The document discusses divorce, remarriage, and blended families from a sociological perspective. It provides historical context on divorce, noting that divorce became more common in the 20th century and is now much more prevalent than a century ago. It also discusses the effects of divorce on children and families, including increased family diversity and the formation of blended families through remarriage.

1. CH 10 Divorce, Remarriage and Blended Families
The critically acclaimed film The Squid and the Whale follows
a couple’s acrimonious divorce and its effects on their two sons.
The performer Miley Cyrus described why she broke up with
her fiancé, Liam Hemsworth, at the age of 21, this way: I was
so scared of ever being alone, and I think, conquering that fear,
this year, was actually bigger than any other transition that I
had, this entire year . . .I don’t ever want to have to need
someone again, where you feel like, without them, you can’t be
yourself. (Effron 2013) Are individualism and marriage the oil
and water of modern relationships, unable ever to fully mix
together? If people pursue marriage primarily to make
themselves happy and then judge the relationship on the basis of
their own happiness, then marriage will be unstable, always
facing the risk that one partner or the other will feel unfulfilled
and turn away. In fact, that may be why divorce has become a
prominent feature of the relationship landscape. Maybe that’s
not a bad thing. If it means that the relationships that do survive
are built on genuine mutual happiness or satisfaction, then the
modern family order may be an improvement over the past. But
if the experience of divorce, or the threat of divorce, looms
large in modern families, then we all live under a cloud of
family uncertainty. Individual freedom is a cherished value for
most people. But uncertainty comes with risks, especially for
children, who are the most vulnerable to the stress of family
transitions (Cherlin 2010). This is the central dilemma of
divorce that we confront. For the Children’s Sake Of course,
there is nothing wrong with loving oneself if that means
recognizing and respecting one’s own needs and desires. But
how is individual happiness to be balanced against famil y
commitments, including marriage? This is as much a moral
question as a practical or psychological one. In the face of such
a quandary, 362 Chapter 10: Divorce, Remarriage, and Blended
Families many people evoke the principle of making decisions

2. in the best interest of children rather than adults. Some parents
try to prevent or delay divorce for the children’s sake—to spare
them the disruption, potential financial loss, and even shame of
a family breakup. Other parents, however, want a divorce for
the children’s sake—to keep them from living under the cloud
of constant bickering or to remove them from the care of an
irresponsible (or even abusive) spouse. And then there are the
children themselves. Their parents’ breakup may be the first
time they seriously face the need to evaluate, in moral terms,
the behavior of adults. For better or worse, in the words of
researcher Carol Smart, divorce “shatters the taken-for-
grantedness of family life.” She quotes a 12-year-old girl whose
parents divorced: I can remember some arguments and I can
remember thinking “Oh my god my parents hate each other” but
now I don’t think they hate each other; they are friends. But if
you argue in front of your children they will think you hate each
other. You need to split up or at least give yourselves some
space until you’ve thought about it because that is what is best
for them. (Smart 2006:167) Through the unhappy experience of
her parents’ conflicted marriage and eventual divorce, this girl
learned something about how to apply ethical standards to adult
behavior and came to believe that her parents made the right
decision. Divorce, perhaps more than most experiences in life,
drives home the lesson that there are many sides to every story.
Just as there are different angles to the story within a particular
family, there also are many ways to see the social phenomenon
of divorce. What to some people seems like the liberation of
unhappy spouses (and children) from a life unfulfilled—or
worse—to others seems like another step down the road toward
the collapse of the family as an institution. The long-term
increase in divorce and remarriage in American family life
raises several questions linked to our three overarching themes
in this book. Clearly, the proliferation of different family
arrangements contributes to family diversity. Further, the trend
in divorce has been to widen social class inequality in family
life, as we will see that divorce has become much less common

