What caused the doubling of divorce between 1965 and 1975?

[SWolf]

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.

Alimony is still responsible for a transfer of around 10 billion dollars a year. It still is a case in around 10 percent of divorces. 97% are payed by men.

Child support is where the modern brutality happens. The non-breadwinner tends to get the kids, as they can easily make the case they were the main caretaker, since the other spouse was working. This lets them get more custody of the children, which makes the breadwinner need to pay more child support to pay for expenses for the children while they are with the other spouse.

It’s a vicious double-whammy. The breadwinner gets the kid less, and they have to pay more in child support BECAUSE they have the kids less.

In the current legal climate, it doesn’t even matter if the breadwinner did anything wrong. When you have a legal climate that gives an advantage to a party to act unethically, it’s called moral hazard. Modern marriage law is exactly that.

 

[Xantippe]

Alimony is still responsible for a transfer of around 10 billion dollars a year. It still is a case in around 10 percent of divorces. 97% are payed by men.

**I was just looking this up, and US yogurt sales are over $7 billion a year.

foodnavigator-usa.com/Manufacturers/Latest-data-on-US-yogurt-Greek-yogurt-Chobani-Dannon**

US ice cream sales are about $5 billion.

idfa.org/news-views/media-kits/ice-cream/ice-cream-sales-trends

The US chocolate market is $20 billion.

candyindustry.com/articles/86698-mintel-us-chocolate-market-to-hit-25b-in-2019

So, color me unimpressed. The total amount of alimony paid in the US is about 50% more than our consumption of yogurt, 2X our consumption of ice cream, and half as much as we spend on chocolate.

I got a bit lost working with all the zeroes (somebody correct me if I have miscalculated horribly), but we are living in an $18 trillion dollar economy. If I did this right, 10 billion divided by 18 trillion is (rounding up) 0.06% of our economy. Woohoo!

A billion dollars is not what it used to be.

Child support is where the modern brutality happens. The non-breadwinner tends to get the kids, as they can easily make the case they were the main caretaker, since the other spouse was working. This lets them get more custody of the children, which makes the breadwinner need to pay more child support to pay for expenses for the children while they are with the other spouse.

**We’ve discussed this before. Average child support in the US is pitiful and nothing like what it actually costs to raise a child. At this point, everybody knows that divorced women are, on average, poor as church mice.

Where is the economic motivation to divorce? Unless he’s an ogre, If I stay with my husband, I get 100% of his money. If I leave, I get some sort of tiny pitiful fraction of that. (An auntie was divorced by her husband who earned about $200k a year. He had a profession involving a lot of travel and he’d insisted that she quit her job a few years before she would have gotten a pension. Her spousal support was $2k a month for three years. He’d patiently waited to officially divorce until the kids were all almost grown, so I don’t know that he had any child support at all.) **

It’s a vicious double-whammy. The breadwinner gets the kid less, and they have to pay more in child support BECAUSE they have the kids less.

**…and because they have more income because during the marriage, the family invested more in the breadwinner’s career.

Families do often have to choose whose career to sacrifice for (whose education to fund, whose career to move for, who gets to take a job that requires a lot of travel, who stays home with infants or sick children), and during the marriage, the at-home parent’s earning power is often sacrificed in order to maximize the breadwinner’s income.

One can’t expect to both take the high-flying job that requires a lot of travel, long or unpredictable hours, no flexibility with regard to dealing with sick children, and also expect 50/50 custody.
**

In the current legal climate, it doesn’t even matter if the breadwinner did anything wrong. When you have a legal climate that gives an advantage to a party to act unethically, it’s called moral hazard. Modern marriage law is exactly that.

If it’s so unfair to men, why are divorced mothers usually so poor?

 

[Hoosier_Daddy]

If it’s so unfair to men, why are divorced mothers usually so poor?

Usually, with financial matters and marriage and family I disagree with you. But this was spot on, and kinda funny!

 

[Xantippe]

Child support is where the modern brutality happens. The non-breadwinner tends to get the kids, as they can easily make the case they were the main caretaker, since the other spouse was working. This lets them get more custody of the children, which makes the breadwinner need to pay more child support to pay for expenses for the children while they are with the other spouse.

Also, come to think of it, child support isn’t really that closely related to divorce.

Child support is supposed to happen when there are children, whether or not there was a marriage involved.

