ABSTRACT
This chapter considers whether Japanese housewives or working wives express greater satisfaction in marriage, and explores what might account for the patterns we see. It focuses on whether Japanese housewives or working wives report greater happiness in their marriages, using data from a national survey to compare women in recent cohort (age 35 or under) to those in an older cohort (age 36–50). The two cohorts of women as well as their male counterparts have experienced very different employment circumstances and hold somewhat different views as to appropriate combination of marriage and work for women. The chapter discusses two things: How recent social and economic changes in Japan may be altering the satisfaction in marriage experienced by working and non-working wives, and how women's experience with objective and subjective conditions of their marriage, especially with regard to household division of labor and their beliefs about value of being housewife, affect their sense of marital satisfaction.