3. among those with the highest levels of education. Divorce also
highlights the social change toward an individual orientation in
family life and decision making. You might link all of this to an
overall trend toward selfishness on the part of adults, especially
in relation to the well-being of children. But the weakening of
those bonds—informal or legal rules and obligations that keep
people together even when they don’t want to be—might also be
a sign of personal liberation and enhanced social freedom.
Although there are various ways of assessing U.S. trends in
divorce, there is no dispute that divorce is vastly more common
today than it was a century ago. Furthermore, the everyday
nature of divorce has changed the institution of the family for
everyone, even those who never themselves divorce. Children’s
lives and relationships are clearly affected when their parents
break up; for example, many people whose own parents
divorced react by limiting themselves to informal
relationships—or by avoiding living with another person
altogether—partly out of aversion to the possibility of divorce
(Klinenberg 2012). The expanding diversity of family
arrangements leads to different kinds of life stories that
sociologists seek to understand and explain. In this chapter, we
will review some history and recent trends regarding divorce—
the who, when, and why of couple breakups. Then we will
consider some of the causes and consequences of divorce for
women, men, and children. Finally, we will discuss the
remarriage and blended family arrangements that follow divorce
for most people, which raise a further set of questions and
issues for modern families. As in the case of marriage
generally, although almost all studies and statistics about
divorce relate to heterogamous couples—those with one man
and one woman—gay and lesbian divorce and relationship
dissolution are a part of the family landscape as well (Rosenfeld
2014). We don’t yet have much systematic information about
how and when such breakups occur, but what we do have so far
reveals little difference in the patterns for straight versus gay
and lesbian couples (Manning, Brown, and Stykes 2016). In

4. most of this chapter I discuss research on couples without
regard to their gender. Church and State The history of divorce
in Western societies shows the state as an institutional arena, its
leaders, laws, and regulations increasingly encroaching on the
Christian church’s authority with regard to the family. The
family that emerged in the modern era is much more under the
control of state authorities than of religious authorities, with
deference to religious authority now usually seen as a conscious
choice rather than a requirement. But before I tell that story, let
me define a few terms. Divorce as a legal event is only part of
what concerns social scientists with regard to couple breakups.
When marriages end, we refer to it as marital dissolution, the
end of a marriage through permanent separation or divorce. We
use that term because some couples who separate never get a
legal divorce. Separation refers to the formal or informal
separation of married spouses into different households. In
some cases, this is a legal agreement, and in some states,
separation is required before a divorce can be granted. Finally,
divorce is the legal dissolution of marriage according to the
laws of the state. (In the United States, marriage and divorce are
administered by the state level of government, but because that
is not the case in other countries, I use the term state to mean
whatever government has authority over families.) I should add
that researchers sometimes refer to any couple dissolving as
“relationship dissolution,” even when they have not been
married. Especially when these families include children, the
process is closely related to divorce. In this chapter, even
though I mostly use the terms marriage and divorce, much of
what we discuss is relevant to committed couples whether
married or not. Divorce is as old as marriage, although the rules
and customs surrounding how marriages end have varied
drastically. Most American Indian cultures permitted divorce,
and it was more common for them than it was among the
European marital dissolution The end of a marriage through
permanent separation or divorce. separation The formal or
informal separation of married spouses into different

5. households. divorce The legal dissolution of marriage according
to the laws of the state. 364 Chapter 10: Divorce, Remarriage,
and Blended Families settlers who encountered them (Queen
1985). Likewise, ancient Jewish laws permitted divorce.
Divorce was quite common among upper-class couples in the
Roman Empire. But by the time of early Christianity, religious
authorities introduced strong rules against divorce, with the
Bible intoning, “what therefore God hath joined together, let not
man put asunder” (Coontz 2005:86). In practice, however, the
Catholic Church did not begin to enforce strict limits on divorce
for common people until the eighth century. By the twelfth
century, divorce was virtually impossible under Church
doctrine. People could separate by mutual agreement (or, more
often, one could desert the other), but they couldn’t legitimately
remarry unless they were granted an annulment, which was
almost unheard of. That history is what makes annulment
important to understand. Annulment of marriage is a legal or
religious determination that the marriage was never valid. After
an annulment, the marriage is treated as if it never occurred.
The logical distinction between annulment and divorce is what
made it possible historically to prohibit divorce but still let
some people (usually powerful men) take spouses. Religious
annulment remains an important issue, mostly for Catholics.
Under the doctrine of the Catholic Church, remarriage is
permitted only if the marriage is annulled by the Church—that
is, judged to have been invalid and therefore not binding on the
spouses. Although this might seem like a convenient fiction,
many Catholics who divorce do seek annulments so they can
remarry and remain within the Church. The vast majority of
annulment applications are accepted, but to help Americans
maintain their ties to the Church, Pope Francis has said he
wants to make annulments cheaper, faster, and easier to get
(Yardley and Povoledo 2015). As a legal procedure, annulment
exists in the United States today but is very rare, occurring only
in cases where spouses were not legally permitted to marry
when they did (Abrams 2013). As the issue of annulment

