Volume 36, Number 3 · March 2, 1989
The Road to Polygamy
By Lawrence Stone
Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society
by Roderick Phillips
Cambridge University Press, 672 pp., $39.50
If the rates of divorce remain fairly steady, as they have done throughout the 1980s, a half of all marriages in America today, and over a third in England, will end in the divorce court rather than the funeral parlor. Apart perhaps from Scandinavia, these two countries have the highest divorce rates in the Western world, far above those in the Mediterranean countries, where strong Catholic religious opposition to any divorce has only recently been defeated by the legislature. Only Ireland has no divorce law at all, a proposed bill having recently been defeated in a referendum by a combination of the Roman Catholic Church and fearful Irish women. During the referendum, an opponent observed that 'a woman who votes in favor of divorce is like a turkey voting in favor of Christmas.' Except in Ireland, therefore, divorce is now as much a part of our culture and our lives as death and taxes. But how and when and why did we get this way, and what have been consequences so far for human happiness, moral virtue, and social stability? These are questions inevitably raised by a reading of Roderick Phillips's Putting Asunder.
Review, 4805 words
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