Marriage or Profession? Marriage and Profession? Marriage Patterns Among Highly Successful Women of Jewish Descent and Other Women in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German-Speaking Central Europe

Abstract

AbstractThis study analyzes the marriage patterns of five hundred highly successful women in modern German-speaking Central Europe. Among the women at the very top of their professions, women of Jewish descent were more likely than non-Jewish women to marry while they pursued their careers. The results of our quantitative study—67.6 percent of women of Jewish descent married versus 51.6 percent of non-Jewish women—provide a unique body of data that complements and contributes to other research that identifies distinctive aspects of Central European Jewish life patterns: the high number of Jewish women university students, the importance of women of Jewish descent in a number of fields, and Jewish families as early adopters of a modern family form with a small number of children and intensive investment in each child.