Top Earning Wives and Their Marriages

Money in marriage sometimes means power and while women have crashed through the psychological barriers to the top jobs, men have been unable to cope with the position of the lower wage earner.

The remarkable study of top earning wives and their marriages will be published next year. The magazine Psychology Today previews the research and points out that in the United States a million women now bring home more than their husbands.

"One of the biggest problems for both husbands and wives in marriages of unequal earnings is that there are so few model couples who have dealt successfully with the situation," says the magazine, "Many simply don't know how to behave in public or private."

The hard facts are that wives who out-perform their husbands in the employment arena set a domestic scenario for disaster. Sex lives suffer and feelings of love diminish. The couples run a high risk of mutual psychological and physical abuse, which leads to a significantly higher divorce rate.

Finally for some under-achieving husbands whose wives are over-achievers, premature death from heart disease is 11 times more frequent than normal.

The exception is in cases where wives earn more but in a typically female job—secretary, nurse or researcher. Sociologist Dana Hiller who prepared the report along with William Philliber, comments: "It's okay for your wife to have a higher paying or higher status job, as long as she's a nurse or a teacher—because that is what women are supposed to be."

Short Answer Questions

1. The research, the result of which will be published next year, focuses on ____.
2. According to the magazine article, if a wife earns more than her husband, both of them feel at a loss in ____.
3. How will a woman's success in her career affect her marriage according to the passage?
4. What are considered to be typical female jobs?
5. The author's purpose in writing the passage is ____.

(Keys.)