Educational expansion and changes in entry into marriage and motherhood. The experience of Italian women.

"The purpose of this paper has been to assess empirically the question of whether women's growing economic independence, resulting from better education, is one of the major factors in determining the timing of marriage and motherhood in Italy.... We have analysed the life histories of a sample of Italian women from different cohorts, collected on the occasion of the National Survey on Family Structures and Behaviours carried on by the National Institute of Statistics.... The effect of level of education is negative. That is, it increases the age of entry into marriage. However, the size of the effect is small and seems limited to the passage from youth to adulthood, because the longer time the woman spends in the educational system increases the age at which she feels herself ready to marry. As far as the timing of the first child, it is almost independent of educational attainment, once marital status is taken into account." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND ITA) excerpt