Cohabitation, Marriage, and Entry into Motherhood

Prior research has neither explicitly compared the entry into motherhood of cohabiting with that of married women nor examined the impact of cohabitation on marital fertility in the United States. Subsamples of 2,056 women in first unions and 1,763 married women from the National Survey of Families...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of marriage and family 1995-02, Vol.57 (1), p.191-200
Main Author: Manning, Wendy D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
Birth Rate
Birth spacing
Black people
Black Population Trends
Children
Cohabitation
Demography
Employment
Family (Sociological Unit)
Females
Fertility
First Birth Timing
Higher Education
Interpersonal Relationship
Marital Instability
Marital Status
Marriage
Married women
Motherhood
Mothers
Multivariate Analysis
National Survey of Families and Households
National Surveys
Of General Interest
Pregnancy
Sexuality. Marriage. Family relations
Sociology
Sociology of the family. Age groups
Spouses
State Surveys
U.S.A
Unions
United States of America
White people
Whites
Wives
Women
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Prior research has neither explicitly compared the entry into motherhood of cohabiting with that of married women nor examined the impact of cohabitation on marital fertility in the United States. Subsamples of 2,056 women in first unions and 1,763 married women from the National Survey of Families and Households are used to address those questions. Entry into motherhood occurs more often and sooner in marriage than in cohabitation. Yet the transition from cohabitation to marriage does not appear to be influenced by desires to begin bearing children. Once nonpregnant cohabitors marry, the timing of the marital first birth is similar to that of women who never cohabited. Cohabitation accelerates the timing of marital first births only among White women who were pregnant when they married. Instead, the impact of cohabitation on marital first birth timing operates partly via duration of time spent coresiding (in marriage and cohabitation).
ISSN:0022-2445
1741-3737
DOI:10.2307/353827