CHAPTER 7
INTERPRETING THE DIVORCE REVOLUTION
"All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion". These opening words of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina turn up not infrequently in the Australian literature on family breakdown, most recently in the chapter on single-parent families in Jean McCaughey's A Bit of a Struggle. (1) Yet it is a puzzling proposition. Why should happiness be less complex and diverse than unhappiness? Are the forms of family unhappiness endlessly various? Novelists naturally have an interest in the complexity of social relations and in the varied and unexpected forms of social and personal failure. Social researchers are, or should be, similarly interested in failure, but they cannot operate on the assumption that each instance of failure requires for its adequate description the richness and subtlety of a novel. Their task is to seek patterns in a body of data which is somewhat removed from the world as experienced by its participants -- though they must also try to translate their findings into terms, motives and intentions recognisable to the people whose lives they are trying to describe. This chapter will aim to find such patterns in the evidence concerning family breakdown.
As the notion of "family breakdown" is a contentious one, something needs to be said at the outset about its usage. The notion implies something more than the ordinary unhappiness experienced in many families much of the time. Such unhappiness usually comes mixed up with elements of hopefulness, cheerfulness and humour, and most people regard it as part of the normal course of events which they have to struggle with or endure. It is not by itself a threat to family relations. A family can only be said to have "broken down" when this unhappiness becomes dominating and irresolvable. Sometimes this breakdown ends in divorce; sometimes the family is not formally broken up but continues, though with lasting alienation and disaffection or perpetual arguments.
"Family breakdown" is, then, a description applicable to both chronically unhappy continuing families and families that end in dissolution. The term itself does not presume that one outcome is better than the other. Nevertheless, it does presume that long-term separations and divorces are themselves unhappily broken relationships. As the evidence will show, few marriages end amicably and by mutual agreement. Equally importantly, almost all marriages still aspire to permanence, amongst other ideals. From the point of view of these aspirations divorce is certainly to be counted as failure. Of course, few (if any) marriages fully live up to their initial ideals, but there are degrees of lack of success. Divorce is almost invariably a "solution" to family problems premissed upon the assumption, made by at least one of the parties, that there can no longer be even a modest fulfilment of those initial ideals.
The most obvious indicator of family breakdown is the divorce rate -- usually measured as the number of divorces per year per 1000 married couples. The very conspicuousness of this figure can be misleading, for it cannot by itself serve as an index of marital or family unhappiness. It is of course impossible to obtain any direct measure of human happiness or unhappiness, but the task of trying to measure the quality of family life is not one which should be abandoned merely for that reason. We do not abstain from studying the state of the economy simply because the evidence is complex and partly intangible. The divorce rate needs to be examined and interpreted in conjunction with many other indicators. No doubt the results will never be conclusive, but they may give us reasons to re-appraise our practices and policies, as well as our personal assumptions. Without such research we are all at the mercy of our own intuitions and experiences, and the subject is of course a deeply emotional one about which it is difficult to be detached.
It has been a general theme of this book that to devise any welfare policy we need some theory about the basic causes in operation and some account of the basic values we want to promote. Unfortunately, fundamental studies of the causes of family breakdown and its incidence in relation to all the standard social indicators -- class, employment and occupation, education, religious and other beliefs, political preference, ethnic background, geographic location -- have not been done in this country. Researchers, it seems, have taken Tolstoy's maxim about the variety of family unhappiness all too literally, as if the enterprise of interpreting and understanding data of this kind is doomed before it starts. And yet the subject -- decline in family stability, if not of family success -- represents a major social change, and it is hard to believe that any change of this magnitude could possibly pass by without careful analysis and examination.
It is not quite true that there has been no serious research on this subject. A considerable amount of work has been done on the process of divorce and separation, most notably in the Australian Institute of Family Studies project on The Economic Consequences of Marriage Breakdown in Australia. (2) What we lack is work on the causes of divorce and separation and on the causes of enduring and successful male/female relationships. The best contributions to our understanding of these topics have been made by Bettina Arndt, Ailsa Burns, Ronald Conway and Peter Jordan. The strategy in this chapter will be to see whether a common pattern or picture emerges from their research, and how well it corresponds with the limited body of data that we have available from the work of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
Rapidly rising divorce rates in the 1970s -- the "divorce epidemic" as it is sometimes described -- were an international phenomenon, affecting all the major Western industrialised countries. Although the general pattern is similar throughout the West, by comparison with these countries Australia ranks as having a fairly high divorce rate, much lower than that of the United States, much higher than that of France and West Germany, on a par with that of the United Kingdom. Any account of the Australian experience will need to be compatible with the general trend in these other countries. It cannot rest too heavily on factors peculiar to Australian life and character.
An analysis of the raw divorce rate figures might not seem a very revealing place to begin, but in fact a good deal can be gleaned from them. The first question that must be tackled is the relation between legal and social change. Between 1959 and 1975 marriage and divorce in Australia was governed by the Matrimonial Causes Act 1959, which replaced a patchwork of state laws with a uniform federal law. The Act permitted divorce on fourteen different grounds of "fault", including brutality, mental cruelty, adultery by either party, habitual drunkenness, and desertion for three years. It allowed a divorce without proof of fault if the parties had been separated for five years. In 1976 the Family Law Act 1975 abolished the notion of fault and all the fourteen categories of fault, and permitted divorce after "irretrievable breakdown" of the marriage as evidenced by twelve months' separation. Consent by both parties was not a requirement.