6. suggests, the controversy around divorce has always involved
the problem of remarriage. Ending a marriage has never been as
controversial as remarrying afterward and especially producing
“legitimate” children—those whose parents are legally
married—in a subsequent marriage. This tension is one source
of the historical conflict between religious and state authorities,
which long competed for the power to regulate marriage and
divorce. This tension exploded in the sixteenth century, when
England’s King Henry VIII wanted an annulment so that he
could take a new wife. The Roman Catholic pope’s refusal to
grant that annulment helped convince Henry to leave
Catholicism and form the independent Church of England, with
himself as its head. (Unfortunately for his new wife, Anne
Boleyn, she bore a daughter and then had a series of
miscarriages without giving birth to a living son, so Henry
executed annulment of marriage A legal or religious
determination that the marriage was never valid. In this letter
from 1530, English noblemen demanded that Pope Clement VII
annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. More than
80 wax seals are attached below the lords’ signatures. Divorce
Rates and Trends 365 her before marrying again a few days
later.) Although that split with the Catholic Church did not end
the power of religious institutions in the realm of marriage and
divorce, by placing family regulation under the control of the
state it marked a significant historical step toward separating
religious from civil authority over family law in Western
societies. Still, as we saw in Chapter 8, despite the separation of
church and state enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the conflict
persists between some religious and legal rules and customs
governing marriage. Recent debates over “marriage rights” have
concerned same-sex marriage. But in the late nineteenth
century, a similarly heated debate revolved around the ri ght to
marry for people who had been divorced. At the time, few
Americans believed that the “guilty” party in a divorce should
be permitted to remarry, but the accusing spouse—often the
victim of abuse or abandonment—was seen more

7. sympathetically. Still, conservatives feared that loosening the
laws regarding remarriage would open up society to the rule of
“free love,” encouraging people to swap partners casually
without regard for the sacredness of marriage (Cott 2000). In
one case, a Catholic bishop in Nebraska declared that anyone
who attended the wedding of a divorced man would be
excommunicated (barred from the Church). Marriage rights
advocates defended the principle of divorce and remarriage as a
moral choice. As one radical journalist wrote, “It is di shonor to
remain in a state of marriage wherein the soul cries out in agony
of despair, and the bondage robs life of all its sunshine” (Harris
1906:393). As divorce entered the twentieth century, it occurred
with greater and greater frequency, even in the absence of
physical abuse or abandonment. Although it remained quite rare
by today’s standards, the American public was riveted by the
family dramas of celebrities and socialites, especially once the
voices of the neglected spouses could be heard in the pr ess (see
Changing Culture, “Divorce, American Style”). Divorce Rates
and Trends As a family sociologist with an expertise in
demography, I have frequently been asked, “What is the divorce
rate?” This is really two questions. First, what do we mean by
the divorce rate? And second, what is the number itself? I will
try to avoid a long, technical answer, but each of these
questions deserves a little attention. There is no single
definition of “the divorce rate.” To see why, consider a few
numbers. In 2015, there were an estimated 1.1 million divorces
in the United States. I have to say “estimated” because there is
no official count of divorces: five states, including the biggest
(California), do not participate in the federal government’s
collection of divorce data. So that estimate is calculated from a
large survey, the American Community Survey (which,
fortunately, provides high-quality data from all states). But
what is the meaning of 1 million divorces? From the total
number, we can Divorce, American Style From King Henry VIII
to Miley Cyrus, the divorces (or breakups) of the rich, famous,
and powerful have contributed dramatic storylines to our social

