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From: ray@rochester.UUCP (Ray Frank)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Name Changes ("traditions that have evolved" disappearing)
Message-ID: <12089@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 5-Oct-85 09:58:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.12089
Posted: Sat Oct  5 09:58:53 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Oct-85 05:10:15 EDT
References: <5211@elsie.UUCP> <11302@rochester.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept.
Lines: 58

> >
> >The divorce rate of people married 7 years or less is statistically
> >much high now than at any time in the past.  What are you talking
> >about when you mention 50 or 75 year marriages?  Staying married for
> >20, 30, 40 years, etc probably is a feat of great accomplishment, but
> >is staying married for greater than 7 years considered a great
> >accomplishment?  The divorce rate is higher now than in the past.  No
> >qualification of this fact is necessary.  The divorce rate is not
> >higher as you imply because people are living longer, this is absurd.
> 
> Is a 7 year marriage a great accomplishment?  I don't know.  I suppose
> it depends on the people.  But what the point you seems to have
> overlooked or misread in my letter is that people, particularly women,
> died young in older days.  For them, a 7 year marriage generally meant
> that a women had survived, say, 3 to 7 pregnancies.  This was not
> extremely rare, but neither was it unusual to die in childbirth.  Add
> in all the other then-common causes of death, and you'll find that, for
> both of a couple to live for seven years after a marriage was only
> somewhat better than 50/50 proposition.
> 
> So what has happened, in general, is that the divorce rate has
> increased, and the death rate has declined, and the affect on longevity
> of any single marriage has about evened out.  What this could indicate
> is that it is not reasonable to expect the average marriage to last any
> longer than it does today.  It's just that now one can get out of a
> marriage without waiting for some natural event to kill off your
> spouse.
> 
> Again, the institution of marriage that you wish to hold to evolved
> when mortality made most marriages short.  When normal mortality makes
> a marriage at 25 likely to last 50 years, not less than 10, one cannot
> expect the institution to stand still.  It must adapt to this changing
> situation.
> 
> Another thing to learn is that the problem of sundering marriages and
> step-parents is essentially as bad today as it used to be in the good
> old days when divorce was nearly unheard of.  It's just that now
> children have to deal with the trauma of parental divorce, and before
> they had to deal with parental death.
> 
> 		Ken Arnold

The divorce rate has dramatically increased since the late fourties, are you
suggesting that women died young in the fourties and fifties?  Are you
suggesting that the longevity curve has dramatically incraeased since the
fourties?  The fifty percent divorce rate today cannot possibly be attributed
to longevity as you suggest, it is just mathematically impossible.
In effect you are blamming mother nature for the divorce rate, and nothing
else. 

But if what you suggest is correct one could then surmise that 50% of the women
who married at age 20 back in the fourties died before the age of 40.  This
would nicely account for the 50% divorce rate of marriages begun when the
women were 20 years old and are today 40 years old and not dead.

If you are talking about a hundred or a thousand years ago, then you might
be correct, the life expectancy was around 40 then, but 40 years ago, the
life expectancy was about 70.