subsequently marry and others do not. One factor that might contribute to marriage is pregnancy. A pregnancy clearly increases the marriage rate among childless women who cohabit in their first union. For both pregnant and non-pregnant cohabiting women alike, however, the incidence of marriage has diminished strongly. Even though a declining fraction married during the first few years of cohabitation, they remained highly influenced by the imminent arrival of a child. This in turn implies that marital fertility has remained relatively constant. It has also remained relatively independent of cohabitational duration before marriage (Hoem 49). The interaction between the pregnancy factor and the woman’s current employment status is significant at the one- percent level. A possible pregnancy influenced the tendency to marry most strongly among students. According to Hoem (1994), in this group, pregnant women who were studying had a seven times greater ‘risk’ of marrying than their non-pregnant counterparts, almost as if pregnancy were a ‘precondition’ of marriage for a female student. It is clear that it is now preferred by the overwhelming majority of couples to cohabit. Nevertheless, pregnancy clearly increases the incidence of marriage among childless women cohabiting with a male partner, until recently when a new provision that included a widow’s pension, which triggered a strong increase in the marriage rate among cohabitants. This strongly indicates that it is not so hard to persuade many Swedish cohabitants to change their legal marital status. It may be concluded that for most people – in Sweden at least – the reasons for not marrying are weak and not very ideologically based.The Deferment of First BirthThe implications for a woman living with a man changed after the mid-1960s. Judging from the behavior of women born in the late 1930s, most of them must have entered a uni...
