_Putting Asunder_, Roderick Phillips
Aug. 11th, 2013 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutSubtitled: A History of Divorce in Western Society
Published by Cambridge University Press in 1988, this monster of a book turns out to be relentlessly good, if a bit dry read straight through. Phillips is careful in the conclusions he draws (which are kinda rare) and frequently points out the flaws in assertions and conclusions made by less careful people writing about divorce. So there _is_ analysis, altho more of the This Can't Be The Whole Story sort than of the And It All Happens Because of X sort.
It's so rare for him to mis-step that the one time I caught him at it, I was startled. But he predicted that the trend in divorce law was unlikely to reduce waiting periods below a year. Ha! Dead wrong on that one! But it's really okay, because in those cases where the wait between filing and final is very short, plaintiff(s) are supposed to assert that the marriage broke down that period or more earlier (typically, altho I think not always), which reconciles very well with his observation that divorces increasing in the wake of procedural/rules/legal reform often occurred because couples long de facto divorced finally could make things official, and one of the big motivators for filing was one or both wanting to remarry.
I picked this up around the time I started the search for paperwork from my grandmother's three divorces and my great-grandfather's (other parent) two divorces. I thought it might help to have a more detailed context for their divorces, especially if it became difficult to track down the files. In the event, finding the files was not as difficult as I had anticipated, and all the divorces were really and truly processed -- the remarriages were not bigamous, which I had wondered about, given the amount of moving across state and international borders that were involved in my grandmother's marriages and divorces.
I initially got the book via ILL, but had to return it before I finished it (it's about 700 pages long), so I wound up paying $70 or so for a used copy. I have no intention of letting this thing go; it is entirely too interesting and seems worth referring to, should I need to go digging around for other divorces in the course of my genealogical research.
Don't get me wrong: this isn't genealogical reference. But it does give the reader a solid understanding of what kinds of separations and/or dissolutions were available in a given place and time for a pretty wide range of time and place, which is potentially helpful.
The last sections of the book are particularly interesting to read as we work our way through the process of establishing a greater degree of marriage equality. The slowness of the process, and the piecemeal nature of it are strikingly similar to the process of increasing access to divorce. Finally, reading the evolution of divorce -- and noticing how Roderick Phillips spends so little time on average family size/number of kids (mentions, only) -- really makes it clear how much marriage and divorce are about property at this point, and how little is about custody (that aspect of family law is completely available to not-married-to-each-other-parents at this point) issues.
Clearly, we're going to keep tinkering with marriage and divorce, who have access to them, and what comes along with registration and dissolution, as time goes by. I always wish that people could do that with a bit more historical perspective, but I recognize that that's basically a bunch of foolishness on my part.
Published by Cambridge University Press in 1988, this monster of a book turns out to be relentlessly good, if a bit dry read straight through. Phillips is careful in the conclusions he draws (which are kinda rare) and frequently points out the flaws in assertions and conclusions made by less careful people writing about divorce. So there _is_ analysis, altho more of the This Can't Be The Whole Story sort than of the And It All Happens Because of X sort.
It's so rare for him to mis-step that the one time I caught him at it, I was startled. But he predicted that the trend in divorce law was unlikely to reduce waiting periods below a year. Ha! Dead wrong on that one! But it's really okay, because in those cases where the wait between filing and final is very short, plaintiff(s) are supposed to assert that the marriage broke down that period or more earlier (typically, altho I think not always), which reconciles very well with his observation that divorces increasing in the wake of procedural/rules/legal reform often occurred because couples long de facto divorced finally could make things official, and one of the big motivators for filing was one or both wanting to remarry.
I picked this up around the time I started the search for paperwork from my grandmother's three divorces and my great-grandfather's (other parent) two divorces. I thought it might help to have a more detailed context for their divorces, especially if it became difficult to track down the files. In the event, finding the files was not as difficult as I had anticipated, and all the divorces were really and truly processed -- the remarriages were not bigamous, which I had wondered about, given the amount of moving across state and international borders that were involved in my grandmother's marriages and divorces.
I initially got the book via ILL, but had to return it before I finished it (it's about 700 pages long), so I wound up paying $70 or so for a used copy. I have no intention of letting this thing go; it is entirely too interesting and seems worth referring to, should I need to go digging around for other divorces in the course of my genealogical research.
Don't get me wrong: this isn't genealogical reference. But it does give the reader a solid understanding of what kinds of separations and/or dissolutions were available in a given place and time for a pretty wide range of time and place, which is potentially helpful.
The last sections of the book are particularly interesting to read as we work our way through the process of establishing a greater degree of marriage equality. The slowness of the process, and the piecemeal nature of it are strikingly similar to the process of increasing access to divorce. Finally, reading the evolution of divorce -- and noticing how Roderick Phillips spends so little time on average family size/number of kids (mentions, only) -- really makes it clear how much marriage and divorce are about property at this point, and how little is about custody (that aspect of family law is completely available to not-married-to-each-other-parents at this point) issues.
Clearly, we're going to keep tinkering with marriage and divorce, who have access to them, and what comes along with registration and dissolution, as time goes by. I always wish that people could do that with a bit more historical perspective, but I recognize that that's basically a bunch of foolishness on my part.
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no subject
Date: 2013-08-11 09:03 pm (UTC)ah, marriage
Date: 2013-08-12 12:52 am (UTC)FWIW, your dad was delusional. There was no way he was going to get custody. OTOH, he was signalling that he wasn't letting her take the kids without a fight, which may have influenced her thinking/feeling in a couple different ways. It would have raised the already considerable costs of a divorce -- and it indicated that he felt a pretty high commitment to the kids and/or her and/or the marriage (or at least his reputation as not-being-divorced -- these kinds of things can be hard to disentangle).
I sort of hope we get to a point as a society where we talk about more of this stuff. We _really_ need to rework marriage as an institution (and I don't just mean extending who can participate in it -- I mean thinking about things like terms other than "forever or until death/divorce"), or it won't be divorce that ends it. It'll be decline-to-participate.
Re: ah, marriage
Date: 2013-08-12 03:47 am (UTC)Re: ah, marriage
Date: 2013-08-13 01:44 pm (UTC)I do not believe the "mom works" argument would have had an impact, because Philips talks a lot about the data showing that most (somewhere between most and almost all) divorced women worked. As he notes, you can't make _too_ much out of this, because we don't know if they worked before they got divorced, but a lot of the people who used to study this thing (before everyone apparently lost interest about 20 years ago, with the exception of some persistent ideologues, mostly on the far right) seemed to think that being a professional woman made divorce more likely. The mechanism, obvs, is that They Actually Had a Real Choice.
If your mother's profession had been a less respectable one, or if your father had a big In with local judges, then I would be inclined to think he could have gotten his way. But as it is, I persist in thinking that she would have gotten the kids. However, the _threat_ may have been enough to push the balance in her head (he is committed to this/it would be really tough on everyone to split) towards staying. Which may in fact have been all he intended anyway. As I know you know (even if you never do this yourself, which you may not, as I know you to be an unusually measured and gentle person), adults say all kinds of rash things that they don't mean literally (except possibly in the heat of the moment) that are then seared into kids' brains and remembered without a full understanding of the context in which those words were uttered.
And in saying this, I don't mean anything about _your_ parents at all. I mean this as a way of illustrating the dynamics of the difficulty of being married.
Re: ah, marriage
Date: 2013-08-14 07:34 am (UTC)