. For
example, a study of 100 women living in a
shelter found that education was the strongest
correlate of permanently leaving their abusive
relationships (Rusbult & Martz, 1995). Indeed,
education was a stronger correlate of leaving
than 34 other person- and relationship-level
variables, including the severity of abuse, the
man’s history of violence, and the woman’s
income and employment status. On the basis
of their review of the literature, Anderson
and Saunders (2003) suggested that women’s
education and other socioeconomic resources
are the most important and consistent predictors
of relationship termination (see also Rhatigan,
Street, & Axsom, 2006).
Although informative, results from studies of
shelter samples have limited generalizability.
They tend to undersample violence that is
less serious and that involves people of higher
education. Moreover, given that all the women in
these studies have been abused, they are unable
to examine whether the association between
education and divorce is different in abusive
and nonabusive relationships. In the current
study, we directly assessed this interaction in
a nationally representative sample of married
young adult women.
EARNINGS
The arguments made above about women’s
education could also be made about women’s
earnings, because earnings also reduce women’s
economic dependence on their husbands (e.g.,
Dugan, Nagin, & Rosenfeld, 1999). There
are, however, theoretical reasons to suspect
that women’s education and earnings might
be differentially associated with divorce. Gary
Becker (1981), in his influential A Treatise
on the Family, argued that women’s earnings
should be positively associated with divorce. He
stated, ‘‘Women with higher earnings gain less
from marriage than other women do because
higher earnings reduce the demand for children
and the advantages of the sexual division of
labor in marriage’’ (p. 231). In other words,
women’s earnings should increase the likelihood
of divorce because women have a comparative
advantage to men in child-care and household
activities, giving couples in which the woman
works less outside the home than the man an
advantage over couples in which the woman
contributes equally or more earnings than her
husband. Becker further argued that market
capital (i.e., employment and earnings) is one
of the few characteristics for which negative
assortative mating is optimal for marital stability,
so that husbands with the highest proportional
earnings relative to their wives have the lowest
risk of divorce. On the other hand, he argued
that education is among the many attributes
for which partner similarity increases marital
quality and stability, consistent with findings of
increased educational homogamy (McLanahan,
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