 

[EasterJoy]

1. Reversal of the widespread sentiment that divorce was never to be even considered, even when the family situation was gravely damaging
   a) because social stigma made divorced people into pariahs in many social circles
   b) because so many families would find it impossible to provide for themselves if the parents split up. (Remember, there was a time when family was the only social safety net that kept people from starving when they suffered financial misfortune.)
   c) because the prevailing wisdom was that it was hardly possible for children to be better off if either parent was removed from their home, even a very toxic parent.
2. The rise of a secular “gospel” that glamourized self-centered decision-making
3. The “black hole” effect, whereby a marriage becomes more at risk for a divorce because the couple has friends or family who have already divorced

Catholics saw a higher rise in divorces because the attitude in #1 was far more strictly in place, for all three reasons, plus the thought that a divorce could lead to damnation while one saintly parent enduring an abusive marriage could lead to salvation.

 

[UbiCaritas]

1. Reversal of the widespread sentiment that divorce was never to be even considered, even when the family situation was gravely damaging
   ** a) because social stigma made divorced people into pariahs in many social circles**
   b) because so many families would find it impossible to provide for themselves if the parents split up. (Remember, there was a time when family was the only social safety net that kept people from starving when they suffered financial misfortune.)
   c) because the prevailing wisdom was that it was hardly possible for children to be better off if either parent was removed from their home, even a very toxic parent.
2. The rise of a secular gospel that glamourized self-centered decision-making
3. The “black hole” effect, whereby a marriage becomes more at risk for a divorce because the couple has friends or family who have already divorced

This is a good, and interesting point.

Some anecdata: my father grew up in the 1950s, in a Catholic family and community. He knew of exactly one divorced family, as the kid attended his school. Both the child and his mother were socially shunned by the community at large, to the point that the other kids at school weren’t allowed to play with him because his parents were divorced, so he was seen as a bad influence.

Ironically, after the death of my grandparents my father was going through their papers, and found that his father had actually been married before his marriage to my grandmother. Since it was in another state, no one locally knew about it, and my grandparents were “married” in a JP’s office, though after the death of the first wife decades later this was sorted out by the two of them having their marriage convalidated by a priest. He remarked that had anyone known about this, he supposed he’d have been isolated and shunned as well, which finally gave him some rather limited perspective on what that kid must have gone through.

I can’t imagine that situation was the only one of its kind. Who knows what the backstory was, or who was at fault? Presumably each of the parents shared at least some of the blame, but the kid certainly didn’t…and yet, he was punished the worst of any of them. One can understand why people who grew up in that generation can be so particularly bitter about the Church, even though that kind of treatment was never Church teaching.

 

[SWolf]

Completely and utterly missing the point. Why should the breadwinner lose a very significant portion of their income, lose their children for the large majority of time, and get a divorce they don’t want, at the whim of their spouse?

The breadwinner sacrifices:

• Time with their children
• A degrading, hard work life for the majority of people
• Higher chances of injury from travelling to work and the work itself

There was plenty of sacrifice to go around, like any marriage.

 

[SWolf]

Also, come to think of it, child support isn’t really that closely related to divorce.

Child support is supposed to happen when there are children, whether or not there was a marriage involved.

If there was a way to prove it went to the children, maybe. But that’s not how it works.

 

[Xantippe]

1. Reversal of the widespread sentiment that divorce was never to be even considered, even when the family situation was gravely damaging
   a) because social stigma made divorced people into pariahs in many social circles
   b) because so many families would find it impossible to provide for themselves if the parents split up. (Remember, there was a time when family was the only social safety net that kept people from starving when they suffered financial misfortune.)
   c) because the prevailing wisdom was that it was hardly possible for children to be better off if either parent was removed from their home, even a very toxic parent.
2. The rise of a secular “gospel” that glamourized self-centered decision-making
3. The “black hole” effect, whereby a marriage becomes more at risk for a divorce because the couple has friends or family who have already divorced

Catholics saw a higher rise in divorces because the attitude in #1 was far more strictly in place, for all three reasons, plus the thought that a divorce could lead to damnation while one saintly parent enduring an abusive marriage could lead to salvation.

Right. Regarding #1, I’d add that this was probably the first time in human history that society was rich enough that divorce wouldn’t cause literal starvation or horrific degradation. Remember in the Gospels how Jesus said that a man that divorced his wife was making her into a prostitute–because that was the primary path to economic survival at the time for a divorced woman. And that continued to be the case for hundreds of years.

As I recall from Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America, there was experimentation with divorce across all classes during the period we’re discussing. After that experimental period, the middle class and (especially) upper middle class has since become very, very conservative in practice (if not in stated theory–it’s FINE for you to get a divorce, but they’re staying married and holding onto their lovely home in their lovely school district). You can’t Tiger Mom very well when you’re a divorced mother of two living on half of what you used to. When you’d practically sell your soul to keep your kids in a good school district or pay private school tuition, maintaining some sort of relationship with your spouse doesn’t seem like a major sacrifice, and in fact, modern middle/upper middle class family depends on husband and wife being able to work together to produce smoothly running domestic machinery.