Before 1976 the system was often legally complex, formalised, expensive, publicly visible, embarrassing, and conducted in traditional moral categories. After 1976 the procedure aimed to be simple, informal, cheap, out of the public eye, business-like and morally neutral. As legal changes go, this was a radical reversal. Whether the new Family Courts have achieved these aims, and whether they are appropriate aims, has been the subject of much public discussion since 1976, but these topics will not be considered at the moment. The issue here is whether these changes in the law can be seen as a major cause of the changing divorce rate.
Figure 7.1: Divorce Rates
Source: ABS Catalogue 3307.0; ABS Yearbooks.
Two things emerge from a study of figure 7.1, which plots the divorce rate. The most striking is the sky-rocketing of the rate in 1976 with the introduction of the new law. At first sight this would seem to support the view that the 1975 Act played a great part in changing social behaviour. But a second and closer scrutiny suggests the opposite conclusion. If the data for the years 1976-1978 are removed from consideration, what emerges is something like a natural curve, beginning around 1970 and levelling off in 1983. This curve appears to represent a social trend operating relatively independently of the state of the law. The divorce rate began to rise in the early 1970s even under the much harsher 1959 Act, and after 1978 it rather rapidly came back to the shape suggested by that early rise. If the legal change produced social change, then we would expect a more abrupt contrast between the 1975 trend and the 1976 result, we would expect a less abrupt drop in 1977-78, and we would not expect an increase between 1978 and 1983. The divorce rate suggests that the legal change was as much a response to a social change as it was a cause of social change.
A further conclusion emerges when we add to the divorce rate the available figures on the median duration of marriages that ended in divorce in this period. What this comparison shows is that the social change at work here was not a long-standing trend, but really began to take effect only in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969 the median duration (from marriage to divorce) was thirteen years. In 1982 it was 10.4 years, and it has remained around that figure since then. (3) If the liberalisation of divorce in 1976 was a response to a long-term trend, we would expect the introduction of the Act to be followed by a sudden rise in the median duration of marriages ending in divorce. In other words, there would be a "backlog effect" as many unhappily married couples who had stayed together for ten or twenty years largely because of the difficulty in obtaining a divorce would at this time take advantage of the easier legal solution. The sudden rise in the rate in 1976 certainly looks like such an effect, but the median duration figures contradict this conclusion. The median duration in 1976 and 1977 was only eleven years. Between 1969 and 1982 the median actually fell steadily every year. The new law caused not the slightest increase.
This is surprising. It suggests that the rising divorce rate of the 1970s cannot be explained as the result of removing the "repressive" or "punitive" 1959 Act and thereby freeing many couples from unhappy marriages contracted under that legislation. Rather, it suggests that on the whole marriages were happier in the 1950s and 1960s than they were in the 1970s. It suggests that the rising divorce rate indicates not merely increased ease of divorce operating upon an unchanging level of desire to obtain a divorce, but a decline in the general quality of married relationships. This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that the rate did not drop off once the supposed backlog had had time to work its way through the system.
It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the divorce rate exactly reflects the state of marriage, but it now appears that those who would deny any connection between them have some explaining to do. As a matter of fact, most discussions of this subject do tend to assume that there has been a decline in the quality of marriage. Ailsa Burns, for instance, poses the question: "why then has this increase [in the divorce rate] occurred at a time when women have been gaining more rights?" And elsewhere: "why are so many younger women less satisfied than their mothers' generation?". (4) The answer to the first question, she says, "lies in the weakening of the social, economic and legal constraints against divorce". But this rests too much on external factors which are themselves responses to internal changes. Some commentators, including Ailsa Burns, argue that what has changed is that people, and especially women, expect much more from marriage than did the previous generation. This view does not accept the decline thesis; its claims will be examined later on.
Let us assume for the moment that the object to be explained is a decline in the quality of marriages as indicated by a rise in the divorce rate. It is possible that this decline is the result of many different factors working together, and some discussions of the subject break down those factors into many different components. This approach risks missing something central. Marriage, like any other social relationship, is always at risk in many ways. The multi-factorial approach may forget to explain why those factors have conspired at this time in this way to produce such a striking social change. It may be just happenstance that the divorce rate has risen so markedly in so many countries at much the same time, and that the trend will vanish just as quickly and mysteriously as it has arisen; but it is more likely that this change is linked to some other large-scale changes. Successfully to explain this phenomenon, we must keep the overall shape of these changes in view.
Looking at the general shape of the divorce rate, a Martian observer would perhaps conclude that there has been a slump in the marriage market parallel to the decline in the economic situation. Indeed, some human observers have hypothesised that economic slowdown has caused marital decline. One version of this thesis holds that inflation and taxation have forced married women to enter the workforce to preserve family living standards. The economic power that women then acquire reduces men's comparative advantage as providers of the family income, and thus destabilises the balance which previously existed between men and women. This thesis conflicts with the common claim that families tend to stick together more strongly in times of economic adversity. Another line of argument reverses the relation between economics and marriage. It points out that marital breakdown is frequently not a result of economic decline but a cause of it, especially for women and children. After divorce, it is observed, men's standards of living tend to rise and women's to fall.
These arguments, though no doubt contestable, warn us that there may be some connection between the general slowdown of Western economies and the general decline of marriage, but because there are tendencies running in opposite directions any more exact account of it will not be easy to formulate. Furthermore, there are other theorists who hold that rising living standards mean that the two sexes need each other less than they did in the past. This argument would predict higher divorce rates with increasing affluence -- for those who are increasingly affluent.
