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Tomdstone
Guest
There have been articles written about this which are available online. The Catholic Almanac has the statistics for the US.
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EasterJoy
Guest
JFK was electable because of how much Catholics had finally assimilated. As a group, we no longer have an identity that is all that separate from the mainstream with regards to marriage. Our divorce rates aren’t worse than the mainstream, but we’ve caught up.
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SWolf
Guest
- Yup. The SAHM who did not work was not the norm through much of history and we did not see the rise in divorce. Nothing wrong with a SAHM though.
- There were already laws allowing divorce for adultery and abuse, and I doubt that was the reason for the monumental rise. I would add a financial incentive have been added to divorce in terms of child support and alimony. No-fault divorce started to require financial obligations from the bread winning spouse in divorce without even just cause.
- We as a Church got soft on Marriage. As a whole though, she has held up well considering the onslaught in secular culture.
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tomarin
Guest
That’s what got the ball rolling certainly (during the war years because of labor shortages). The parallel I would draw is with black GI’s getting a taste of being treated equally to whites in Europe and then coming home to the south and encountering oppressive Jim Crow rules. The result of their frustration was the Civil Rights movement a decade later.
I would hazard to say that if WWII had never happened or if the US had not been involved neither of these two movements would have developed when they did or to the extent that they did. Odds are we would be living in a much more conservative society.
This is just an off-the-cuff thesis, not the result of any kind of research or serious thinking.
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dans0622
Guest
Hello,
All the “annulments” from those days, as is the case today, did not involve only Catholics.
As to the numbers themselves, the process involved was changed in a 1971 document from Paul VI called “Causas matrimoniales” which was supposed to “expedite” marriage cases. It certainly did so. Furthermore, in 1970, the USA had its own set of norms which were even more “expeditious” (called “the American Procedural Norms”). These documents widely broadened the scope of who could submit a petition. For example, in the old law, the person who excluded children from the marriage could not submit a petition. A non-Catholic could not submit a petition. A person could not submit a petition in his own diocese, if the other person lived elsewhere and the wedding took place elsewhere. These are a few examples of how the process was “opened up” to a great many more people.
In addition, I think it is fair to say that ecclesiastical Judges may themselves been impacted by a certain “divorce mentality” and were more “liberal” in how they applied the law regarding marital consent.
Dan
meltzerboy
New member
Well, congratulations on catching up to the mainstream!
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pensmama87
Guest
Personally, I blame pants.
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Tomdstone
Guest
Some people have blamed women wearing pants, others say the rise in Catholic divorces and marriage annulments was due to women refusing to wear headcovering in Church.Personally, I blame pants.
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Hoosier_Daddy
Guest
No, it was that the Latin was not used in the vows.
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estesbob
Guest
I am curious as to whether this increase was a US phenomenon or was for CAtholics in general?
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Gwendolen
Guest
My mother was divorced at the end of that time frame – she had been sent to college, basically to find a husband before her brother was to enter 2 years later. Grandparents could only afford to educate one child for four years, and at that time, there was no question it would be their son. She was married at 19, then had four children…
Then, as she grew and developed as a person, was still expected to behave as a 20 year old housewife. The end was tragic. She fell in love with her music teacher, divorced my dad, and eventually the music teacher as well.
For what it is worth, she had three daughters, (and one son) and we all finished college before marrying, and all have our own careers…with the option of working part time to tend our children. All of us have been married for 20+ years. Although of course I DO NOT approve of her choices, I appreciate that her struggle laid the way for our success.
Then, as she grew and developed as a person, was still expected to behave as a 20 year old housewife. The end was tragic. She fell in love with her music teacher, divorced my dad, and eventually the music teacher as well.
For what it is worth, she had three daughters, (and one son) and we all finished college before marrying, and all have our own careers…with the option of working part time to tend our children. All of us have been married for 20+ years. Although of course I DO NOT approve of her choices, I appreciate that her struggle laid the way for our success.
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Xantippe
Guest
I’m not sure about the dates, but there’s probably a problem with your chronology, as the rise in the divorce rate went hand in hand with the fading away of alimony as an institution.
Alimony used the be very much the rule around mid-century in the US–it’s now only a shadow of its former self.
Here’s an old newspaper article from 1986, in which Betty Friedan is regretting the fact that feminists attacked the old system of alimony:
“A series of divorce laws pushed into practice by the women’s movement should be changed because they penalize women who deserve alimony, author Betty Friedan and other feminists said Wednesday.”
