WAYS OF ENTERING ADULT LIFE AND DECISIONS OF MARRIED-WOMEN

Demographers and sociologists have increasingly studied the relationsh ip between events in the life course and women's work. In this paper, the extent to which different ways of entering adult life, as shown by the woman's leaving her parental home, affect the course of women's c areers. Leaving home because of marriage suggests a life course in whi ch a woman's economic activities will have to be fitted into family li fe and the husband's career. By contrast, leaving home for vocational training or for employment tends to give women greater independence in future relations between themselves and their partners. By using answ ers to questionnaires in a retrospective survey, the authors show that some aspects of life style, and particularly the method of transition to adult status, do have specific effects on women's decisions about their occupations, relations with their family, and on migrating. This has led the authors to assess the weight of some determinants, such a s social background, in shaping the life course.