Our general lack of research on the causes of family breakdown makes it almost impossible to confirm or refute any of these conflicting claims. The one piece of economic information that we do have seems to be neutral on the matter. Alan Jordan's study of incomes in Australia, The Common Treasury, found that broken families have no economic distinguishing features which might account for their failure. As Jordan puts it, "sole parents are not a natural group, and therefore sole parenthood in general has no natural history, the histories of different sole parents depending on the characteristics of the groups from which they have originated". (5) This suggests that it would be fruitless to look in great detail at economic circumstances to explain family breakdown.
A large number of factors suggest that marriages should have been stronger in the 1970s than previously. Ronald Conway lists six predictors for marital success, based on American life insurance research:
- As people grow older their chances of making a successful marriage increase. Chances of marriage break-up increase almost logarithmically to the degree to which the age of the older partner falls below 21.
- Length of acquaintance and courtship increase the chances of a successful marriage choice. On the average, the shorter the acquaintanceship, the less successful the marriage.
- Despite the evident success of many second marriages in recent years and the removal of the stigma once attached to divorce, marriages in which one party has already been divorced are likely to be less successful than one in which neither party has had a previous spouse.
- Shared religious faith or strong code of religious values makes for more successful marriage than is the case with partners who have no such beliefs.
- Intelligence and a good education possessed by at least one party in the marriage is a better augury than if neither partner possesses these advantages.
- If the couple's parents are happily married the odds that a new young marriage will succeed are far more favourable. This is one of the most important predictors of marital success. (6)
Conway adds that "In the decade or so since these six predictors were formulated little has happened in the way of research to unseat them". But he does not note how remarkably inadequate these six are in accounting for the rise of the divorce rate in the 1970s. The only factor clearly correlated with divorce is (4), the decline in religious values. Factor (3), the relative failure of remarriages, may play a small part, but a high rate of remarriage presupposes a high first divorce rate, and so cannot explain that rate. What we can expect from this factor is a "snowball effect" -- rising first divorce rates and a high rate of remarriage will accelerate the overall divorce rate.
All the other indicators suggest that marriages in the 1970s should have been stronger than previously. Factor (6), the parent model, is a little ambiguous. If marital success means marital permanence then the low divorce rate of the 1950s will have tended to produce a low divorce rate in the 1970s. If success is defined in some other way then the parental model will at least be neutral, for it predicts that each generation will be just as successful as the preceding generation.
The tendency of the 1970s was towards later marriage, longer pre-marital acquaintanceship, and more education. (At least more formal education -- real educational standards may well have declined in this period.) We are forced to the conclusion that either these are not good predictors of marital success, or there was some other factor at work which powerfully over-rode their influence. There may be some evidence that later marriage is not a good predictor. While teenage marriages are certainly the least stable of all first marriages (and the reduction in teenage marriages must have tended to reduce the overall divorce rate), first marriages where the wife is between 20 and 24 achieve better than the median rate of success. (7) In other words, marital success does not improve in proportion to age at marriage. Nor is it at all clear that couples who live together before marriage -- and thus maximise their premarital acquaintanceship -- tend to develop better marriages. (8)
It appears that something has been missed by the American life insurance companies, and by Ronald Conway, a usually astute observer of these matters. Yet there are a number of other factors which also suggest that divorce rates should have declined in the 1970s. Living standards rose steadily between the 1950s and the 1970s, taking economic pressure off families. Feminism must have boosted women's confidence, and their increasing involvement in public life has greatly expanded their opportunities. Fewer children per family should have made domestic life less strenuous. Reliable information and advice about sexuality is now more readily available. Homosexuals are less likely to be trapped in marriages for which they are entirely unsuited. Young people no longer rush blindly into marriage. According to Peter McDonald, "Teenage marriage is now at its lowest level in Australian history", (9) and this dramatic decline, which began in 1971, should have lowered the divorce rate significantly. The tendency to postpone parenthood until the marriage has become well established must have relieved some of the pressures felt in the early stages of marriage. And most importantly of all, the overall rate of first marriage has itself steadily dropped since the mid-1970s. This must have had the effect of "screening out" many who felt themselves unsuited to marriage. (10)
OTHER HYPOTHESES
All in all, the evidence suggests that the divorce rate indicates not a lesser, but a considerably greater social change than the figures themselves would show. At this point we have almost exhausted what can be discovered from the broad and crude statistics about marriage and divorce. We need to turn to more specialised, though possibly less representative, studies and conjectures. So what has happened? Perhaps the "divorce epidemic" has been the by-product of an outbreak of the traditionally accepted causes of family breakdown? Has there been a corresponding increase in domestic violence, drunkenness, mental cruelty, male desertion, adultery, etc? Reliable comparative information on the incidence of these phenomena is, in the nature of the case, difficult to come by. The most recent Australian study of domestic violence, Beyond These Walls, estimates that chronic domestic violence afflicts about three to four per cent of women in domestic relationships, so even if violence has increased it is still not at a level to account for more than a small part of the divorce rate. (11) It is also well known that couples in such a violent relationship very often stay together for many years. The report cites the American research of Straus and Gelles, which suggests that the level of such violence may have declined between 1975 and 1985 by about 26 per cent. (12)
At least this much can be said here, that few who write seriously about marriage and divorce claim that the divorce rate reflects rising levels of the traditional grounds for divorce as laid down in the 1959 Matrimonial Causes Act. The most likely candidate here, adultery, being the fugitive thing that it is, is not easily quantified; but it is a curious case in another way. Conway reports on a 1981 nationwide survey conducted by the Melbourne Age showing that "63 per cent of the men agreed that it was wrong for a married person to have sex outside marriage and 70 per cent of the women felt the same way". (13) It may be that more liberal attitudes of this kind make adultery less of a threat to marriages than previously, though of course people's actual reactions to the real thing may bear little relation to their professed opinions.