On the other hand, as I’ve noted when visited my hometown, outside the middle class, or on the periphery of the middle class, marriage is much more brittle. But, sometimes that has a lot to do with stuff like mental illness (perhaps undiagnosed) and substance abuse, not to mention just plain old bad decision making by one or both spouses. If my family’s old employee ever gets around to divorcing his five-times married wife who has repeatedly taken four figure sums out of his savings and done stuff with it without asking, nobody is going to blame him.

 

[BlueEyedLady]

Completely and utterly missing the point. Why should the breadwinner lose a very significant portion of their income, lose their children for the large majority of time, and get a divorce they don’t want, at the whim of their spouse?

The breadwinner sacrifices:

• Time with their children
• A degrading, hard work life for the majority of people
• Higher chances of injury from travelling to work and the work itself

There was plenty of sacrifice to go around, like any marriage.

So? When you have children, it is not about you and what is best for you. You bring a child into this world, you support it, whether you’re single, divorced, or married. That’s just the right thing to do.

This isn’t about “whims”. There is not even a significant portion of the population that is divorcing on a " whim" for a “payout” as you keep asserting (without evidence, I might add). The incentive you keep going on about just isn’t there.

 

[Hoosier_Daddy]

Also, come to think of it, child support isn’t really that closely related to divorce.

Child support is supposed to happen when there are children, whether or not there was a marriage involved.

Oh snap! A mic dropping post…

 

[Xantippe]

If there was a way to prove it went to the children, maybe. But that’s not how it works.

How much do you think it costs to care for a child?

The national average for infant and toddler daycare costs are around $1,000 a month nationally, more in expensive areas, and $400-$500 a month even in the very cheapest states.

babycenter.com/0_how-much-youll-spend-on-childcare_1199776.bc

If a divorced woman is receiving the national average amount for child support (around $400 a month), that amount will either just cover daycare (in a very cheap state) or cover less than half of the daycare costs in a more average state.

And the child still needs to eat (toddlers can be absolutely voracious), have clothes, shoes that fit and are appropriate to the season, warm coats, doctor visits, dental visits, haircuts, some basic toys and art supplies, etc., etc. And, of course, the child needs to have a roof over their head, and every additional bedroom costs money.

So, if we’re talking about a toddler or infant and the average child support payment, the money is already all being spent on the child if the child is being housed, eating three meals a day, and going to daycare.

 

[TeachCatechism]

Completely and utterly missing the point. Why should the breadwinner lose a very significant portion of their income, lose their children for the large majority of time, and get a divorce they don’t want, at the whim of their spouse?

The breadwinner sacrifices:

• Time with their children
• A degrading, hard work life for the majority of people
• Higher chances of injury from travelling to work and the work itself

There was plenty of sacrifice to go around, like any marriage.

Child support can be a scam, but an even bigger one is alimony. I get alimony in a case like a parent took time out of their career. They should get temporary alimony until they can get on their feet. I also get something in the case of a person working so the other can advance their education. I’ve heard many cases of a spouse helping support the other through medical school then dumping them once they became a doctor. What I don’t like is permanent alimony. I get some people are really too old to start a career but the other cases are just laziness. I once dated a man who was paying alimony, child support and mortgage and he had no income for himself. Meanwhile his wife should have been working but refused to. Their kids were in school and she was young. I ended up dumping him partly because of this but also because I knrew I’d have to support his family. Speaking of which many people don’t even know that often the new spouse has to help pay child support. That’s another scam and yet another reason I avoid single dads. The guy I mentioned was always fighting with his ex about seeing the kids.

 

[EasterJoy]

Right. Regarding #1, I’d add that this was probably the first time in human history that society was rich enough that divorce wouldn’t cause literal starvation or horrific degradation. Remember in the Gospels how Jesus said that a man that divorced his wife was making her into a prostitute–because that was the primary path to economic survival at the time for a divorced woman. And that continued to be the case for hundreds of years.

As I recall from Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America, there was experimentation with divorce across all classes during the period we’re discussing. After that experimental period, the middle class and (especially) upper middle class has since become very, very conservative in practice (if not in stated theory–it’s FINE for you to get a divorce, but they’re staying married and holding onto their lovely home in their lovely school district). You can’t Tiger Mom very well when you’re a divorced mother of two living on half of what you used to. When you’d practically sell your soul to keep your kids in a good school district or pay private school tuition, maintaining some sort of relationship with your spouse doesn’t seem like a major sacrifice, and in fact, modern middle/upper middle class family depends on husband and wife being able to work together to produce smoothly running domestic machinery.

