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The recent increase in American divorce rates has aroused a great deal of media publicity, popular discussion, and social science research. Several recent works have begun to reexamine the origins, trends, and implications of divorce in American history. This paper presents systematic data concerning the extent of divorce in three North Central states for the 1810-60 period. The findings establish the incidence of mass divorce for a considerable period prior to official divorce statistics. Major patterns are analyzed and compared to late 19th-century data from the first governmental studies of divorce for the 1870-1900 decades. While some urban-rural differences are found, changing laws and norms played the principal role in the increase in divorce rates during the 1800s. The final part of the paper discusses the implications of these findings for understanding marital disruption in social-historical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general inverse relationship between marital disruption (separation and divorce) and educational status, commonly assumed by family sociologists, is demonstrated for both men and women using the 1/1000 sample of the 1970 United States Census. A minor, but interesting exception to this generally inverse relationship is noted for males with six or more years of college. This paper, however, focuses on a more dramatic and particularly significant deviation from the general pattern. Specifically, highly educated females—those with five or more years of college—have an especially high disruption rate compared to women with only four years of college. In fact, the disruption rate for women with five or more years of college exceeds that for women at every educational level except those who did not finish high school. The objective of this study was to see if those factors which differentiate women with four years of college from those with five or more are the same factors that differentiate between the "never disrupted" and the "ever disrupted" women with five or more years of college. The findings reveal that three variables—race, employment outside the home, and income—are associated with the likelihood that highly educated women will divorce or separate. These same variables also distinguish them from baccalaureate-level women. Four possible explanations, unrelated to the data analysis presented, are suggested for why a woman who enters graduate school significantly increases her probability of marital disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]