Divorce

Divorce is the legal dissolution of a marriage, as initiated by one or both partners. The social acceptability of divorce has varied widely across historical periods, religious faiths, and cultures. Whereas the United States has allowed divorce, under certain conditions, since the establishment of the nation, Chile legalized divorce in 2004, and a handful of other countries still prohibit the practice. Because sociological theory traditionally views the family as a basic building block of society, social scientists are interested in many aspects of divorce. Some scholars view the right to divorce as an indicator of women's rights, whereas others attempt to explain the social and cultural causes and consequences of rising divorce rates in the United States and elsewhere. Still other researchers examine families' internal dynamics preceding or following divorce. Accompanying the rise in divorce rates since the mid-20th century have been other changes in family forms, including the rise of single-parent households, an increase in age at first marriage, lower fertility rates and fewer children in families, the rise of cohabitation, and the formation of gay and lesbian families.

Accurately estimating the incidence of divorce is difficult because of the varying lengths of marriages, the related challenge of tracking individual marriages over time, and confusion over how to define a couple who divorces and then remarries. Recent U.S. statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics show that there were 7.5 new marriages per 1,000 people and 3.6 divorces per 1,000 people in 2005, giving rise to the conventional wisdom that “half of all marriages end in divorce.” These rates have remained relatively constant since the 1960s.

Divorce reform was a major concern of the U.S. women's movement of the mid-20th century, commonly referred to as the “second wave” of feminism. Prior to major reforms undertaken by individual states since the 1970s, U.S. laws followed the British legal tradition of finding one partner at fault for the breakup of a marriage. The advent of no-fault divorce laws made divorce a simpler process by allowing reasons such as “irreconcilable differences” as grounds for divorce.

Advocates of women's rights pursued expanding the availability of divorce, based on an understanding of marriage as an institution based on gender inequality, in which the woman is the weaker partner and at risk of exploitation, domination, or violence by her husband. Many feminists view marriage as an inherently unequal social institution in which the man has more power than the female because of greater social status, higher income, or greater physical strength. Women have traditionally been responsible for care of the home and children, increasingly in addition to paid work outside the home. Because of these disadvantages, women are more likely than in past generations to seek a divorce or separation. Thus the legal right to break marital bonds emerged as key to women's autonomy and independence.

Consequently, divorce has become more socially acceptable in the United States since the women's movement in the 1960s. Before that time, a social stigma was attached to divorced families, especially to divorced women and their children, rather than to the men. Divorced families constituted “broken homes,” a phrase still in use today. Illustrating the normalization of divorce are not only higher divorce rates but also the often positive or sympathetic portrayal in popular culture of divorced men and women.

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