On the other hand, as I’ve noted when visited my hometown, outside the middle class, or on the periphery of the middle class, marriage is much more brittle. But, sometimes that has a lot to do with stuff like mental illness (perhaps undiagnosed) and substance abuse, not to mention just plain old bad decision making by one or both spouses. If my family’s old employee ever gets around to divorcing his five-times married wife who has repeatedly taken four figure sums out of his savings and done stuff with it without asking, nobody is going to blame him.

People do not realize it, but divorce is still a major force in the financial difficulties of many families. The standard of living for everyone drops, and it causes a lot of resentment and strife between parents.

Another factor that keeps poor people poor is that it is much easier to get yourself arrested when you are poor than when you are rich: your neighbors are not as likely to call the police because they hear your domestic dispute when you have a detached single-family dwelling as they do when you rent an apartment, your children may have to make do with less supervision because the parents have to work longer hours, your children are more likely to have interactions with police in a neighborhood that is high in crime, and so on. That is a topic for another thread. Suffice it to say that people who divorce often do not realize the financial sacrifice they are making. They think that if their spouse is “reasonable,” it will work out OK, but you can’t keep two households for the price of one, and that is all there is to it.

Back to the original question–I think people used to weigh the financial repercussions of divorce to be much scarier than people weigh them to be now. Certainly, the chances of starving are lower, but life as an American in 2015 who is “not starving” is not any piece of cake, all the same.

“Easily in but not easily out,” as the lobster said in the lobster pot!
(from The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis.)

 

[EasterJoy]

Child support can be a scam, but an even bigger one is alimony. I get alimony in a case like a parent took time out of their career. They should get temporary alimony until they can get on their feet. I also get something in the case of a person working so the other can advance their education. I’ve heard many cases of a spouse helping support the other through medical school then dumping them once they became a doctor. What I don’t like is permanent alimony. I get some people are really too old to start a career but the other cases are just laziness. I once dated a man who was paying alimony, child support and mortgage and he had no income for himself. Meanwhile his wife should have been working but refused to. Their kids were in school and she was young. I ended up dumping him partly because of this but also because I knrew I’d have to support his family. Speaking of which many people don’t even know that often the new spouse has to help pay child support. That’s another scam and yet another reason I avoid single dads. The guy I mentioned was always fighting with his ex about seeing the kids.

This is one reason I don’t believe in “no fault” divorce. If someone lets a spouse support them through medical school and then decides to drop them when they get through–hey, if they are abandoning a spouse who never did a thing to deserve it, let them pay alimony for life. Let their marriage promises mean something permanent! On the other hand, if someone is being divorced for a just cause of which the divorcing spouse is innocent, I’d not have any problem if they were cut out of the common conjugal life without a penny. If they broke their marriage through their infidelity, why should the wronged spouse have to support them at all?

I do not buy the contention that it takes two to cause a divorce. That simply isn’t true. Sometimes, a marriage breaks up by the fault of one, by the refusal of one, or by the infidelity of one, not because both failed to keep their vows. In that case, the one who made their vows and then violated them in a gross way deserves nothing.

 

[Xantippe]

People do not realize it, but divorce is still a major force in the financial difficulties of many families. The standard of living for everyone drops, and it causes a lot of resentment and strife between parents.

Suffice it to say that people who divorce often do not realize the financial sacrifice they are making. They think that if their spouse is “reasonable,” it will work out OK, but you can’t keep two households for the price of one, and that is all there is to it.

Back to the original question–I think people used to weigh the financial repercussions of divorce to be much scarier than people weigh them to be now. Certainly, the chances of starving are lower, but life as an American in 2015 who is “not starving” is not any piece of cake, all the same.

There’s a chicken-and-egg factor, though–there are often major financial disagreements and dysfunction that precede divorce.

huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/divorce-study_n_3587811.html

"Arguing about money is the top predictor of divorce, according to Sonya Britt, a Kansas State University researcher.

"On Friday, she shed light on her research, which found that couples who argued about money early in their relationships – regardless of their income, debt or net worth – were at a greater risk for divorce.

“Arguments about money [are] by far the top predictor of divorce,” she said. “It’s not children, sex, in-laws or anything else. It’s money – for both men and women.”"

“The research also concluded that arguments about money were longer and usually more intense than other types of marital disagreements.”

