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Divorce Rate In The 20th Century

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On legal terms, it was still difficult for a couple to obtain a divorce. During the 1950s most state laws recognized one or more “no-fault” grounds for filing a divorce, such as an insanity or incompatibility (Clarke-Stewart and Brentano 8). However, most courts interpreted these “no-fault” grounds very strictly. In addition, most divorces cases wouldn’t even be considered a hearing, which resulted in divorce trials trying to pass through complex and outdated law procedures. Divorce procedures during the 19th and late 20th century were very different when compared to our present divorce procedures, therefore mentioning its history is important because it portrays a realistic picture of our past culture. This past culture within the United …show more content…

According to authors Clarke-Stewart and Brentano, “This all changed in the 1960s. The roaring social changes of the period reanimates stagnant divorce reforms and triggered a sharp increase in the divorce rate” (Clarke-Stewart and Brentano 10). Essentially, economic circumstances in the United States improved, which allows for individuals to live apart and independently. Normally, when there are greater working opportunities, there are higher rates for divorce due to the availability of being able to maintain yourself with a job after the divorce. Due to greater economic circumstances, women became more independent from men, enabling themselves to take on jobs outside the family household. During the 1960s the Women’s movement began to build progress, giving women higher status. Women were encouraged to be more confident and independent within their working and living environments. As a result, divorce rates increased, because “when women no longer depend on men for status and income, they are less likely to stay in unsatisfying marriages” (Clarke-Stewart and Brentano 10). This movement is just one cause that affected societal change. During the era, everything in the United States was being questioned, from personal values, to marriage and even other institutions. When you come down to it, that was part of the culture back in the day, which again demonstrates cultural influence on divorce

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A divorce was only allowed if a spouse was committing or showing habits of adultery, habitual drunkenness, mental illness, laziness, and cruelty. Only one out of fourteen reasons had to be proven in court for a divorce to occur (Timeline.awava.org.au). The biggest change made by the FLA (Family Law Act) was the elimination of matrimonial fault (Monahan, 1998, 64). The change of the divorce law in 1975 benefitted married couples who wanted a divorce without having to show evidence of problems within the marriage and this is exemplified in the divorce rate statistics. In the years between 1959 and 1974 divorce rates were below 20’000 a year.

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Question: What accounted for the drastic increase in divorce rates from 1870 to 1920? Can this be equated with the Industrial Revolution?

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As more oil was discovered the rates of divorce rose higher and higher. In the U.S during 1926, there was 1.6 total. In 1929 and 1930 the divorce rates were 1.7 and 1.6. The later years of the 1920s had higher divorce rates, but during the 1930s the divorce rates started to lower back down and became 1.5 and 1.3. In 1930 Ector County, Texas had 37.4 people get divorced on average.

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The Women’s Movement was a symbolic movement in achieving political and civil equality. It assisted women lifestyles in the United States, granting them equal opportunities as men. Therefore, the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteed equal rights with men and the Equal Pay Act guaranteed equal pay. But these opportunities rarely helped women since they were prohibited and discriminated from universities and communal school, young girls have to be taught at home by mothers due to the segregation from males and females. In the 1960s, organizations were predominantly constructed for women since they were driven away from society of men and can’t attend schools and colleges.

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This essay I will look at a performance art, ‘Interior Scroll’ by Carolee Schneemann, exploring how deeply that work is connected, related, and even born from those various contexts, such as physical, history, technological, cultural, and political. The target of this exploration that I hope clearly to show those undeniable strong relationships between the performance and the contexts, and pointed out importance roles of those elements in the process of the work. I will meanly focus on political, culture and technological, through lens of the three perspectives to have an analytical attempt to the work ‘Interior Scroll’. The essay will divide into three section; each section will discourse about a context. Think about the way how those important

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Gender roles were reasserted in 1950s America postwar. Even if there was an increase in divorce rates popular culture and mythology upheld hetronormative marriage as a key to spiritual, financial and spiritual success. In the 1950s, the term “containment” referred to the foreign policy-driven containment of communism and atomic proliferation. In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988)