8. history. How we interpret those stories is related to how we see
divorce in general as a personal drama and as a social issue. The
first celebrity divorce in the United States covered by national
media—in this case, newspapers and magazines —involved
silent-movie star Charlie Chaplin, renowned for his portrayal of
the downtrodden everyman figure known as the Tramp. In 1927,
Chaplin’s second wife, Lita Grey, sued him for divorce. Grey
was to have been the lead actress in Chaplin’s new movie, The
Gold Rush, but the actor/ director, himself the product of
divorced parents, hurriedly married her—and replaced her in the
cast—when she became pregnant. The young actress was just 16
years old and he was 35 when they crossed the border into
Mexico to get married. Because of her age, he feared he could
be charged with statutory rape unless they married. It was
Chaplin’s second divorce (the first was also from an actress
under 18), and it created a national sensation, with charges and
countercharges aired in the press, breaking on page 1 of the
New York Times on January 11, 1927, with the subheadline,
“Film Star’s Wife Makes Sensational Charges of Infidelity and
Threats on Her Life.” The divorce settlement that Lita Grey
received was itself sensational: at $625,000, it was the largest
monetary settlement in the United States at that time. (However,
at just $8 million in today’s dollars, it was skimpy compared
with the celebrity settlements we’ve grown accustomed to since;
and had their marriage not cut short her career, she might have
ended up even richer.) Despite the scandal, Chaplin’s career
continued on an upward trajectory, and he remains a cultural
icon today. Today’s celebrity divorces may feature scandalous
accusations, but that’s less common now that such charges are
not necessary to gain court approval for a legal divorce.
Changing Attitudes A century ago, advocates for women’s
equality argued that liberalizing divorce law was essential to
women’s equal rights, and most people assumed that divorce
promoted equality between the CHANGING CULTURE Charlie
Chaplin with Lita Grey during the making of The Gold Rush,
which she was to have starred in. Divorce Rates and Trends 367

9. sexes (Smock 2004). Later critics, concerned about the rising
number of single mothers living in poverty, feared that divorce
was not just expanding women’s rights but also contributing to
the “feminization of poverty,” since few women received
anything like the large settlement that Lita Grey received from
Chaplin (Klawitter and Garfinkel 1992). Still, feminists
consider access to divorce essential for gender equality. Today,
acceptance of divorce is widespread but not universal. As of
2016, when asked whether divorce is “morally acceptable”
versus “morally wrong,” 72 percent of Americans told the
Gallup poll that they thought it was morally acceptable (Gallup
2016). But the pattern of support closely follows divisions
between conservative and liberal political views (as you can see
in Figure 10.1). The idea that easy access to divorce is
weakening families in America and causing harm to children in
particular is common among social conservatives (Coontz
1992). Social conservatives tend to combine views in favor of
“traditional” family structure with support for traditional
religious authority as well. That explains why those who attend
religious activities more often are so much more likely to
oppose loose divorce laws (Stokes and Ellison 2010). How
acceptable—or reasonable—divorce is in response to
relationship problems reflects the way people are raised and
their cultural attitudes in general. However, people’s attitudes
also reflect a practical response to their own experiences and
the experiences of those around them. In an interesting example
of that social process, a study of one community over time
found that divorce tends to appear in clusters of friends,
coworkers, and siblings (McDermott, Fowler, and Christakis
2013). And although most people favor nonrestrictive divorce
laws and believe that divorce is a morally acceptable solution to
serious marital problems, in some liberal communities divorced
people experience feelings of failure and find themselves the
subject of gossip. That was the experience of the women quoted
in a feature story about divorced Brooklyn CHANGING
CULTURE Percent of people who say that divorce in the United

