CLASS IDENTIFICATION AMONG WORKING WIVES: EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT AND UNION MEMBERSHIP, BUT NOT OCCUPATIONAL PRESTIGE
St~mmary.-Past research has suggested that the occupational attainment of working wives influences their perception of their social class membership. However, several correlates of occupational anainment, such as education, age, race, and union membership, which may have independent effects on class identification, were not controlled in earlier studies. The present study utilized data from three national surveys and included previously omitted variables in the analyses to show that working wives' educational attainment and union membership, bur not their occupational attainment, influenced their class ' identification. A series of papers (Duncan, 1961; Watson & Barth, 1964; Acker, 1973; Haug, 1973; Hiller & Philiber, 1978; Philiber & Hiller, 1977, 1979) have questioned the long-standing proposition among students of social stratification that all members of the family unit derive their social status and life style solely from the social and economic achievements of the "husband-head" of the family (Davis, 1949; Parsons, 1954). This proposition was based not only on the observation of the past dominance of men in the economic and power systems of society but also on the postulated social necessity of a tightly organized, single-headed family unit whose stability would supposedly be threatened by dual sources of stratification determinants. Most recently Philiber and Hiller (cited above) have used multiple regression analysis on data from several NORC General Social Surveys in attempts to determine the independent effects of working wives' and the husbands' of working wives occupational attainments on subjective class identification. Their results suggested that, in general, wives' class identification was a product of both personal and spouse's occupational attainments but husbands' class identification was influenced only by personal and not by wives' occupational attainment. However, Philiber and Hiller only controlled for one additional objective stratification characteristic in their analyses, total family income. The present scudy attempted to re-evaluate the Philiber and Hiller results through a more rigorous analysis. First, not only occupational but also educational attainments of both husbands and wives were included as independent variables in the analyses. Second, family income a?~d age, and race were included in the analyses so that the effects of these variables on subjective class identification would not be confounded with the true effects of occupational and educational attainment. Finally, two additional characteristics of occupations were added