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| 43% of first marriages end within 15 years. "14% of white women who married in the 1940s eventually divorced. A single generation later, almost 50 percent of those that married in the late sixties and early seventies have already divorced. ... Between 1970 and 1992, the proportion of babies born outside of marriage leaped from 11% to 30%." Divorce increased almost 40 percent from 1970 to 1975. "In America, divorce used to be difficult to obtain and, usually, impossible without good reason: adultery, abandonment, abuse, alcoholism. In 1880, according to the historian Robert L. Griswold, one marriage in 21-fewer than 5 percent-ended in divorce. Over time, there have been peaks and valleys in the divorce rate, such as the period immediately following World War II, when returning soldiers found things rather different from how they had left them, or were themselves tremendously changed by war. "But beginning in the mid-1960s," writes Griswold, the divorce rate "again began to rise dramatically, fueled by ever-higher marital expectations, a vast expansion of wives moving into the work force, the rebirth of feminism, and the adoption of 'no fault' divorce (that is, divorce granted without the need to establish wrongdoing by either party) in almost every state." Griswold continues, "The last factor, although hailed as a progressive step that would end the fraud, collusion, and acrimony that accompanied the adversarial system of divorce, has had disastrous consequences for women and children.'" |