DIVORCEdeveloped as there are higher and higher expecta-
tions for what a marriage should be. In the nine-
teenth century, drunkenness, cruelty, and failure
to provide were added to more traditional grounds
of adultery and desertion. In the early twentieth
century, cruelty was continually redefined to in-
clude not only physical, but mental cruelty as well.
The post-war surges in divorce created suffi-
cient numbers of divorced persons so that the
practice lost much of its stigma. The increase in
divorce becomes more understandable when the
loss of stigma is considered alongside the increase
in women’s employment since the mid 1960s.
When women are employed, there is less con-
straint on them to remain in a marriage. But there
is also less constraint on their husbands who will
not be required to support their employed ex-
wives after a divorce.
Since 1970, divorce has been fundamentally
redefined. No-fault divorce laws passed since the
early 1970s have defined as unacceptable those
marriages in which couples are ‘‘incompatible,’’
have ‘‘irreconcilable differences’’ or in which the
marriage is ‘‘irretrievably broken.’’ Prior to the no-
fault regime, divorces required proof of a fault
(crime) on the part of one spouse. The court
decided whether to grant the divorce. Divorce
proceedings were intentionally adversarial. To-
day, the non-adversarial grounds for divorce are
almost entirely based on the failures of emotional
essentials. Emotional marital breakdown may have
been a feature of large numbers of marriages in
earlier historical periods. Only now, however, is
such a situation viewed as solely sufficient grounds
for terminating the marriage.
DIVORCE IN THE WESTAny theory of divorce must be able to account for
the broad similarities in historical (twentieth cen-
tury) trends throughout the entire Western world.
These similarities exist despite notable differences
in national economies, forms of government, and
the role of the church. The trends are well known.
There was very little divorce until the end of the
nineteenth century, a slow but constant growth in
divorce rates through the first half of the twentieth
century (interrupted by two world wars and an
international economic depression), and signifi-
cant increases in divorce rates since the 1960s. The
twentieth century, in short, is when most signifi-
cant changes in divorce rates occurred. And the
changes noted in America were seen in most other
Western nations.
Between World Wars I and II, there were
widespread changes in divorce laws that reflected
changing beliefs about matrimony and its essen-
tials. The strains of war and the associated prob-
lems that produced more divorces made the prac-
tice more conspicuous and consequently more
acceptable. There is no doubt one cause of divorce
is divorce. When obscure, the practice was stigma-
tized and there was little to counter stereotypes
associated with its practice. When divorce became
more commonplace, it lost some of its stigma.Social changes pertaining to women’s roles
are a large part of the story of divorce during the
postwar era. One sign of these changes was the
growth, throughout the West, of women’s labor
force participation. But the most conspicuous sym-
bol of the changing role of women was the passage
of suffrage legislation throughout the Western
world. Before 1914, women were permitted to
vote only in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Nor-
way, and eleven western U.S. states. In the United
States, women were enfranchised in 1920. In Brit-
ain, Sweden, Germany, and many other European
countries, suffrage passed soon after World War I.
Divorce laws, similarly, were altered between
the wars in accordance with changing views of
marriage and the role of women. The British
Parliament enacted divorce reform in 1937 by
significantly extending the grounds for divorce
(including cruelty) and granting women new op-
tions for filing for divorce. Scotland reformed its
divorce laws in 1938 by extending grounds for
divorce to include failures of emotional essen-
tials—cruelty and habitual drunkenness, for exam-
ple. In 1930, the Canadian Parliament for the first
time empowered judicial magistrates to grant di-
vorce rather than requiring legislative decrees.
And the Spanish divorce law of 1932 was the most
liberal in contemporary Europe—providing di-
vorce by mutual consent (Phillips 1988, p. 539).
Even Nazi Germany permitted no-fault divorce by
1938 (though divorce law was aimed at increasing
the number of Aryan children born).
Following World War II, divorce rates through-
out the Western world stabilized after an initial
increase. The low divorce rates, high fertility, and