Ailsa Burns attempts to relate women's decisions to separate to another traditional ground for divorce, failure of the husband to provide economic support. "In many cases income has been erratic during the course of the marriage, and a smaller, but reliable income is considered preferable. In addition, a significant minority [of women] have been the major bread-winner during the course of the marriage/relationship (due to the partner's unemployment/physical or mental illness/absence/failure to support), so that the move into sole parenthood improves financial status". (14) No doubt these causes are at work (as they always have been) and they are of course important for those who have to deal with them, but there is little reason to think that they help us to understand the overall divorce phenomenon. As Alan Jordan's evidence shows, family breakdown has been occurring fairly evenly across all levels of income and status.
Bettina Arndt provides a different angle on the subject, reporting on a 1985 study of 168 recently-separated men by a Brisbane Family Court counsellor, Peter Jordan. First, Arndt notes, male desertion of women is no longer the central issue. "In Australia it is women rather than men who are making the decision to end the marriage. In 65 per cent of cases studied, the wife made the decision to separate (the husband's decision accounted for 19 per cent of divorces ...)". (15) This finding is broadly confirmed by the Australian Institute of Family Studies in their Economic Consequences of Marriage Breakdown in Australia; from their analysis of 825 cases they estimate that more than two out of three unilateral separations are instigated by women, whereas Jordan's finding was more than three out of four. (16) Second, separation does not seem to be an amicable parting of ways -- only 16 per cent of cases involve mutual agreement (18 per cent according to the AIFS study). Third, "Upon separation most men experience emotional and physical symptoms normally associated with extreme grief and stress". Women tend to have decided that the marriage is heading for failure at least a year before separation, and have usually done their grieving before they leave.
When she attempts to generalise about what went wrong in these relationships, Arndt places the emphasis on the emotional imbalances between the partners. She quotes an English study of marriage in which one-third of the women complained that "their partners were inept as companions and ineffectual as confidants". Arndt's general view is that "Along with the shift in economic balance in the family, women are now beginning to resent their continuing emotional support of men and are expecting men to supply the same emotional input into relationships as they do". Even after separation, men (26 per cent of them, in Jordan's estimate) say that they do not understand what went wrong, and it is usually the man who attempts reconciliation after the event.
Conflict over power and decision-making in the family does not seem to be the central issue. A 1982 Australian Institute of Family Studies report by Helen Glezer concludes that 29 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women felt that important family decisions should be made by the husband. (17) This suggests that in only 13 per cent of families is there disagreement about decision-making processes. (It is possible that in up to 71 per cent of cases the man thought decisions should be mutual and the woman thought they should be hers, but this appears unlikely.) This seems surprising: it suggests that the familiar feminist portrait of marriage as downtrodden women being ruled over by domineering men is wide of the mark. But such a conclusion would not surprise Ronald Conway, who in his writings has mustered a large body of evidence to show that (like their American counterparts) Australian families are generally mother-dominated.
Helen Glezer's research reports disagreement over roles in the home -- battles over the kitchen sink -- as a major cause of conflict; other work seems to show that this is not the primary problem and indicates that men today are very much more likely to do their share of housework and child care. As we noted in Chapter Four, only 6 per cent of homemakers surveyed by Women in the Home thought that their partners failed to appreciate their contribution to the family; and the ABS Time Use Pilot Survey showed that in general men and women contribute equally to the overall workload of society. (18) Even Glezer's own study showed that young married men (those under 34) differ very little from their partners in their attitudes to these things. (19) Yet it is this group of men who are experiencing the full force of the divorce revolution. Perhaps it is best to conclude that the home front becomes a major battle-ground only when the more basic emotional imbalances between the couple are not sorted out. Ailsa Burns describes the case of a woman breaking away from traditional sex roles who complained that "the real source of her dissatisfaction was her husband's failure to communicate with her ("he never listens") -- that is, it was her disappointment in the relationship rather than the unjust division of labour and authority in the marriage that had changed her attitudes". (20)
Burns describes well how difficult it is to work out a fair division of labour between home and work. She speaks of an
exchange rate confusion that occurs in traditional marriages, because of the fact that transactions are made in different coinage. (How much child-rearing and homemaking equals how much providing?) An exchange rate between the two currencies has to be struck, which is necessarily arbitrary in the absence of any measurable criteria; and under such conditions it is relatively easy for the more powerful group to mystify the weaker into accepting the legitimacy of a rate struck by itself. (21)
Whether or not this mystification is common, conflict between couples can easily be aggravated by these exchange rate difficulties, and it is plausible to think that they will loom even larger in the process of transition from one system of well-known roles to a new and relatively untried arrangement.
Conflict over child-rearing is, apparently, also not crucial. There is very little evidence that women who divorce feel that men, for all their emotional limitations, are inadequate as fathers of their children. Since 1974 the proportion of divorces in families with children to total divorces has fallen from 68 per cent to 60 per cent. In Arndt's account, many of the men were reported to be too absorbed in their work to provide their wives with the companionship they sought, which suggests they were also not closely involved in their children's lives. But after separation had occurred, ninety-eight per cent of them "claimed strong feelings for their children and 91 per cent did not want to be separated from them". (22) It would be very presumptuous to assume that these feelings are not genuine. (In the divorce debate men commonly find themselves being blamed for lacking emotion and then being expected to show none when they lose their family.)
One element in this situation that has perhaps not been given full weight is the age distribution of the divorce figures. Arndt remarks in one place that "most divorces are taking place not towards the end nor at the beginning but somewhere in the restless middle of her marriage rather than his". But elsewhere she observes that "In Australia, divorces are happening earlier -- the peak age group is the twenty-four to twenty-nine-year olds. ..." (23) It is difficult to see how a twenty-seven year old can be described as "in the restless middle of her marriage".