10. States “should be more difficult to obtain than it is now.”
People with more conservative political views and those who
participate in more religious activities have a more negative
view of permissive divorce laws. SOURCE: Author’s graph
from the General Social Survey data, 2014–2016 (Smith et al.
2017). Political views Religious activities Liberal Moderate
Once a month More than once a month Never Less than once a
month Conservative 28% 32% 44% 48% 57% 40% 52% Figure
10.1 Attitudes toward divorce 368 Chapter 10: Divorce,
Remarriage, and Blended Families produce several differ ent
divorce rates, depending on what other information we have
(England and Kunz 1975): • Crude divorce rate: 3.9 divorces for
every 1,000 people in the country. This simply indicates how
common divorce is in the whole country. We can report this if
all we know is the number of divorces and the size of the entire
population. That is why we use it for long-term trends, going
back to years before there was good available data. As Figure
10.2 shows (using a different data source), the crude divorce
rate rose from the earliest national estimate almost continuously
for most of the twentieth century, until about 1981, from which
time it has been falling almost continuously. • Refined divorce
rate: 16 divorces for every 1,000 married couples in the country
(or 1.6 percent). This tells us how common divorce is among
married couples specifically, a figure that can be further broken
down into the categories of education, race/ethnicity, number of
years married, and number of times married (see the Story
Behind the Numbers). • Divorce-marriage ratio: 1 divorce for
every 2.2 marriages that year in the country. This directly
compares the frequency of divorces to that of new marriages.
That ratio means that there are 46 percent as many divorces as
marriages—which some people have called the “divorce rate.”
When most people ask about the divorce rate, they really are
asking what the odds are that a couple who marry today will end
up getting divorced. Since that question involves predicting the
future, it’s impossible to answer, of course, but that won’t stop
us from trying. There are two helpful ways of going about it.

11. First, we can look at the marriage and divorce history of older
people today. For example, a study in 2009 showed that, of all
the people who got married in the 1950s, about 40 percent were
divorced after 50 years. Among the group that married later, at
the height of divorce in the late 1970s, mothers (Paul 2011).
“I’ve definitely experienced judgment,” said Priscilla Gilman, a
writer quoted in the story. “Everyone said: ‘Isn’t there anything
more you can do? Your kids need you to be together. They’re so
little.’” These cultural skirmishes, occurring in the personal
lives of many people as they make their way through a lifetime
of family decisions, reflect the unresolved nature of our cultural
attitudes toward families. In this case, the competitive attitude
toward parenting—which encourages parents to put their
children above all else and judges them harshly when they do
not (as we saw in Chapter 9)—clashes with the individualist
view that marriage must be CHANGING CULTURE self-
fulfilling and rewarding (as described in Chapter 8). • Crude
divorce rate: 3.9 divorces for every 1,000 people in the country.
This simply indicates how common divorce is in the whole
country. We can report this if all we know is the number of
divorces and the size of the entire population. That is why we
use it for long-term trends, going back to years before there was
good available data. As Figure 10.2 shows (using a different
data source), the crude divorce rate rose from the earliest
national estimate almost continuously for most of the twentieth
century, until about 1981, from which time it has been falling
almost continuously. • Refined divorce rate: 16 divorces for
every 1,000 married couples in the country (or 1.6 percent).
This tells us how common divorce is among married couples
specifically, a figure that can be further broken down into the
categories of education, race/ethnicity, number of years
married, and number of times married (see the Story Behind the
Numbers). • Divorce-marriage ratio: 1 divorce for every 2.2
marriages that year in the country. This directly compares the
frequency of divorces to that of new marriages. That ratio
means that there are 46 percent as many divorces as marriages—

