I recently stumbled across this TRP thread, but as I was reading I noticed some really fishy data that completely neglected the variety of factors that play into something as significant as societal divorce rates. To quote:

Let's look at the statistics and history:

United Kingdom

  • 1918 - In the UK Women's Suffrage was put in place. Women over the age of 30 were allowed to vote.
  • 1928 - In the UK full Women's Suffrage was granted and any legal adult woman could vote.

Now look at this chart and notice when divorce started spiking: ~1918
http://i.imgur.com/5C1qZSh.png

Chart Source: [guardian.co.uk]>(http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons)

And here is the UK Marriage vs. Divorce rate over the past 80 years:
http://i.imgur.com/7fV3IWV.png
Chart Source: ons.gov.uk

Okay, so there's all that, but this is severely guilty of back-reading the modern status quo into historical events.

In the UK prior to 1857 only wealthy men could initiate divorce through a direct appeal to parliament. In 1857 the Matrimonial Causes Act was instituted which lowered the cost to appeal for divorce significantly, and allowed women to be the initiating party, however women were required to demonstrate that their husbands had broken their martial vows and were also guilty of additional abuses such as cruelty, rape, and incest.

In 1923 this was amended to require only adultery, but a woman still had to deliver some form of proof that her husband was unfaithful (no such restriction was placed on men, accusation alone was sufficient).

Before we go to the next step, I want to make sure everyone's following along. From 1857 to 1923 a woman (who, outside of the wealthy, was likely working a factory job) could only petition for divorce if her husband was an adulterer and was also guilty of rape (note: the law did not conclusively recognize that a husband could rape his wife until 1991, so he had to have raped someone else for this to count under the law), battery, or molesting their children.

So 1923 eased that up a bit, he only had to be unfaithful, not both unfaithful and violent.

Then, in 1937, check again when that line starts to go up, the law was again amended to include drunkenness, insanity, and desertion as sufficient grounds to initiate a divorce. (That's right: prior to 1937 a woman could not divorce and re-marry even if her husband had abandoned the family, left the country, and severed all ties.)

So that line starts to go up once women are given the power to sever abusive, untenable, or deserted relationships. At the same time, through the 40's, women re-entered the workforce to fill wartime vacancies. Having a source of income allowed women in abusive/exploitative relationships to sever the marriage without the doom of poverty.

The next major event (skipping over the complexities of the post-war workforce and the birth of the Baby Boom) is the Divorce Reform Act of 1969. This allowed both men and women to initiate a "no fault" divorce. If both parties were amenable and had lived apart for two years, the divorce could be processed without the violation of marriage vows on behalf of either party. In essence couples who agree that things just weren't working could peacefully go their separate ways. The extremely sharp uptick after 1970 represents the number of prior relationships that had already failed, but were now legally eligible for a no fault divorce. There's actually two ticks: one in 1971 (the two-year eligibility date for consensual divorces) and another in 1974 (the 5-year eligibility date for single-party divorces).

In short the major upticks in divorce rate in the UK follows changes to the law that expand the grounds of who can initiate a divorce for what reasons. This appears to correlate to suffrage because the right to vote and the right to initiate a divorce are both expressions of legal autonomy. Basically the two laws were passed around the same time because they're part of the same issue being contested.

Other trends to notice in the data: upticks in the divorce rate tend to lag a few years behind upticks in the marriage rate. This makes logical sense from a social science standpoint - a portion of couples simply aren't going to work out, but it usually takes a few years to really realize that you're not really compatible. The decline in marriage rates in 1990 and beyond generally correlate with both a generational change and a recession of the British economy, and we see towards the end the two lines beginning to mimmic each other as the demographics of the marriage pool and the divorce pool increasingly represent the same generation of people.