Women's Social Class Identification: Does Husband's Occupation Make a Difference?

Abstract

Research into social stratification has tended to concentrate on working-class men; there has been little on the middle classes, and even less on women. This paper looks at the class position and class images of 342 working married women in social grade C1, drawn from a national survey of class images conducted between 1981 and 1984, to assess the extent to which these women's class identification is determined by the occupation of their husbands and the way in which the middle and working classes are perceived by women in same-class and cross-class marriages. It is concluded that a woman's class identification is determined at least in part by her own characteristics rather than her husband's, with education being a particularly important variable.