There is good evidence that a marriage that survives the first ten or so years is likely to survive most other contingencies. The median duration of failed first marriages between the date of marriage and final separation is around seven years. (24) Any general account of these issues has to keep this in mind. This fact suggests not that the difficulties between men and women are irreconcilable but that many of us enter marriage very unprepared for the responsibilities it entails. This is all the more surprising in that few now enter marriage without having had some experience of life with the opposite sex.
Clearly, for most couples at the earlier stage of family formation, money is not a crucial difficulty (unless they have put themselves deeply into debt with mortgage repayments). Typically, they have both been in the workforce for at least five years and have not had dependants to consider. For this group the issues have more to do with morale and education, with an understanding of what marriage and family life require, than with dollars and cents. (Nevertheless, marriage guidance counsellors do emphasise the role of financial stress in family breakdown, and the family assistance policies argued for in earlier chapters might alleviate some of this.)
The crucial age group here -- say, twenty-four to thirty-four -- is also the peak child-bearing period. A twenty-seven year old woman is very likely to have a two-year-old child and a baby. The stresses of first children at this time seem to be compounded by the strain women feel in moving (if they do move) from the workforce to the home, with all the attendant loss of status and (sometimes) sense of purpose. Further, many young Australian men take longer to "settle down" than women; they go through a phase in which drinking, sport, sex and danger are the main interests; and some never manage to make the transition to becoming stable sources of support for their family. (25) It would seem from this evidence that we are on the whole -- both women and men -- poorly prepared and educated for this transition period. That it should so often result in divorce, leaving a woman on her own to cope with young children, seems both tragic and unnecessary. We know that the effects of divorce on young children are often traumatic. That women in this situation should be choosing to leave their main source of economic, if not emotional, support is even more puzzling. And if emotional support is their main objective it is difficult to see how they might obtain this at all on their own with small children. Arndt's portrait of an emotionally strong woman leaving an emotionally inadequate man, though plausible in some respects, seems out of kilter with this aspect of the picture.
One theory which has had some acceptance is demographic. The rising divorce rate of the 1970s corresponds roughly with the entry onto the marriage market of the "baby boom" generation. This sudden growth in numbers looking for marriage partners does not by itself make a difference, but it might in conjunction with another well-attested feature of marriage -- the fact that men tend to marry women about two years younger than themselves (or, if you prefer, women marry men two years older than themselves). This age difference -- the so-called "marriage gradient" -- is very constant, and can be observed since at least 1920. (26) In a rapidly rising population men's choice of partners will expand and women's will contract. (The reverse will hold in twenty years time when the present declining birth rate produces a decline in those seeking marriage partners.) The result (as Bettina Arndt observes) was that in the early 1970s, "For every 100 women aged twenty-three to twenty-five, there were 94 males two years older". (27)
How does this affect the divorce rate? The original proponents of this theory, Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord, postulated that population growth causes a two-stage liberalisation of personal values. Ailsa Burns presents their argument as follows:
In the first stage the men come to realise that they have more appealing options than tying themselves to the role of breadwinner, and to a single woman. In the second stage the women come to realise that, given the shortage of men and the development of libertarian male attitudes, investing too much in marriage is a recipe for disappointment. They too become more cautious about marriage. The marriage age rises, women involve themselves in careers and leisure involvements, and short-term relationships, cohabitation and divorce all increase. (28)
Burns shows that this thesis does not match the Swedish experience, and she therefore doubts its applicability to Australia. But there are even stronger grounds for doubting the theory. If women stand to lose more than men from divorce, then women will be less likely than men to initiate separation, even if men are more "libertarian". But, as we have seen, women are far more likely than men to end a marriage: the reasons which lead the argument to postulate a relaxed male attitude to marriage must lead to the opposite attitude in women, and this does not seem to be the case. Whatever the plausibility of the demographic argument in explaining changes in general attitudes, it does not explain the divorce rate. In fact, if the theory has any plausibility at all, then, because it predicts results so contrary to the actual case, it requires us to find a real cause powerful enough to countervail the demographic forces.
One common hypothesis about divorce is that nuclear family breakdown is a function of extended family breakdown. But the matter is far from straightforward, for at least five reasons. The evidence of the breakdown of the extended family is far less certain than the evidence of breakdown in the nuclear family. The Anglo-Saxon tradition has always been one of a "modified" nuclear family, not of the European co-resident extended family. (29) If extended family relationships are dissolving this is likely to be a long and slow process, and therefore not a fact well adapted to explain a sudden rise in the divorce rate. The fact of increased mobility cannot be taken as direct evidence of extended family disintegration: what the family car has done to separate people, it and the telephone can also do to keep them in touch with each other. And if the breakdown of the extended family is associated with the breakdown of the nuclear family, might it not be that there is some underlying factor which is causing both kinds of breakdown, and not that one kind of breakdown is causing the other? For all these reasons we are still only guessing when we make claims about the relation between the two forms of the family.
