Destroying the Beautiful: Feminism and Divorce
The Evidence in Divorce
When we ignore God's rules and design, the consequences are always bad, and this is no less true for divorce than for anything else.
Proverbs 14:12 NASB95 - There is a way [which seems] right to a man, But its end is the way of death.
Ignoring His design for marriage, gender, and the family leads to broken homes, and the main agent of that destruction is divorce. The data that's about to be presented demonstrates the fruits of this destructive agent without question.
Recent research revealed something startling that was worth its own post, even if it is just a shorty. The section on divorce in the original post was quite short, mostly because I didn't have a lot of information to insert there. However, that has since changed, and quite dramatically. We'll mainly be examining the correlation between the rise of feminism and the rise in divorce rates, and the results are shocking, to say the least.
All stats, unless noted otherwise, in the following tables are per 1000 people, so rather than the number of marriages ending in divorce, it’s how many people were divorced.
The chart below is the exception to the stat rule, because it shows the percentage of divorces per year rather than the number per 1000. It doesn’t go back as far as I’d like it to, but the data only goes back to 1867. Notice that since that time, there have been several major spikes, and they correlate remarkably with our topic of interest.
As we already explored in the first post, the first women’s rights meeting was held in Seneca Falls in 1848, but it was interrupted by the Civil War in the 1860s. Our data doesn’t begin until after that war, so we’ll pick up the trail there. The sources for my data can be found here and here.
I’m no math expert, but the real shocking data appears when you take the percentage over the baseline divorce rate. I also include the marriage rates per 1000 beginning in 1900. There’s a major correlation between the decline in divorce rates that seems to appear in the 90s through the 2000s, and the decline in marriage rates.
The baseline for as far back as we have data was about .3 divorces for every 1000 people, which is really quite low. This is the rate up until 1880, when there was a dramatic shift.
One tiny increase from .3 to .4 might not sound like much, but it represents a 33% increase over the baseline divorce rate, which is huge! A 33% increase is pretty staggering, but it’s hardly the end of the line. Now, what happened in or around 1880 to cause this sudden jump?
In 1875, a court ruled against Susan B. Anthony, which spread the popularity of the women’s rights movement quite a lot. Five years after this jump in popularity, we see a sudden jump in the national divorce rate.
As we’ve already seen, women gained the right to vote nationally in 1920, though surprisingly, most women just 17 years earlier did not want the right to vote. Watch the divorce rate as we approach the year 1920.
Between the end of WW1 and 1925, the divorce rate spiked almost 200% over what it was in the 1800s. The major event during that period was women being given the right to vote.
Rates continued to climb at a steady rate until the end of WW2, when, in the 5 years between 1940 and 1945, the rate jumped from 567% to 1067%, an increase of 500%!
Between 1944 and 1945, there was a 200% increase in the number of divorces, and this would be about the time all the men returned from the war, often to find their wives had been running around with other guys while they were away. During WW2, women also entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time, and the end of the war represented a time of return to the old way of doing things, or so everyone thought.
Turned out that women wanted to be independent from men, so they were more able to get a divorce and still be able to support themselves. It climbed to its highest peak in 1946 and then steadily decreased until 1958, when it reached its lowest point at 2.1 divorces per 1000.
By 1964, the divorce rate was on the rise again with the revival of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution. In 1969, no-fault divorce came into effect, and we see what the effects of that were the very next year.
No-fault divorce came about as a direct result of the efforts of the feminist movement, and the divorce rates will just continue to climb from here. By 1977, the divorce rate would reach 5 per 1000 for the first time.
Divorce rates would peak in 1980, and then decline slightly through the 1990s. This decline would continue on through the early 2000s
As you can see, there’s been a 35% decrease in marriage rates, which explains some of the sudden decrease in the rate of divorces. Most people just aren’t bothering to get married anymore, while the rate of divorce is still 733% higher than our baseline. It’s still 6 marriages to every 2.5 divorces, which is why the rate still stays so high. More people are getting married than are getting divorced, but that number is certainly narrowing.
