Does Marrying Well Count More Than Career? Personal Achievement, Marriage, and Happiness of Married Women in Urban China

Abstract

A gender perspective is basically missing in the existing literature on subjective well-being (referred to as SWB) in China, and evidence of women’s SWB is scanty. Drawing from the theoretical framework of public/private-sphere separation, this article examines how married women’s happiness is affected by her personal achievement and characteristics of marriage matching, with particular reference to class and educational assortative marriage. Using pooled data from the Chinese General Social Surveys (2003–2013), the results of diagonal reference models and ordered logistic regression show a predominant role of husbands’ class positions in determining married women’s happiness. Meanwhile, women tend to be happier when they earn more, but their happiness decreases as they contribute more to household economy. When the effects of marriage matching and husbands’ characteristics are differentiated from those of women’s own class positions and education, there is no empirical evidence supporting a significant impact of assortative marriage per se on women’s happiness. This analysis reveals deeply internalized gender norms relating to marriage and family among Chinese women and suggests the possibility for such norms to be increasingly reinforced in the social context of two-sphere separation.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Shanghai Social Science Summer Symposium, Shanghai, July 14, 2017 and the Annual Meeting of the Chinese Sociological Association, Shanghai, July 15^–16, 2017. I would like to thank Xiaogang Wu, Wei Zhao, Yingchun Ji, other participants, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions. The author would also like to thank Yizhang Zhao for her kind assistance with the CNLR commands in SPSS.

Notes

This study, therefore, unlike previous research mentioned above, does not include employment status as a separate explanatory variable.

For analyses of the effect of marital matching, q will be the estimate of the weight of husband’s class, whereas (1-q) is for the weight of respondent’s own class.

As the final set of ordered logistic modeling incorporate the male sample, descriptive statistics of men between the ages of 16–55 are reported in Table A.1 in Appendix.

See Table A.1 in Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (17BSH017). I am also grateful for the support of the research fund provided by the School of Sociology and Political Science at Shanghai University.

Notes on contributors

Meng Chen

Meng Chen ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of Sociology at the School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University. Her research interests include social mobility and its social consequences, gender inequality, and class differences in parenting. She is the PI of a three-year research project on parenting and mobility strategies of the middle-class families, which is funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China. She has published her research in Chinese Sociological Review and Development and Society.