12. which some people have called the “divorce rate.” When most
people ask about the divorce rate, they really are asking what
the odds are that a couple who marry today will end up getting
divorced. Since that question involves predicting the future, it’s
impossible to answer, of course, but that won’t stop us from
trying. There are two helpful ways of going about it. First, we
can look at the marriage and divorce history of older people
today. For example, a study in 2009 showed that, of all the
people who got married in the 1950s, about 40 percent were
divorced after 50 years. Among the group that married later, at
the height of divorce in the late 1970s, mothers (Paul 2011).
“I’ve definitely experienced judgment,” said Priscilla Gilman, a
writer quoted in the story. “Everyone said: ‘Isn’t there anything
more you can do? Your kids need you to be together. They’re so
little.’” These cultural skirmishes, occurring in the personal
lives of many people as they make their way through a lifetime
of family decisions, reflect the unresolved nature of our cultural
attitudes toward families. In this case, the competitive attitude
toward parenting—which encourages parents to put their
children above all else and judges them harshly when they do
not (as we saw in Chapter 9)—clashes with the individualist
view that marriage must be CHANGING CULTURE self-
fulfilling and rewarding (as described in Chapter 8). Divorce
Rates and Trends 369 a higher percentage—46 percent—were
already divorced after only 30 years of marriage. Although
many people believe that 50 percent of marriages end in
divorce, no cohort of couples has yet (quite) achieved that high
of a rate (Kreider and Ellis 2011). Second, we can estimate how
many of today’s marriages will end in divorce by calculating
what would happen if some recent year (in this case, 2012)
happened over and over again—that is, if everyone lived
through today’s divorce rates for their entire marriages (Preston
1975). That way of estimating future events predicts that 53
percent of new marriages will eventually end in divorce, with
the other 47 percent ending with the eventual death of one of
the spouses (Cohen 2016). Using recent history to predict the

13. future is complicated by the aging of the population. It turns out
divorce rates have been rising for older people but falling for
younger people, and we can’t know what will happen to today’s
young people when they become tomorrow’s old people
(Kennedy and Ruggles 2014). We will return to divorce at older
ages in this chapter’s Trends to Watch. In summary, regardless
of which numbers we use, we can safely say that divorce rates
are a lot higher than they were 150 years ago, and they peaked
around 1980 before starting to decline. But if we want to know
what percentage of new marriages will end in divorce, we can
only make an educated guess, but it will probably be about half.
A consistent rise from 1860 to 1981, except for some major
events that disrupted the trend: a dip during the Great
Depression, when many people postponed divorce because they
couldn’t afford to move out on their own; and a spike after
World War II, when many people who had rushed into marriage
before the war divorced. SOURCES: Statistical Abstracts;
National Vital Statistics of the United States; Jacobson (1959).
Note: For 1920–present these are official counts from the
National Center for Health Statistics, and they do not exactly
match those from the American The Divorce Revolution Let’s
return to the years 1960–1980, when there was a dramatic
increase in divorce that came to be called the “divorce
revolution” (Weitzman 1985). What happened? Many people
associate that rise with the liberalization of family law, which
started permitting easier, “no-fault” divorces. Under the new
laws, which spread across most of the country in the 1970s,
couples could get a legal divorce without an accusation of
wrongdoing, such as infidelity, abuse, or desertion. More
important, in most states, either spouse could unilaterally
demand a divorce. In other words, the law took on the reality
that marriage was a voluntary arrangement between free
individuals. Although not specifically written to privilege
women, the new divorce laws were part of a tide of reforms in
the legal system, inspired by the feminist movement, aimed at
liberating women from traditional discriminatory laws

14. (Strebeigh 2009). Divorce reform was probably the most radical
change ever in the law governing families. But did such a
dramatic break with the legal past really cause the number of
divorces to skyrocket? Yes and no. As Figure 10.2 shows,
divorce had been increasing for decades, and the rate was
increasing rapidly even before 1970, when the first no-fault
divorce law took effect in California. In fact, even prior to
1970, although the law mandated an adversarial divorce process
based on finding one spouse at fault, many couples and their
lawyers were able to work around the legality to arrange
divorces even when no legal breach of the marriage vows had
occurred (Cherlin 2010). And yet, there is no doubt that the
more liberal legal environment made divorce easier. By
studying the trends in different states as they adopted the new
laws, researchers have determined that no-fault divorce did in
fact lead to a sharp spike in divorces, but only for a short time
(Wolfers 2006). After that, the divorce rate returned to a more
moderate, long-run upward trend (Schoen and Canudas-Romo
2006). Thus, whether or not changes in the law were directly
responsible, the divorce rate climbed for decades and eventually
reached levels high enough to have a major impact on family
life. By the time the baby boomers reached marriage age, their
attitudes toward family commitments and priorities were unique
in American history. People born in the late 1950s—during the
baby boom—had the …