Working Wives: Negative Effect on Husbands?

Husbands of working wives experience lower levels of job and life satisfaction than do husbands of non-working wives, a study out of Rutgers University has shown.

Regardless of the husband’s age, income bracket or educational level, the study found that a wife’s employment had a negative effect on her husband’s mental health. Even those husbands who expressed positive attitudes about their wives working were found to be less satisfied in their home and work lives than were the husbands of non-working wives.

Conducting the study of 1,515 American workers with her then-Rutgers colleagues Graham Staines and Deborah Fudge, psychologist and social work professor Kathleen Pottick concluded that “husbands’ perception of their adequacy as breadwinners in the family is a central component of their mental health.

Not Ready to Abandon Role

“It appears that husbands may not be ready yet to abandon the ‘good provider’ role--that is, the traditional role of being sufficiently resourceful as a provider for one’s family that one’s wife does not have to enter the labor force.”

But as Pottick also pointed out, “clearly in this day and age, it’s very difficult to support a family on one income. And so it seems to me that another way of looking at these findings is that men and women are going to have to share the breadwinning role. Men will need to broaden their conception of what it means to be a good provider. They’re going to have to not feel ultimately solely responsible for providing for the family, just as women will need to not feel ultimately solely responsible for the enculturation and nurturing and nourishing of the children.”

In short, Pottick said, “What we found is that men who have wives who are working are still feeling that they are psychologically ultimately responsible for being a good provider. Knowing this, men can begin to pinpoint for themselves the fact that they may not be psychologically sharing, and they can begin to have a dialogue about that, and I think that’s the way we can change.”

Pottick and her colleagues undertook the study of a national cross-section of men ages 16 to 65 to follow up and expand upon studies conducted early in this decade by psychologists Ron Kessler and Jim McRae at the University of Michigan. Using national survey data on the effects of wives’ employment on wives themselves and on husbands, the latter researchers found, Pottick said, that “basically, women who worked had better mental health, using a variety of measures.” At the same time, however, Kessler and McRae discovered that the husbands of the working wives had worse mental health than the husbands of housewives. Although those researchers eliminated certain explanations, “they were not able in any way to conclusively understand what may have created this effect,” Pottick said.

At Rutgers, Pottick and her colleagues decided “this was an interesting sort of unsolved puzzle,” she said, “as to why it was that wives’ employment had this negative effect on the mental health of husbands.”

Changing the Mechanism

By understanding the cause of the problem, Pottick and her associates reasoned, those experiencing the discomfort could work to change it. Or, as she explained in a telephone interview from her office in New Brunswick, N.J., “When there is a problem in one’s mental health--when one feels bad, or is not feeling good about their lives--you want to find out why it is that people are not feeling good. When you understand the psychological mechanism, you can begin to change it.”

Economic realities and a daily burgeoning number of women in the work force are unlikely to reverse themselves, Pottick said.

One explanation Pottick’s team arrived at was that with both husband and wife working, total income rises, but so, usually, do expenses. Over time a husband may begin to feel that he could not support his family on his income alone if his wife were to stop working. In the process, Pottick posits, “his sense of adequacy of himself as a man is eroding.”

Raised Expectations

“What seems to be happening,” she said, “is the men are putting these expectations on themselves, and these expectations are very difficult to meet. This seems to be affecting their job and life satisfaction.”

Said Pottick, “Increased standards of living enjoyed by a working marital pair appear to be shouldered psychologically by husbands.” Husbands, she said, “may not object to the employment of their wives . . . but husbands do seem to need to feel that their incomes alone are perfectly adequate to meet family economic need.”

Admitting that she and her associates were surprised by their findings, Pottick called the project “an exciting study, with great ramifications because of the growing number of women in the work force.”

A future study, Pottick said, may investigate whether husbands’ mental health begins to suffer as soon as a wife enters the work force, or if this condition takes time to develop.