The Political Side of Divorce

Given the statistics, it's a wonder divorce wasn't a presidential issue long ago. Well, it was. "It was a major problem for Nelson Rockefeller in 1964, though not his only problem," Pika said. Rockefeller was a moderate Republican, and the nomination was controlled by conservatives, who pushed for fellow conservative Barry Goldwater. "But one of the major problems Rockefeller had been his recent, very public divorce," Pika said.

Although the National Center for Health Statistics reports that for the past 40 years the ratio of marriages to divorces has been nearly 2 to 1, only one president, Ronald Reagan, has been divorced. Just for the record, in 2005 there were 7.5 new marriages per 1,000, and 3.6 divorces per 1,000.    

The rest of the world has considered American divorce rates high as far back as the American Revolution. That's not surprising for a country that got its start through a divorce -- a political one from King George III. The founding fathers had a grievance list of the kind that would have shamed any vengeful spouse.

But long before the country gained its freedom, the first American couple divorced in a Puritan court in Massachusetts in 1639. In England, it took an Act of Parliament to get a divorce until 1857. Why was divorce available under the religiously restrictive Puritans and not in England? "Any country that abandoned Catholicism had to abandon marriage as a sacrament," said Rick Wunderli, a medieval history professor at the University of Colorado.

He's alluding to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, when many northern European countries --like England -- broke from the Catholic Church. "That meant that marriage became a civil affair," an affair of state, untied from Catholic doctrine, which prohibited divorce altogether at that time.

The Puritans became a center of that revolt by the following century. For them, "A contract was only valid as long as both parties agreed to it," Wunderli said. "If one party no longer agrees, the contract ends."

A bad marriage, the Puritans reasoned, was bad for the community -- perhaps the root of the American no-fault divorce. English poet and Puritan John Milton argued that a valid marriage contained true companionship. Since their goal was communal harmony, forcing two people who didn't love each other to stay together wasn't good, the Puritans reasoned. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps echoing Milton, used a similar argument when preparing documents in a divorce case four years before writing the Declaration of Independence.

He wrote that it was cruel "to chain a man to misery until death," that "liberty of divorce prevents and cures domestic quarrels," and that a marriage, like any other contract, was unenforceable without both parties agreement.