Education, Modernization and the Risk of Marriage Disruption in Sweden, West Germany and Italy

The impact of the increase in women's educational attainment on the risk of marital disruption in Sweden, West Germany, and Italy is analyzed using event history data. The results show that the risk of marital disruption increases when a woman's educational attainment improves. "This is true both for the total effect of the educational level on the disruption risk (when we only control for birth-cohort membership) and for the direct (or partial) effect that remains when we also include a number of further individual-level factors that are closely connected with educational level (age at marriage, pregnancy status at marriage formation, and childbearing parity). The greater disruption risks of better-educated women may be explained by their greater willingness to violate social norms by dissolving unhappy marriages and their greater ability to cope with the consequences of disruption.