Posted by Bitch Lab at 10:58 am and filed under Gender, So 1998 ::
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Smells like she’s having my baby Who cares if they’re lies? Just Move It!
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So: Donât like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and donât read her. Read the women she rips off instead. Theyâre better.
So: Donât like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and donât read her. Read the women she rips off instead. Theyâre better.
10-08-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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[...] Bitch | Lab: How Changing Expectations For Marriage (Among Other Factors) Increased The Divorce Rate [...]
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Did you know that the higher the rate of consumption of ice cream, the higher the incidence of drowning?
It’s true. You can look it up.
It is an example of the problem of identifying the trends in occurances of two distinct events. Yes, as more women started working, there were more divorces. However, as you said, one has nothing to do with the other. Anyone who tries to assert otherwise is an idiot.
anonymous –
lol. some of us always wanted to send letters to grandparents a couple of weeks before final exams so they’d be aware that they should avoid risky activities.
for some inexplicable reason, grandparents seem to die a lot around final exam time.
it’s a puzzle.
I wouldn’t say that more women working has de nada to do with it, but it has a lot less to do with it than people think.
So many people are crap at remembering the big changes in society when they look for an explanation on one variable.
Here, surely, one important factor to take into account is the increasing life expectancy, ( including the lower rate of death in disease, but also childbirth and in war). People didn’t have to divorce as much in olden days because one often died because the other got fed up.
Another important factor : increasing labour mobility throughout the 20th century, nationally and internationally, usually away from the countries into cities, away from stable farm-based self-employment to more varied, less secure, wage work, with more durably split families, more possibilities for affairs, and beyond that a more individualistic and open ideology of self-fulfillment, which I think is what you refer by the change in our “great expectations”.
Totally OT, but BL, d’you know what’s going on with Slant Truth? I can’t seem to get any of the pages except the front one to load. He just updated yesterday, so i am assuming this isn’t an intention pull the plug or anything. Is it just me? would’ve contacted him directly but the email page is down too. thx.
Absenting a radical shift in society, we’ve got a fairly steady rate of change for divorce. Economic will, of course, play a part, but in a society in which ebing secular presents no major penalties, or divorce is acceptedf in your church, I don’t see things changing much in the future.
Outside of the US and first world Europe, things may see more drastic changes soon.
Hey b|l,
I sat down the other day to reply to Amanda’s post but by then there were miles of other comments. The 50-year timeline Amanda, Alas, and others are using does seem to exaggerate the differences whereas a longer one would tend to flatten it out.
I’m more than halfway through radical feminist (though not particularly radfem) Stephanie Coontz’s “Marriage, a History.” Echoing May’s point she makes a compelling case is that marriage in the modern era started going off the rails back in the late 1700s when the idea of marriage based on romantic love rather than family, social, or political obligation was taken seriously for the first time in history.
Conservatives at the time found the idea absolutely abhorrent, arguing that if one could marry for love then one might want a divorce. The thesis of the book is that the conservatives were absolutely right that it was going to happen, but pretty much wrong that it’s a bad thing.
To the extent that increasing social and economic autonomy makes it possible for women to survive divorce someone might be able to make the case that it’s a contributing factor to current divorce rates. But as early as the mid 1800s people — women in particular — were already freaking out at the prospect of being trapped in a “bad match.”
The point being that while modern conservatives blame economic emancipation for somehow *creating* divorce it would be more accurate to say it’s making possible something that was already underway 150 years ago. And it sounds like May’s book is more confirmation.
Tip: When arguing with “traditionalists” who prize enforcing marriage to preserve womanly virtue mention the 19th Century counterarguments that forcing her to marry or, worse, remain married to someone she can no longer love soils a woman’s traditional purity and virtue. :-)
Cool post,
figleaf
[...] Bitch | Lab: How Changing Expectations For Marriage (Among Other Factors) Increased The Divorce Rate [...]
ilestre –
YUPPER!
The number of children who lived in “recombinant families” (step-familes) in the 1880s was higher than the number of children living in them in the 1990s. (That’s off the top of my head, but I’ll double check on it later)
Which is to say that, yepper, there was a high rate of early death during child bearing years for many women.
The actual issue re: age demographics in the US is that while the life span has been increasing, most of the earliest gains were seen in the reduction of infant mortality rates. When a lot of children die at a young age, it drasitcally pulled down the lifespan. When people correct for that by looking at life expectancy at 5 and up, there isnt that huge a variation. There’s an impressive one, but it’s not that huge.
I’m not a demographer by trade though and I haven’t looked at this info in years. I’ll have to write up a post in a couple of months tying it all togehter.
Yup yup yup yup yup yup.
The change in population density had a an impact on our lives. It brought people together who wouldn’t have encountered one another in an agrarian setting. It made it easier for ideas to travel. Etc. The reduction in work time also mattered, too.
figleaf –
i have to say it. it’s always so flattering to see that you actually read this blog! gives me goosebumps!
But even better, this succint analysis is fantabulous. Stephanie Coontz is one of the best people for bringing out these ideas in a straightforward way — and she’s entertaining to read, yah?
So, nod til my head falls of, YES!
The fun thing is, the whole line of argument actually goes like this:
1. the nuclear family has actually been around for quite a long time. (don’t ask me dates, I’ve forgotten)
2. It’s not something that emerged with the rise of capitalism and industrialization as I learned in high school.
3. what emerged with industrialization and capitalism is what is called “the privatization of the nuclear family”: the family became more and more about romantic love; it was unmoored from the community and discipline of children became something that was confined to the interior, privacy of the family. (In the early Colonial days, it wouldn’t have been uncommon for town fathers stepped in to resolve family problems such as how to discipline a child.)
4. But the biggest thing was this stripping away of many other functions of family until it become a fulcrum for the fulfillment of people’s needs for emotional intimacy, sexual intimacy, and romantic love.
5. Thus, this huge focus we have on how our family lives must be our main source of emotional fulfillment.
6. when conservatives rant on about the “institution of marriage” i chortle for these reasons you describe Figleaf — and so much more. They really are such a friggin’ laff-a-minute clowns when it comes to this topic and their revisionist histories. blah.