According to a study published in the American Law and Economics Review, women file just over two-thirds of divorce cases in the United States. [36] There are some differences between states, and the numbers have also changed over time, with about 60 percent of women`s filings in most of the 20th century and more than 70 percent women in some states shortly after no-fault divorce was introduced, according to the document. Of course, divorce laws in the United States have come a long way since colonial times, but only time will tell how divorce laws will evolve in the years to come. We hope for progress on women`s rights, not further setbacks; And with greater promotion of women`s rights, more progress on divorce laws that will close the current gaps in our divorce system – while continuing to support a fair and equitable process for both parties. First, while it was the case that the working class and poor Americans had more conservative views on divorce than their middle- and upper-class peers, this is no longer the case. For example, a 2004 survey by the National Fatherhood Initiative of U.S. adults ages 18 to 60 found that 52 percent of Americans with a college degree supported the norm that parents who have an unsatisfactory marriage should stay together until their children grow up. But only 35 percent of less educated Americans held the same view. In 2015, the Manhattan Supreme Court ruled that Ellanora Baidoo could hand over divorce documents to her husband via a Facebook message, and she was the first to do so. [18] [19] Table 1 provides definitions of the labour market variables used in the analysis, and Table 2 presents their averages for each census year.
For the period 1880-1940, the districts are state economic zones, as defined in the 1950 census; for 1970 and 1980, these are groups of circles as described in the microdata samples for those years; and in 1990, these are areas of widespread microdata. In each census year, I used the largest sample available to construct labour market measures for each county. Districts with fewer than 1,000 cases usable in the microdata samples were grouped into larger units or excluded from analysis.6 District boundaries therefore vary over time and tend to be slightly larger in the earlier period when the country was less populated. This does not distort the coefficients, but the finer geographic accuracy possible in recent census years probably helps to reduce standard errors. 4Migration between the dissolution of a marriage and the census date could also blur the results. Women who divorce or separate can be expected to migrate to places where they can find work, which could lead to a false link between women`s participation in the labour market and marital instability. However, this does not seem to be an important factor for two reasons. First, the impact of women`s participation in the labour market is just as strong for men as for women in each census year.
Second, I conducted a state-level analysis using birth status as an indicator of migration and found that the relationship between women`s labour force participation and marital instability was actually stronger for non-migrant women than for migrant women. Although intrastatic migration may operate differently from interstate migration, the effect of migration is unlikely to be reversed. For example, divorced and separated women do not appear to have systematically migrated to places with better employment opportunities. Second, marriage rates have fallen and cohabitation rates have risen in the wake of the divorce revolution, as men`s and women`s trust in marriage has been shaken. From 1960 to 2007, the percentage of married American women rose from 66% to 51% and the percentage of married men from 69% to 55%. At the same time, the number of couples living together quadrupled from 439,000 to more than 6.4 million. Because of this increase in cohabitation, about 40% of American children will spend some time in a cohabiting union; Today, 20% of babies are born to cohabiting couples. And because cohabiting unions are much less stable than marriages, the vast majority of children born to cohabiting couples will have their parents separated at the age of 15. The size of these coefficients is large in relation to the evolution over time.
This is illustrated by a pooled analysis covering the six census years (last column). All labour market variables in the pooled equation are very significant and show the expected signs. However, the dummy variables of the census year have the opposite sign of the sign expected in 1880, 1910 and 1940. This means that if the independent variables were held constant over time, the probability of divorce or separation in the previous period would be higher than in recent years. Figure 3 shows the projected percentage of persons divorced or separated for each census year, with all other independent variables held constant at the 1940 average. The pooled model predicts that 6% to 7% of the eligible population would have divorced or separated between 1880 and 1940, compared to only about 4% in recent census years. Until England passed the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, there were few, if any, laws or rules to dissolve marriage. Before 1857, couples in England could only divorce by an «Act of Parliament,» and cases of divorce throughout history, until 1857, were rare. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 gave women in England the opportunity to file for divorce from their husbands, although women had a much heavier burden of proof for proving marriage mistakes than their male counterparts. One of the earliest divorce law documents in North America dates back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, the settlers set up a court to decide the divorce procedure. As already mentioned, divorce was rare and largely illegal during this period; However, the court allowed some exceptions and divorced in cases of adultery, desertion, bigamy and impotence.
Readers should exercise caution in interpreting all results presented here. The world changed dramatically between 1880 and 1990, and my simple measures of the changing workforce capture only some aspects of that change.