The Dynamics of Divorce 61
Older Women
I married beneath me. All women do.
—Lady Astor
Age tends to be a crucial factor for a divorcing woman. In one of
Dr. Wallerstein’s studies, she came to the rather sobering find-
ing that every woman in the study who was forty or older at the
time of her marital separation remained unmarried fully ten years
later. Conversely, half of their former husbands had remarried
within that same ten-year period.
Tough times for older women. Many of my older female clients
complain that it can be brutally difficult for them to reenter the
job market in any kind of meaningful way. If they do find work,
the fact that they often can get only lower-echelon jobs under-
standably depresses and discourages them. All of this has the
cumulative effect of further reducing their self-esteem. As if this
weren’t bad enough, whereas their ex-husbands have the luxury
of dropping down ten, fifteen, or even twenty years insofar as
their dating prospects are concerned, the “talent pool” of eligible
mates for women in their forties or fifties becomes notoriously
shallow. According to the Census Bureau, a single woman at 40
had a 40.8 percent chance of eventually marrying.
The impact of education/career. Many experts have studied the
impact of the educational status on a woman’s marriage. It turns
out that the divorce rate has gone down for college-educated
women in the last two decades, while it has gone up for those
without college. It appears that women with education and earn-
ings have more ability to leave a bad marriage, but they also have
more ability to alter the terms of an existing marriage so as to
make it more durable.
As per a recent study done by Nancy Burstein, career women
are now more likely than stay-at-home-moms to have marriages
that endure. “The more recent and more convincing studies tend
to show that women’s employment and earning increase marital
stability,” says Ms. Burstein. Her statement would seem to contra-
dict the arguments often cited by “family values” conservatives
about the negative impact of working wives on marriage. These