"’‘There is a false illusion of equality in current divorce proceedings,’’ Friedan said at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. She called reform divorce laws, enacted over the past 15 years in almost every state, '‘male models for equality . . . that penalize women.’
"Friedan, who wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and is credited as a founder of the women’s movement, called for a change in the newly enacted divorce laws – the same laws supported by the women’s movement in an effort to make the courts treat women equally with men.
‘‘Very early on, women said we don’t want alimony, it’s a form of dependence,’’ said Harvard sociologist Lenore Weitzman. ‘‘We thought it was a trap and now we see it is a lifeline.’’ She presented studies that show a woman’s income drops the first year after divorce while the man’s standard of living can increase by more than 100 percent. She said recent census figures show 85 percent of divorced women do not receive alimony."
articles.orlandosentinel.com/1986-09-04/news/0250190057_1_alimony-divorce-equality
So, heck if I understand why alimony has recently turned into a bogeyman–in most of the US, alimony (particularly life-long alimony) is not a thing. A few years of spousal support is the most anybody can count on these days in much of the US (although I realize that things are difference in parts of the NE).
I can’t seem to find anything right now (google alimony and feminists and you get mostly garbage), but historically speaking, there was a feminist push to destroy the old alimony system in order to shove women into the workforce.
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Xantippe
Guest
I think your second point is correct.
About the first point, I recently learned that there was actually a big boom in divorce right at the end of WWII.
There’s a nice chart of marriage and divorce rates here, covering a nice long stretch of time:
washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/23/144-years-of-marriage-and-divorce-in-the-united-states-in-one-chart/
"First, you can see that the common generalizations are true. As the chart shows, marriage rates have declined steadily since the 1980s. Today they are lower than any other time since 1870, including during the Great Depression. However, divorce rates today are actually slightly down compared with the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s on a per capita basis.
"In addition, you can see that events like World War I, World War II and the Great Depression all had a significant impact on marriage and divorce rates.
“Couples rushed to the altar before the wars started, as well as at their conclusion. As Olson notes, divorces also spiked after the conclusion of WWII, perhaps because some couples who had married rashly before the war realized their differences.”
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PolarGuy
Guest
WWII changed a LOT of people and not usually for the better. Men who had seen unimaginable horrors came home changed; POWs came home to find that spouses had thought them dead or otherwise moved on from them; soldiers came home missing body parts; women waiting for all of the above found they could survive and thrive without them, etc. - all at a time when technology, education (GI bill etc.), and all else were changing too.
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Sunbreak
Guest
I couldn’t dispute that. What I observed growing up during this time is that when women were finally able to get the same pay and jobs that could support them, they felt they didn’t have to be stuck in unhappy or abusive marriages.
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HerCrazierHalf
Guest
So at its core, a key issue is that both sexes suddenly had other “viable” options?
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Xantippe
Guest
Yes.
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SuperLuigi
Guest
I would say no-fault divorce is the biggest factor.
Contraception is a grave matter, but that had been working its way into other churches as early as the 1930s I believe.
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chris62
Guest
The sexualisation of society was about this period, hand in hand with an increase in a TV viewing, with more than one TV in the home becoming popular.
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christofirst
Guest
According to my mom, now in her late 80s, there was a considerable amount of familial and societal shaming associated with divorce back in the 1950s and very likely before. The fear of this shame is what kept her from leaving my dad, even though theirs was an often miserable and hostile marriage.
The shame associated with divorce seems to have been jettisoned during the sexual revolution, which coincides with the years mentioned by the OP.
If my parents were younger and married today, they very likely would have divorced. Is it because of the fighting, anger and misery we kids constantly saw that none of my siblings are married now? Could be. As it was, my parents lived their later years in separate rooms like bitter roommates, rarely speaking to one another. The marriage endured officially until my dad died, so I guess there is great Christian merit in that. It hardly seems ideal…
The shame associated with divorce seems to have been jettisoned during the sexual revolution, which coincides with the years mentioned by the OP.
If my parents were younger and married today, they very likely would have divorced. Is it because of the fighting, anger and misery we kids constantly saw that none of my siblings are married now? Could be. As it was, my parents lived their later years in separate rooms like bitter roommates, rarely speaking to one another. The marriage endured officially until my dad died, so I guess there is great Christian merit in that. It hardly seems ideal…
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