Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce

by Roderick Phillips

The rapid spread of divorce since the 1960s has dramatically affected family life in Western society. Extensive research has been devoted to this recent period of change, and yet the long-term history of divorce has remained surprisingly obscure. Roderick Phillips, author of the highly acclaimed magisterial history of divorce, Putting Asunder, has now abridged his fascinating and wide-ranging study for a general readership. Encompassing religious and secular attitudes to divorce, the evolution of divorce laws, and changing responses to marriage breakdown, Untying the Knot offers a highly readable and thought-provoking history of the phenomenon, placed illuminatingly against a variety of social, economic, political and cultural backgrounds.

261 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1991

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating history of divorce in the Western world from medieval times to the present (1990s). It's an abridgment of the author's longer work, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society.

Phillips is the best kind of historian, a cautious one. For him two parallel trends is an association, not a causation. For example, in the 20th century the rise of divorce accompanied the increase of women in the workforce. But "it is not always clear whether employed women divorced or divorced women obtained employment."

Some historians see divorce as a "death substitute" - that is, in earlier centuries the higher mortality rates meant that spouses died before they might have sought a (then-nonexistent) divorce. As life expectancies increased, marriages would naturally last longer, and marriage breakdowns would be more likely to occur, resulting in a higher number of divorces. Some historians see marriage breakdown as historically common, and rising divorce rates are simply a result of divorce becoming more widely available. Phillips doesn't agree with this view. His view is that marriages "were generally stable in traditional Western society and that a significant extent of marriage breakdown is peculiar to modern times." He approvingly quotes another historian who argues that since the 1960s people "expect more of the conjugal relationship. It is made to bear the full weight of needs for intimacy, companionship, and love, needs which previously were met in other ways. Couples expect more of each other." Phillips adds, "the higher these emotional expectations rise, the less likely they are to be fulfilled."

His study is packed with fascinating details, such as how even Martin Luther, one of the scholars consulted on whether Henry VIII should have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, found bigamy preferable to divorce for the king. For centuries, the Anglican church was not substantially more liberal on divorce than the Catholic; it required an Act of Parliament to divorce one's spouse up until 1857. In medieval Burgundy, a woman who tried to divorce her spouse, according to law, should be smothered in mire. (France did try to improve, though. In later years the month of May was set aside as the one month when husbands ought not beat their wives.)

We think of Calvin's Geneva and Puritan Massachusetts as being among the most conservative religious and legal communities, yet they both made spouse beating a crime centuries before other locations did. Most Western legal codes allowed husbands to beat their wives. The term used was "moderate correction," and the husband should not draw blood nor use a stick thicker than his thumb. The sad phrase "rule of thumb" still falls today from the lips of the unknowing.

Then there was the ritual of "wife sale," which probably began in the 16th century and continued up until the 19th. The wife often wore a halter around her neck as she was "brought to market," sometimes to a town square, fairground, or tavern, and auctioned to the highest bidder. It seems that in many cases, the wife had committed adultery, the purchaser of the wife had been agreed on in advance (the man she had cheated with), and the sale was a formal and public acknowledgment of a marriage ending in the days before divorce was legal.

(The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a wife sale.)

[Avril · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read. From the conclusion:

"... one of the more important conclsuions of this study [is that] marriages were generally stable in traditional Western society and that a significant extent of marriage breakdown is peculiar to modern times, notably the last hundred years ... [In the past] the imperatives of marriage and the family economy produced flexible and potentially very low expectations, and a high level of tolerance, both of which have changed over time ... Marriage is integral to broad social, political, economic and cultural processes, and it is futile to expect marriage to remain constant or to have a consistent social meaning while social structures, economic relationships, demographic patterns, and cultural configurations have undergone the massive transformations of the past centuries." (pp. 254-5)