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The American Dream is one that almost every American citizen has dreamt about at some point in their lives, however it is repeatedly destroyed in reaching it by the people who are so often known as the ones created to support them. An example of this is Fences, by August Wilson (1983), as it essentially describes family life, and how the dynamics of each family depends on how they treat each other and the circle of abuse. It is also an example of how the people who are the closest can either encourage their family members to go to their dreams, or completely crush them. They have the ability to do this due to their position, and because their opinion means more to the person whose dreams are in question. “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston supports

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The 1960s saw more and more women entering the workforce (moreso than in the 1920s), changing the dynamic within families. With more working mothers, fathers were called upon to play a more integral role in the function of the household (Potter, n.d.). In 1960, birth control was legalized (Potter, n.d.), giving women even more control over their family structure and lifestyle they chose to

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Many people today feel that, in 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan made what turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of his political career. He signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, introducing an alternative to the now defunct fault-based divorce system. Prior to this law, couples could only file for divorce if a fault, such as adultery or cruel or inhuman treatment, had occurred. Sanford N. Katz, a Professor of Law at Boston College who received his A.B. from Boston University and J.D. from the University of Chicago, insists that divorced Americans suffered under the fault-based divorce system. He says fault-based divorce commonly led to secret collaborations between attorneys, judges, and defendants, and influenced the assignment

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In the early nineteenth century, a new pattern of family arose based primarily on companionship and affection. Many of productive tasks and jobs of married women were assumed by unmarried women working in factories, and the workplace moved some distance from the household. So, a new kind of urban middle class family had begun to emerge and a new division of domestic roles appeared, which assigned the wife to care full-time for her children and to maintain the home. The divorce rate during the early and mid-nineteenth century began to rise, many states adopted permissive divorce statutes and judicial divorce replaced legislative divorce. If marriages were to rest on mutual affection, then it divorce had to serve as a safety valve from loveless and abusive marriages.

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Despite what many believe, it was not one leader that precipitated change, but a perfect series of events: the change in the post World War II economy, the invention of the birth control pill, and the civil rights movement all made way for the moment ‘When Everything Changed.’ While writing about the catalysts for change, Collins said, “The soaring expectations of the postwar boom, followed by the decline in men’s paychecks in the 1970s, mad wives’ participation in the workforce almost a requisite for middleclass life,” (Collins 105). The very first element in the series of events that led to the perfect storm, the postwar boom, made it a necessity for most women in middleclass families to work for the first time in history. While it might seem insignificant in the larger scope of history,

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920 Words | 4 Pages

According to the society norms, it was very rare that a married couple were actually attracted to each other. The individuals couldn’t have gone against the society expectations so, without caring about what they really want, they followed the expectations and married whoever. This shows they could not make any individual life choices without thinking of what everyone else would have done. Not only are the social expectations based on love but also small, foolish details.

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Yale University Press, 2006. Web. 9 Mar. 2016. Beginning with the essential historical and social context of divorce, the authors go on to provide some interesting trends and facts about marriages and divorce rates. This book also contains statistics on the distribution of separation by the duration of marriage in the United States.

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The conflict theory’s focus on divorce inspects the imbalance and power dynamics that are held within a society that can trickle down to individuals and their marital relationships. A society that is constantly in a state of battling and oppressing for distribution of limited resources plays a role in each and every divorce. Divorces are offered at a costly price, and the distributions of the assets between the two can often cause even more strife among couples feeling deeply saddened and/or resentful. Unrealistic expectations as well as underlying unresolved issues in individuals also play a role in divorces. America’s divorce rate averages about forty to fifty percent and subsequent marriages have even higher rates of separation.

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Outline General Statement : Happiness is not the absence of problems as life would not be that perfect without problems; they are our guidelines so have the ability to expect them and deal with them. Problem statement : One of the social problems that we are facing nowadays is Divorce .

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