Familienpolitik

This article in last week’s Newsweek looks at the effect loosened divorce laws had on kids growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s. Some of the men and women describe feeling ashamed of their parents’ failed marriages during a time when divorce was just beginning to become acceptable. As the author explains,

The change had begun in the ’60s as the myth of the nuclear family exploded, and my generation was caught in the fallout. The women’s rights movement had opened workplace doors to our mothers—more than half of all American women were employed in the late ’70s, compared with just 38 percent in 1960—and that, in turn, made divorce a viable option for many wives who would have stayed in lousy marriages for economic reasons. Then in 1969, the year I entered kindergarten, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed California’s “no fault” divorce law, allowing couples to unilaterally end a marriage by simply declaring “irreconcilable differences.”

“No fault” divorce laws made divorcing easier, because the neither the wife nor the husband had to prove infidelity of any other marital transgression. Divorce proceedings no longer had to be an airing of dirty laundry.

Tags: Divorce, family policy, Underage marriage, United States