From these statistics, we can make some conclusions, but it’s easy enough to chalk it up to simply being correlation rather than causation. It’s merely a coincidence that the divorce rates spike in correlation with major advances in the feminist movement, rather than the cause of the spikes being the result of the efforts of women’s liberation enterprises.
We might well draw such a conclusion if this were the only data available to us, but it is not. We’re going to take a look at some more statistics, in case this data wasn’t enough, and we’re also going to examine a study done by a gentleman in the 1930s.
Who Initiates?
We’re going to examine who is the initiator of divorce, and it may or may not be surprising to you.
As we’ll see, nearly two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women, and among the college-educated, this number jumps to a staggering 90%! Source
What’s super interesting is that this number is completely dependent on marriage. When it comes to non-marital relationships, cohabiting, in other words, or simply dating, the gender who is most likely to end the relationship is evenly split between men and women, which means that the marriage covenant makes more of a difference to men than it does to women. Biblically speaking, men are the guardians of the covenant rather than women, and this is one reason why.
“Women seem to have a predominant role in initiating divorces in the U.S. as far back as there is data from a variety of sources, back to the 1940s,” Rosenfeld said. “I assumed, and I think other scholars assumed, that women’s role in breakups was an essential attribute of heterosexual relationships, but it turns out that women’s role in initiating breakups is unique to heterosexual marriage.”
It can be argued that this is simply because divorces almost always favor the woman over the man in recent years, but as we have seen in the above quote, this trend of women being the initiators is not a new one. We’re going to take a look at this data, and it solidifies our previous supposition that high divorce rates are a result of feminism.
The current 10-year divorce rate among heterosexual couples is 18% in America, which is quite high. Again, that’s 733% higher than it was in the late 1800s, and 69% of that 18% is initiated by women. Now, oddly enough, among homosexual couples, the divorce rate is 15%, which, since it’s sinful, you’d think it would be higher than hetero couples, but it’s not.
However, among lesbian couples, the divorce rate is around 30%!
We constantly find the affirmation that women are far more likely to end a marriage than men are, and again, this not only coincides with feminism, but it is also markedly influenced by the amount of college education the woman specifically has had, and it completely depends on the presence of a marriage covenant.
Divorce.com has all kinds of reasons why this might be the case and extensive studies to back up their conclusions, and they give a list of seven main reasons why women initiate a divorce.
Unmet needs
Deficient life-work balance
Women who earn $38,000 or more than their husbands have an 8.4% chance of divorce, compared to couples where the husband earns more, who have only a 2.9% chance of divorce.
Husband’s unfaithfulness
Cheating, whether physical or emotional, is seen as one of the most significant trust breaches in a marriage.
Conversely, women in the same situation might see emotional infidelity as more significant than physical when their partner forms a strong bond with someone else.
They may become frustrated if their partner spends time and resources on another person instead of them and their children.
Alcohol addiction
Physical and emotional violence
Women reported experiencing both emotional and physical abuse
Better support system
Women are more likely to have a robust support system than men, so they are more likely to talk to friends and family about their relationship and to have more help if they divorce. They have a circle of support to help them through the transition.
It is also worth noting that divorce is contagious. If a close friend divorces, a person’s chance of divorce goes up 75%. Women have more close friendships and divorce becomes more likely if friends are divorcing.
Fewer regrets
Notice that this list is mostly based on perception and the way women relate to their emotions, especially under the category of unfaithfulness, where a perceived “emotional affair” is seen as more serious than even a physical affair.
A wife earning more than her husband significantly increased the risk that she would divorce him as well. Reading through these statistics, it should become abundantly clear that God set things up to work a certain way, and when we abandon that, things don’t work out so well. Now, the point of this whole article is to prove a point using statistics, but we will get into some scripture toward the end, and of course, many more articles explaining the topic with the bible can be found here.
The Historical Lens
The final piece we will examine is the historical pattern of feminism and divorce. A man by the name of JD Unwin did an incredibly in-depth historical examination, and while some of his conclusions contradicted his own data, the data itself is astounding. The book is called Sex and Culture, and it can be read in its entirety here.