Another common hypothesis relates divorce to sexual ethics. Undoubtedly, attitudes to sexual morality have changed greatly in the past two decades. The present combination of increased early sexual knowledge and decreased marital stability is unlikely to surprise any traditional moralist, from (perhaps) the author of Genesis onwards. In a philosophically articulate defence of traditional sexual morality Roger Scruton contends that sexual desire can only be integrated into a satisfying life through the contrasts required by the notions of modesty, shame and innocence. Scruton observes in passing that "Nabokov's Lolita, who passes with such rapidity from childish provocativeness to a knowing interest in the sexual act, finds, in the end, a marriage devoid of passion, and dies without knowledge of desire". (30) Whether a Lolita-like loss of innocence has been a general tendency is difficult to say, but we know that teenage marriages tend to be unstable and it may be that teenage sexual experience tends to inhibit the forming and maintenance of fulfilling adult relationships. Countries with the highest divorce rates -- notably Sweden and the USA -- appear to be countries with early pair-bonding, though little is really known about this subject. (31)
Perhaps, more generally, sexual permissiveness, made possible by improved contraception, has led to a devaluation of marriage. But this thesis suffers from a similar defect to that of Guttentag and Secord's demographic theory. It is a central dictum of the older folklore about courtship that "a man pursues a woman until she catches him". Men, in other words, are at first more interested in the pleasures of marriage, women in the permanence required for stable child-rearing. On this hypothesis, if a desire for sexual freedom is a major cause of marital breakdown, then we would expect men to seek divorce more often than women, which is contrary to fact. If on the other hand the folklore was once accurate but now is false then the issue to be explained is how and why such a change in attitude has occurred.
CHANGING EXPECTATIONS
So far, then, only two patterns have emerged: marital breakdown is mainly about emotional imbalances, and it tends to show up early in married life. We are now in a position to consider the "higher expectations" thesis mentioned earlier on. Brigitte and Peter Berger put this viewpoint very strongly. They maintain that
the high divorce rates indicate the opposite of what conventional wisdom holds: People divorce in such numbers not because they are turned off marriage, but, rather, because their expectations of marriage are so high that they will not settle for unsatisfactory approximations. In other words, divorce is mainly a back-handed compliment to the ideal of modern marriage, as well as a testimony to its difficulties.
This interpretation is supported by the very high levels of remarriage by both men and women. Modern marriage, according to the Bergers, "is designed to provide a 'haven' of stable identity and meaning where these are very scarce commodities". (32) If this were so we would expect people to cling desperately to the identity and security that marriage provides, and perhaps they do.
It needs to be remarked, however, that Christian and Jewish teaching has always fostered high expectations of marriage -- the commitment entailed has been represented as total, mutual, lifelong and exclusive. Amongst the purposes of marriage, companionship and mutual emotional support have always ranked highly. It can be easily argued that these expectations are humanly far too high. This objection is well put by Jonathan Raban:
One of the oddest features of western Christianised culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy. ... Out of the family, it is often hard not to feel like the astigmatic child who had been left behind after the teams have been picked. Inside the family, one is made insistently aware of the widening gulf between the squally here-and-now and the bright arc of the myth as it sails, oppressively yet unattainably, over one's head. (33)
However, Raban's formulation obscures the fact that lifelong monogamy has always been the preferred mode of life for the vast majority of European people (excluding the aristocracies and those subject to the most grinding poverty), whether or not they accepted an overlay of Christian ideals. He exhibits just that tendency to overstate the ideals that he deplores in those he is criticising. Perhaps Judith Wallerstein has summed up the question of expectations best: "today we expect more from marriage than previous generations did, and we respect it less". (34)
Raban and the Bergers illustrate the difficulty inherent in determining what are and are not realistic expectations about marriage and family life, and it may be that many people today are similarly confused about this issue. But this difficulty does not explain why there should be a sudden upsurge of marital conflict at any one time. High expectations do not by themselves lead to conflict; only divergent expectations will have this effect. A distinction has to be drawn between high expectations of mutual fulfilment and high expectations of self-fulfilment. It may be that in many cases what seems like high expectations for marriage are actually high expectations for each person considered separately from the marriage partner. Finally, any account of the divorce revolution as a revolution of rising expectations cannot easily be gender-neutral. Some account needs to be given of the already-mentioned fact that separation is so often instigated by women.
The fact that women initiate separation and divorce very much more often than men suggests that feminism, or the social changes to which feminism is in part a response, is a significant force in the divorce revolution. Yet there are strong reasons for doubting this. For schematic convenience we can consider feminism as having three main components: a relative devaluation of the importance of motherhood and child-rearing in women's lives; a strong emphasis on participation in public life and especially in the workforce; and a tendency to denigrate conventional married life. None of these three is very strongly correlated with the phenomenon of sole parenthood.
Changing attitudes to motherhood are well documented. As Arndt puts it, "Women no longer regard motherhood as their most important role. In 1971, 78 per cent rated motherhood as their raison d'être; by 1982, only 46 per cent gave it such a high priority". (35) Questions couched in terms of "primary function" are unpleasantly reminiscent of Napoleon's description of women as "nothing but machines for producing children"; and the fact that someone comes to see X as more important than Y does not show that they no longer regard Y as important. Nevertheless, not even feminism's best friends could claim that the movement has always striven to preserve the highest ideals of motherhood. Indeed, many of its leading protagonists now think that the movement failed badly in this central regard. Mica Nava, to take but one of many possible instances, observes that "The interests of children, their dependency and vulnerability, have never really been explored within feminist theory". She adds that feminists were short-sighted in neglecting "the insistence of many women (outside the movement) that family life and motherhood can be both rewarding and a source of authority". (36) The early attitude of the movement is epitomised in the perhaps apocryphal comment of one of its founders that "Bringing up children is not a real occupation because children come up just the same, brought up or not". Fortunately, propositions like this are now admired merely for their period flavour. Few parents would be so silly as to attempt to put this attitude into practice, but it may be that the underestimation of the requirements of parenthood that it signifies has been influential.
