Posted on Facebook, April 27, 2023. Pasckie Pascua.
AS of 2019, both marriage rates and divorce rates in the U.S. are decreasing, with the marriage rate dropping from 8.2 per 1,ooo people in 2000 to 6.1 and the divorce rate from 4.0 in 2000 to 2.7. Hmmm. The current divorce rate in the U.S. is 2.9 persons per 1,000 people. Overall, the rate of divorces in America is falling. However, divorces amongst people aged 50+ years is rising.
Since I came from a galaxy so far away with no divorce (!) I find the U.S. data fascinating. Sure, the issue is complex. I viewed all these, divorce and separations, on a linear gaze years ago. But then it isn’t really that simple, right? As in single parenthood with 7 kids and unsettled divorce for 7 years etcetera aren’t so simple per law.
I was thinking that the nasty societal divide ushered by politics and the pandemic-ushered funky inertia would somehow shudder the relationship quotient. Or maybe I am wrong. People are marrying less but divorcing less as well.
Let’s look back per what I read on Smithsonian, an article entitled “Escape from the Gilded Cage” by April White, adapted or based on her book “The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” 👩🦳💔👱♂️
SOME facts cited by April White on her book “The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” Slowly over the decades, divorce laws in the United States followed fundamental shifts. By the 1930s, one could obtain a divorce after a six-week stay in Nevada. In the late 1940s, South Carolina, which had, for most of its existence, no provisions for divorce, changed its constitution to allow unhappy spouses to go their separate ways.
It took until the 1960s for New York to expand its grounds for divorce beyond adultery. By then, New Yorkers had figured out other creative ways around the law. Some went to Mexican states where a divorce could be obtained in just one day. I thought New York spearheaded this area of legal splits. I am wrong.
But indeed New York took the thingy to a more commercial level. There was even a cottage industry of actresses willing to play the role of the other woman for couples who wanted a divorce on the grounds of adultery without actually committing it.
In late 1990s, I worked in a Queens law office. There, I realized “marriage for convenience” or pay was a lucrative entrepreneurial venture. Marry a citizen for a fee, then divorce her/him later for more fee. Business. 👩🦳💔👱♂️
INFLUENTIAL, famous people got into it since they needed divorce or they were embroiled in those marital shudders. In 1966, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller—whose wife, Mary, had divorced him in 1962 after six weeks in Reno—signed into law a bill recognizing five grounds for divorce in New York, including cruelty and abandonment.
Then, in 1969, California governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced himself, signed the first no-fault divorce law, allowing spouses to separate without a finding of guilt. By 1977, all but three states had such an option.
But of course South Dakota led this “revolution” in America. In asking for their own freedom, the “divorce colonists” in Sioux Falls were among the first rebels. Collectively, they had, quite unintentionally, set the country down a winding path toward the acceptance and accessibility of divorce.
“They had rising ideals and a new vision for marriage, and for each of them, divorce was a declaration of independence,” writes April White in her book “The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” 👩🦳💔👱♂️
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