Money issues can be huge. Take for example the impulsive wife in one of my previous posts–she would not sit down and get buy-in from her husband before repeatedly spending large amounts of his very hard-earned savings on really stupid “investments.” I’ve also heard of a couple of cases in real life where, while husband and wife are living under the same roof, the husband stops supporting the family. It’s sort of a sit-in divorce. That happens a lot.

Different income tiers have different divorce rates–roughly speaking, the richer they are, the less divorce there is.

theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-divorce-proof-marriage/381401/

(Drop down to the bar graph for annual household income.)

“Couples who make more than $125,000 a year (combined) cut their divorce risk in half” compared to couples that make $25k or less.

It’s easy to imagine what the mechanism for that is. Unfortunately, the less money you have, the more stress even small missteps or disagreements can cause. For instance, my husband might raise an eyebrow at a Starbucks treat. But if my Starbucks treat caused us an overdraft fee and that in turn caused a cascade of economic unpleasantness, wow, we’d have a lot more to argue about!

With regard to different eras and the fear of divorce, If I had to rank it, I’d probably put it like this:

1. pre-1965 fear of divorce (most fear)
2. post-1990-ish-present fear of divorce (second greatest)
3. 1965-1990ish fear of divorce (least–the experimental phase)

You could actually make a case that current society is the most afraid of divorce, because of how people delay or avoid marriage out of fear of divorce. But somewhere between 1965-1990 is the point of lowest amount of fear. (That’s when people were actually saying the words, “If it doesn’t work out, we can always just get a divorce!”)

 

[Xantippe]

This is one reason I don’t believe in “no fault” divorce. If someone lets a spouse support them through medical school and then decides to drop them when they get through–hey, if they are abandoning a spouse who never did a thing to deserve it, let them pay alimony for life. Let their marriage promises mean something permanent! On the other hand, if someone is being divorced for a just cause of which the divorcing spouse is innocent, I’d not have any problem if they were cut out of the common conjugal life without a penny. If they broke their marriage through their infidelity, why should the wronged spouse have to support them at all?

I do not buy the contention that it takes two to cause a divorce. That simply isn’t true. Sometimes, a marriage breaks up by the fault of one, by the refusal of one, or by the infidelity of one, not because both failed to keep their vows. In that case, the one who made their vows and then violated them in a gross way deserves nothing.

That sounds like a very adversarial winner-takes-all system. I think it assumes that outsiders (namely the legal system) can know a marriage inside and out, when all of their information comes from interested parties. While fault may be entirely one-sided, I don’t think that an outsider is in a position to know that.

Also, there is a question of basic justice–why isn’t a spouse (however erring) entitled to half of all property acquired during the marriage? They presumably had some role in the acquisition and maintenance of marital property.

 

[Marie5890]

Off the top of my head, I’d say women entered the workforce in large numbers, which gave them some financial independence from their husbands, which emboldened them to leave marriages in which they weren’t happy for whatever reason, which resulted in the stigma against divorce dissolving.

I agree with this.
Sometimes people idealize marriage of the past, thinking that just because the divorce rate was lower meant there were more happy marriages, less abusive marriages.

I am willing to debate that.
Since women got to the point that they did not need a man for financial stability, they didnt have to live in abusive marriages.

 

[Xantippe]

I just found a very interesting tidbit from this Atlantic article:

theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-divorce-proof-marriage/381401/

“Men are 50 percent more likely to end up divorced when they said their partner’s looks were important in their decision to get married, and women are 60 percent more likely to end up divorced when they cared about their partner’s wealth, compared to people who said they cared about neither.”

Ay yay yay!

 

[TeachCatechism]

This is one reason I don’t believe in “no fault” divorce. If someone lets a spouse support them through medical school and then decides to drop them when they get through–hey, if they are abandoning a spouse who never did a thing to deserve it, let them pay alimony for life. Let their marriage promises mean something permanent! On the other hand, if someone is being divorced for a just cause of which the divorcing spouse is innocent, I’d not have any problem if they were cut out of the common conjugal life without a penny. If they broke their marriage through their infidelity, why should the wronged spouse have to support them at all?

I do not buy the contention that it takes two to cause a divorce. That simply isn’t true. Sometimes, a marriage breaks up by the fault of one, by the refusal of one, or by the infidelity of one, not because both failed to keep their vows. In that case, the one who made their vows and then violated them in a gross way deserves nothing.

I agree. If one person is the guilty one they should be supporting. I think it’s immoral when someone cheats then they get support. They should pay for the children and lose custody. The wronged spouse shouldn’t be penalized at all.