However, there is evidence which suggests that this is not an important factor. We know that after separation sole mothers are far more likely than fathers to seek and accept the primary custody of their children. By international standards Australia has a high rate of sole fathers caring for children after divorce or separation -- about 15 per cent as compared with the international average of ten per cent. But the fact that 85 per cent of sole parents are mothers is not suggestive of a very strong tendency by women to abandon their children. This is not what might be expected if a relative decline in the perceived importance of motherhood is a major factor in the increase in the divorce rate.
Much the same can be said about workforce participation. The international increase in workforce participation by women needs no documentation here. What is striking is that sole mothers are less likely than married women to be in the workforce. Although they are more likely than married mothers to be in full-time employment, they are very much less likely to be working part-time (this is discussed in the next chapter). This is not what we would expect if female employment is a major factor in family breakdown. Some of the anomaly may be explained by the effects of the poverty trap, but the evidence is still inconsistent with the familiar feminist picture of women for whom paid work is a psychological necessity. On this evidence it would appear that divorce and separation are more likely than marriage to "relegate" women to the traditional roles of child-carer and homemaker.
Nor is this all. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that much of feminism has been hostile to conventional marriage and family life. Instead of affirming the value and importance of both public and private life, the movement was strongly inclined to promote the former partly by devaluing the latter. Least of all was it interested in finding ways of sustaining and enriching long-term relationships between men and women. Whether feminism and its emphasis on the pursuit of public goals at the expense of private achievements and satisfactions have played -- and continue to play -- a large part in the divorce upsurge cannot be demonstrated directly from the available evidence. However, the indirect evidence does not indicate any very strong or lasting hostility to marriage. Most women who divorce remarry (or at least re-partner), often within a few years of the first break-up. Some remarry more than once. If we emphasise this evidence we seem forced to conclude that we have no good explanation of family breakdown which links the phenomenon to feminist or anti-feminist themes.
Figure 7.2: Women receiving Supporting Parents Benefit
Source: ABS Yearbooks.
As we observed earlier, there is no immediately obvious reason why increased workforce participation should have weakened marriages. Bettina Arndt, as we saw, connects workforce participation with a redressing of emotional imbalances: "Along with the shift in economic balance in the family, women are now beginning to resent their continuing emotional support of men and are expecting men to supply the same emotional input into relationships as they do". (37) This suggests that work has given women the confidence to stand up for their rights to care and consideration within marriage. Whether this is so depends partly on whether we accept Arndt's and Conway's picture of men as emotionally inarticulate. But even if we accept this -- and it is difficult to gainsay -- we need not accept all of Arndt's account. An alternative view would be that the focus on work and public life has now made women as emotionally limited and brittle as it previously made men. This interpretation seems just as consistent with the evidence as Arndt's more widely accepted picture. Arndt's account is gender-based. The alternative is based on the distinction between public and private life.
THE WELFARE ROLE
Perhaps the welfare state has played a large role in the divorce revolution? The case for claiming that the welfare system has been a major cause of family breakdown has been argued by economists Peter Swan and Mikhail Bernstam, who have also conducted a detailed study of the American evidence on this question. The conclusion of their comparison between the two countries is that:
There can be no doubt that Australians have taken to welfare benefits like junkies to a fix. The doubling of the number of female teenage recipients and quintupling of overall SPB [Supporting Parents Benefit] recipients in just over ten years is an almost unparalleled "accomplishment". By contrast, in the United States the number of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rose only five-fold over the much longer period 1950-1980. For Australia, in just over ten years the proportion of families with children dependent on sole parent benefits has increased from about 5 to 12 per cent. (38)
As evidence of the direct responsiveness of behaviour to the welfare system, Swan and Bernstam note that the numbers of women in receipt of SPB took a sudden and permanent upturn after 1980, just when the six-month qualifying period for benefits was removed (see Figure 7.2). On the basis of their US data they also contend that sole parent dependency is responsive to labour market changes. Young unskilled workers, unable to find work, cease to be able to support a family and are replaced by the social security system.
Swan and Bernstam's claims are mainly about welfare dependency, not divorce and separation as such, but it seems probable that there would be considerable overlap between the two. Further, we saw in Chapter Five that the general growth of the Australian welfare state in the past few decades has been very disproportionately financed by taxes on families with children, and thus this growth represents the rise of one kind of welfare system at the expense of another. Australian family policy consists mainly in supporting broken families and taxing intact families. Given this evidence, most economists would predict a large shift from one family form to another.
There are two grounds for doubting this analysis. First, even when the evidence that behaviour is highly responsive to even small monetary incentives is strong (as in Figure 7.2), it seems hard to believe that highly charged emotional decisions are being governed to a large extent by such changes. The argument entails that if those monetary incentives were not operating the divorce rate would be very much lower than it is; but the divorce rate is no lower among people not eligible for welfare assistance. Second, the picture is complicated by the fact that in only a small proportion of cases does separation or divorce bring any financial advantage to women, who are the main initiators. In general, separation and divorce leave women financially worse off. Without doubt it is now economically very much easier than ever before for women to support themselves outside marriage. Some of this independence will have come from greater workforce participation, although if we emphasise this aspect it becomes difficult to account for the welfare dependence of sole mothers. Greater economic independence must be seen as a catalyst speeding up a reaction which was disposed to occur for other reasons. But this still leaves us unclear about the primary forces at work, especially if (as was claimed at the beginning of this chapter) there is no good evidence that marriage before the divorce revolution was as stressful as it has since become.
