BOOKS

Marriage and death and division

Piers Paul Read

THE ROAD TO DIVORCE: ENGLAND 1530-1987 by Lawrence Stone OUP, £19.95, pp. 496 It is now 13 years since Professor Stone published The Family: Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, which advanced the mischievous theory that divorce had re- placed death as a means of limiting mar- riage to a tolerable length of time. He looked forward with apparent equanimity to untried alternatives to traditional family life:

There is no reason to assume that the end-product of affective individualism, namely the intensely self-centred, inwardly turned, emotionally bonded, sexually liber- ated, child-orientated family type of the third quarter of the 20th century is any more permanent an institution than were the many family types which preceded it.

His thinking has had effect. A recent policy review for the Labour Party suggests that it should no longer be public policy to support and sustain the old-fashioned, life-long, nuclear family. Professor Stone, however, seems to have had a change of heart. 'The revolution in our attitude towards marriage', he now writes in The Road to Divorce, 'is the most profound and far-fetching social change in the last 500 years', and has possibly reached a stage where divorce

ceases to be a healthy removal of dead wood, the legal burial of a shattered marriage, and turns into social pathology as damaging to the individuals involved — men, women and children — as it is to society as a whole.

The title of this new work, The Road to Divorce, is misleading because it is largely a serious study of the chaotic laws affecting marriage, not divorce, from the late Mid- dle Ages to the Victorian era, when popular custom took one position, the church another, and the state and prop- ertied laity a third. 'It is not too strong to say,' writes Professor Stone, 'that the marriage law as it operated in practice in England from the 14th to the 19th century was a mess'.

Throughout this period, divorce was virtually impossible and few seemed to want it. On the Continent, after the Reformation, the Protestant nations allowed divorce, and in England Milton wrote eloquently in favour of it, but at the Restoration in 1660 the regulation of mar- riage was returned to the ecclesiastical courts of the Church of England which upheld the old Catholic Canon Law that what God had joined together, no man should put asunder. This could be circum- vented by the rich through private Acts of Parliament which were initially passed only to ensure heirs for prominent families, but later came to accept grounds such as adultery, cruelty and desertion. The poor divorced either by desertion, or by the quaint custom of taking an unwanted wife to market with a halter around her neck where she would be 'sold' to a prearranged buyer.

However, both Parliamentary divorce and wife sale were statistically insignificant — at most around 50 of each in a decade. More entertaining, but equally infrequent, were actions for 'criminal conversation' husbands suing their wives' lovers for damages. This bartering of honour for cash was ridiculed on the Continent, and con- firmed England's reputation as a nation of shopkeepers, but since a successful action for Crim. Con. was necessary for a Parl- iamentary divorce, it came to be used by colluding husbands and wives. In 1728, for example, it came out in court that the controller of the Royal Household, Sir Richard Worseley, who was suing his wife's lover for £20,000, had actually given him a leg up to watch through a window as 'Things must be really tough!' she washed with nothing on.

More stories of this kind are promised by Professor Stone in companion volumes, Uncertain Unions (stories of the making of marriage before 1753) and Broken Lives (stories of the breaking of marriage before 1857). This means that for the most part this volume is a little dry, like the legal records upon which the research is based. However, the prominence given to the lawyers is justified, because it was they who lobbied for reform. It is interesting that women did not agitate for easier divorce, despite being, as Professor Stone describes them, 'the nearest approximation in a free society to a slave'. What women wanted, and obtained, were more rights within marriage, particularly over their own property.

Even after the passage of the 1857 Divorce Reform Act, divorce did not become common. 'The number of people involved remained statistically minute. As long as there were under a thousand divorces a year, England still remained basically a non-divorcing society.' How- ever this act did establish precedents. It removed, once and for all, control over marriage from the Church; and in doing so it openly rejected the theological principle of the indissolubility of marriage.

Yet this had never been the sole, or even the best, argument against divorce.

What must become of the children [asked David Hume in 1724] upon the separation of the parents? Must they be committed to the care of a step-mother; and instead of the fond care and concern of a mother, feel all the indifference or hatred of a stranger or an enemy? How many frivolous quarrels and disgusts are there which people of common prudence endeavour to forget when they lie under a necessity of passing their lives together; but which would soon inflame into the most deadly hatred, were they pursued to the utmost under the prospect of an easy separation?

If it was so clear that easy divorce would be socially harmful, how did it come about? It is only in the last 60 pages or so of The Road to Divorce, his serious study completed, that Professor Stone describes the changes in both the laws and social attitudes which have led to the present `divorce revolution', and speculates upon the meaning of available statistics.

Although allowed by the Act of 1857, divorce remained insignificant until the first world war, after which there is a dramatic increase in petitions, three- quarters of them by husbands, suggesting that 'a large number of lonely wives had committed adultery and set up new house- holds during the long absence of their husbands at the front'. The same happens after the second world war, but then there is a lull until the 1960s when the increase becomes so rapid that it can no longer be ascribed to 'a shift of legal categories among those whose marriages have broken down', but suggests instead 'a significant real increase in marital breakdown'.

He lists the probable causes — the decline in religious belief, the 'increasingly pervasive ideology of individualism', and the rise of expectations of 'sexual and emotional fulfilment from marriage . . . to quite unrealistic levels'. He considers that `the ideology of feminism has had a major impact', and that the working wife has destroyed the family 'as an integrated economic unit which had once been very hard to break up'.

The only factor he seems to have missed is the advent of the divorced and unmar- ried parents as a constituency in their own right whom politicians offend at their peril. It is already apparent that the Labour Party means to court them, and that Conservatives are faced with a dilemma: they may believe in the value of stable marriage but they risk alienating these voters if they point out that, in pursuing their own happiness, they have almost certainly brought misery to their children.