Divorce: An American Tradition

by Glenda Riley

In 1639, Puritans in Massachusetts granted the first divorce in America, to Mrs. James Luxford, on grounds of bigamy (she was awarded Mr. Luxford's property and he was fined, placed in the stocks, then banished to England). Divorce has been a fact of American life ever since. Indeed, by 1880,
one in sixteen marriages ended in divorce; by 1928, one in six; and today, one out of every two American marriages ends in divorce.
In Divorce , Glenda Riley provides an intriguing history of marital breakdown in America, from colonial times to the present, revealing how America has become the divorce capital of the world. Riley describes how the Puritans broke radically with British tradition, treating marraige as a civil
matter, after the fashion of Luther and Calvin, and granting civil divorce almost two centuries before England. She traces the gradual easing of divorce laws, as more and more grounds were added to existing statutes; highlights the great disparity of laws from state to state (Utah, for instance,
granted consensual divorce by 1850, over a hundred years before it became common practice in other states, while South Carolina outlawed divorce completely until 1949); and examines the impact of westward migration and the growing importance of love. Riley brings her narrative right up to the
1990s, when marriages end at an astonishing rate, and single parent and blended families have become common. Throughout, the reader is treated to quite a bit of colorful the "divorce mills" that appeared in Indianapolis, Sioux Falls, Fargo, and, of course, Reno; the various alternatives to
traditional marriage (such as the celibacy of the Shakers, or the group marriage of the Oneida community); and many fascinating divorce cases, from the obscure--such as the Connecticut woman who claimed her husband put dead chickens in her tea pot--to the infamous (such as the trial of Brigham
Young, who when sued by one of his wives for a $200,000 settlement, quickly countersued, claiming the marriage was polygamous and thus illegal in the United States; he won the case).
Divorce has become an American tradition, Riley concludes, and it will continue to be so, laws or religious prohibitions to the contrary. She argues that if we stop fighting over whether divorce is good or bad, and simply recognize that divorce is , we might work out a more equitable and helpful
system of divorce for Americans.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 1991

About the author

Library of Congress Authorities pub. info. gives additional name: Shauna Reilly (lives in Indiana; pseudonym of Glenda Riley)

Reviews

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back when I was a kid, ordinary families on TV (as opposed to rich people and celebrities) never got divorced (the number of widowers and widowers, however, was considerable). The first TV series dealing with blended families and divorce (Here We Go Again, early 1970s) was considered edgy. I got the impression ordinary people never got divorced before the sexual revolution.
Ah, youth. Turns out that divorce has been part of America since colonial times, and that in the 20th century when I was doing that TV watching, the US had the highest divorce rate in the Western world. Riley traces the twists and turns of divorce attitudes and divorce law — what are valid grounds for divorce? If you marry somewhere that doesn't allow divorce, is your divorce in another state legally valid? Does divorce ruin women or save them from abusers and drunkards?
This has lots of fascinating detail like 19th century Indianapolis being the Reno Nevada of its day (the place you'd go for a quickie divorce) or the phrase "divorce of bed and board" (old term for legal separation). And that two couples mutually agreeing to divorce was a bad thing, legally and regarded as some kind of fraud by the courts.
Riley gets a bit nerdier than I wanted in the discussion of statistics and what they mean (were out-of-state couples getting divorced in Indiana visiting for that purpose, or simply people who'd moved there recently?), but those bits are skippable. Overall a very good job.

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is great for its broad tracing of divorce laws, statistics, and attitudes about divorce from the British colonies to the end of the twentieth century. Because it is such a broad survey, not every minutiae is included and sometimes there is confusion because Riley is not always clear about where or when her evidence is coming from. However, it should be a starting point for anyone interested in the history of divorce in the United States as it demonstrates the variety of sources one can use to study divorce and when divorce debates came to the forefront of American history.
Riley emphasizes throughout that divorce has always existed in the United States and many Americans accepted divorce as a needed remedy, points that may still (somehow) surprise some readers. To make her argument, she primarily relies on two sets of records. The first is legislative records which allows her to trace changes in divorce law (in what instances divorce was available and what part of government issued divorces). Similarly, court records contain divorce petitions and other documents that give some sense of who divorced and why they did so, although Riley is correct to always caution readers that court records are never completely true accounts of people's lives as they constructed petitions in clear ways to fit divorce statutes. These records also demonstrate how the multiplicity of divorce statutes caused many legal quagmires as states and individuals questioned if a divorce in one state was legal in another if the other state did not allow divorce on the ground given in the suit. It was partially these quandaries, but also the continual fear of rising rates of migratory divorce (individuals who would travel to other states with less strict divorce laws than their own) that led to widespread calls for divorce reform in the 1850s and again in the late 19th century. Riley traces how the idea of a national divorce law became a prominent proposed solution, but also how the movement failed for such reasons as state's rights, lack of invited female involvement in the movement, and social science's non-support.
The second set of sources Riley uses throughout are cultural sources, such as novels, essays, and other print material. Riley uses these to construct the broader cultural ideas about divorce that influenced politicians and reformers. This is the weaker of the two parts of the book (for a better explanation of these cultural frameworks see Basch's Framing American Divorce). She does clearly explain how the conflicting cultural views of divorce (which were more than just a pro and anti divorce divide) often meant that legislators made laws that did not put the persons divorcing in the best positions. Importantly, these laws often dealt less with alimony and child custody than they needed to, frequently putting women in a more precarious position than men.

My main problem with the work is her strong reliance on statistics, of often trying to figure out what parts of the country had the most divorces and if divorce rates changed over time. Riley does often warn readers that the same statistics can often be used to argue multiple and conflicting points. Statistics are also quite elusive for any period before about 1880 because no one was keeping centralized records of numbers of divorces. Nor throughout most of history were many characteristics, such as race, number of years married, or occupations, kept for those divorcing. Even with these cautions, Riley continuously falls back to documenting statistics of a rising number of divorces, if not a rising divorce rate. This puts her in the position of having to explain why divorce numbers continued to rise. While she does rightfully mention that part of the rise is because of a growing population and growing acceptance by Americans for divorce, she also falls back on vague reasons like industrialization, urbanization, increased mobility, etc. By the final chapter and epilogue which takes us from 1970 (and no-fault divorce) to the present, the work really turns towards a social science-like policy brief as opposed to a history; of how divorce laws still do not solve many issues like female poverty/inequality and how they should be changed. I am certainly a proponent of history informing the present and more educated decision-making, but it felt a little over done to me.
A smaller complaint is her lack of inclusion of native peoples, the French (except for a bit about Louisiana), and Spanish. Certainly most American laws about divorce came from Protestant & English law, but I think some parts of the early West were influenced by their previous European settlers. Native peoples also have a long known history of allowing "divorce" or at least the separation of sexual partners without the stigmas Euro-Americans gave to divorced individuals, but this is not in Riley's work and native peoples only appear when they begin to utilize white courts for divorce (something they had to do because whites now forced them to also marry according to US state law).

These flaws are items for new scholarship to correct and demonstrate the wide number of issues, places, sources, and time periods left for historians to research. And, as Riley certainly points out, divorce has been a part of American history from its beginning and holds a prominent place in American society, so much so that many other cultures remarked on the prevalence of divorce in the United States. Divorce was not an American invention, but it certainly took on a character and prominence of its own in the United States as Riley accessibly lays out from the British colonies to the recent past.

[Susan]

Long ago.
Only comment is "good"