If the account in this chapter has any validity then we may be left with a three-fold phenomenon: traditional male emotional immaturity; the stresses of women's growing public independence, combined with a possible loss of understanding about private life; and the intervention of the welfare system, in a way which was (and is) biased against two-parent families. These may be enough to explain the divorce explosion, and why it occurred when it did. They may help to explain the two other important questions that arise here: why it is that women instigate separations; and why these tend to happen so early in marriage. But in general the available evidence is both scanty and poor in quality, the conclusions reached are obviously very conjectural, and it is easy to marshal evidence which runs counter to those hypotheses. None of the arguments accommodates the fact that -- as this discussion has emphasised -- there are strong reasons for expecting marriages to have improved in this period.
Although the Australian Institute of Family Studies was established (as its journal, Family Matters, proclaims on the back of each copy) "in order to promote the identification and understanding of factors affecting family and marital stability in Australia", it has contributed almost nothing to this central task. We seem forced to accept that we know remarkably little about the Australian manifestations of a phenomenon which has closely affected the lives of almost everyone in Western societies in the past two decades. Such a conclusion would be in line with overseas work, or lack of work, on the subject. An English study entitled Who Divorces? ends with the observation that "Research into the causes of marital dissolution, both in this country and in the USA, has so far not enabled the firm identification of any one, or even several, dominant variables". An American account entitled Family Breakup comments that "Virtually no research has focused on the processes by which family bonds shift and deteriorate". Another American writer claims that "Except for the work of a few scholars, marriage and divorce, as a subject of study, has only been pecked at and not studied in its totality". One major study which comes close to integrating the sociological evidence with an understanding of the personal dynamics -- Wallerstein and Blakesloe's Second Chances -- emphasises the deep-seated and long-lasting adverse after-effects of divorce trauma, but it has no general theory about causation. (39) Maybe the divorce revolution should be thought of not as a function of other social changes but as sui generis.
Perhaps Tolstoy was right after all: family unhappiness is more mysterious than family success. The fact that we find the questions perplexing, and seem to lack even a useful common vocabulary in which to discuss them, is probably unsurprising. This theoretical confusion may simply mirror the confusion which exists at the level of practice. In matters of this kind we seem to be inept and primitive. This would not matter if the subject was purely a speculative one, but, as the next chapter will indicate, we do know enough to be clear that the divorce trend often has damaging consequences for children. For this reason, if for no other, thoughtful research of a kind we have not even begun to contemplate is urgently needed both on the causes of family breakdown and on appropriate social policies to minimise the damage caused by family breakdown.
ENDNOTES
1. A Bit of a Struggle, 48.
2. McDonald, The Economic Consequences of Marriage Breakdown in Australia.
3. See ABS Social Indicators, Table 2.6. and ABS Cat. 3307.0. The 1988 figure was 10.1 years.
4. "Why Do Women Continue to Marry?", 231, 226.
5. Common Treasury 2, 98.
6. Conway, The End of Stupor?, 83.
7. See ABS Social Indicators, 1984, Chart 2.5.
8. Peter McDonald suggests that perhaps 40-50 per cent of couples marrying for the first time in 1984 had lived together before marriage: "Families in the Future", 41.
9. Ibid.
10. This shift should make us somewhat wary of figures that measure the divorce rate as the number of divorces per 1000 people. The number of divorces per 1000 married couples is a preferable measure.
11. Beyond These Walls, 45.
12. Ibid. 48. See Straus & Gelles, "Societal Change and Family Violence".
13. Conway, The End of Stupor?, 21.
14. Burns, "Mother-Headed Households", 11.
15. Arndt, Private Lives, 53-56; Jordan, Effects of Marital Separation on Men.
16. McDonald, The Economic Consequences of Marriage Breakdown in Australia: A Summary.
17. Reported in Private Lives, 49.
18. See page 88 above.
19. Reported in Private Lives, 48.
20. "Why do Women continue to Marry?", 223, based on Williams, Open Cut.
21. Ibid.
22. Arndt, Private Lives, 61.
23. Ibid. 60, 71.
24. See Social Indicators, Table 2.6, "Divorces: Duration of Marriage". The ten year median duration figure given earlier is a measure of the period between date of marriage and the date of decree made absolute.
25. Ronald Conway's Being Male: A Guide for Masculinity in a Time of Change is a useful attempt to understand some of these phenomena.
26. See Social Indicators, Chart 2.3, "Median Age at First Marriage".
27. Private Lives, 67.
28. Burns, "Mother-Headed Households", 387-400. See also Guttentag & Secord, Too Many Women?
29. For a brief summary of research on this topic see Mount, The Subversive Family, Chapter 4.
30. Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation, 343.
31. See David Popenoe, Disturbing the Nest, 298.
32. The War over the Family, 181.
33. For Lave and Money, 220f.
34. Wallerstein and Blakeslee, Second Chances. 16.
35. Private Lives, 48. A 1988 Adelaide Advertiser survey -- admittedly a self-selected sample -- found that only two per cent of women now see motherhood as their primary function.
36. Nava, "From Utopian to Scientific Feminism?".
37. Private Lives, 53.
38. Swan & Bernstam, "Brides of the State". See also Bernstam and Swan, "The State as Marriage Partner of Last Resort"; Swan & Bernstam, "Support for Single Parents"; and Swan & Bernstam, Malthas and the Evolution of the Welfare State.
39. Thornes & Collard, Who Divorces?, 132; Little, Family Breakup, x; Arnold, "Marriage, Divorce and Property Rights: A Natural Rights Perspective", 195; Wallerstein and Blakeslee, Second Chances. See also Popenoe, Disturbing the Nest, for a wide-ranging sociological analysis of these questions. In "Theorizing about the Quality and Stability of Marriage", Lewis and Spanier provide a useful formal schema for considering these complex questions, but they offer no particular hypotheses to account for the known evidence.
No comments:
Post a Comment