In the course of his study, he looked at thousands of cultures and civilizations and found something extraordinary. A society collapses when sexual opportunity and liberty are rampant, and primitive cultures with their lack of modesty simply won’t advance because of this fact.
If, however, sex is confined to a marriage between a man and a woman, then that society will advance. The important factor is that each woman is relegated to one man and that sex is confined to marriage.
As he points out, the greatest advances occur in those societies that are absolutely monogamous, just as we find God’s ideal for marriage is monogamy.
If a man's wives are compelled to confine their sexual qualities to their husband for the whole of their lives, or for so long as he wishes, the energy of the society is greater than it would be if the wives could leave their husband of their own free will.
In the past, too, the greatest energy has been displayed only by those societies which have reduced their sexual opportunity to a minimum by the adoption of absolute monogamy (para. 168). In every case the women and children were reduced to the level of legal nonentities, sometimes also to the level of chattels, always to the level of mere appendages of the male estate.
Eventually they were freed from their disadvantages, but at the same time the sexual opportunity of the society was extended. Sexual desires could then be satisfied in a direct or perverted manner; no dissatisfaction demanded an outlet; no emotional stress arose. So the energy of the society decreased, and then It disappeared.
Pages 431 and 432
Now, this next section hits on our topic of feminism, and it shows no mercy. He accurately points out that female emancipation is nothing new or unique to our modern times, contrary to what we might like to think.
I mention the matter now because, owing to the egocentricity in our historical outlook, to which I have already referred (para. 159), it is often supposed that female emancipation is an invention of the modern white man. Sometimes we imagine that we have arrived at a conception of the status of women in society which is far superior to that of any other age; we feel an inordinate pride because we regard ourselves as the only civilized society which has understood that the sexes must have social, legal, and political equality.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
A female emancipating movement is a cultural phenomenon of unfailing regularity ; it appears to be the necessary outcome of absolute monogamy. The subsequent loss of social energy after the emancipation of women, which is sometimes emphasized, has been due not to the emancipation but to the extension of sexual opportunity which has always accompanied it. In §i62 NECESSITY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 345 human records there is no instance of female emancipation which has not been accompanied by an extension of sexual opportunity.
Page 344-345
This is one of those places where his conclusions did not match his own data, however, because he himself was a feminist. While he has concluded that sexual opportunity leads to the downfall of a society, he can’t quite bring himself to make the obvious connection.
He accurately notes that women’s emancipation always comes before sexual opportunity increases; in fact, that there is no case of female emancipation which has not been accompanied by an increase in sexual opportunity. He stops just short of the correct conclusion that female emancipation is the cause of the collapse of a civilization.
In other words, based on his study and the other data we have covered, it can be accurately concluded that a society begins its collapse when women achieve social and political equality with men.
The Scriptural Conclusion
The findings of Unwin’s study and the other data in this post complement what is laid out in the Bible. Women are to be keepers at home; they were created for men, they cannot initiate a divorce (for extremely good reasons, as we have seen), and they are confined to a single husband who is their master.
All the data in this post is simply the real-world consequences of rejecting God and His designed system of marriage and the family. It backs up what He says in His word, and every single aspect of what we find written for our instruction in the Bible.
Our God loved us enough to give us the exact instructions we would need to keep a society functioning at its highest level.
How awesome is that?!
1 Corinthians 11:3 NKJV - But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman [is] man, and the head of Christ [is] God.
1 Corinthians 11:8 NKJV - For man is not from woman, but woman from man.
1 Corinthians 11:9 NKJV - Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man.
However, an alarming trend has arisen in the Church of God. There is a pattern of soft feminism that is infecting the church, where biblical words like head, lord, rule, and submit are being softened into partner, teammate, servant-leader, and equals. This soft feminism is not harmless; it’s the seed of destruction, undermining God’s order in the very place it should be upheld.
Genesis 3:16 NKJV - To the woman He said: "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire [shall be] for your husband, And he shall rule over you."
Genesis 2:18 NKJV - And the LORD God said, "[It is] not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him." Genesis 2:22 NKJV - Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.
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