ABSTRACT
Divorce has had a powerful effect on American culture, literally and figuratively. A brief overview highlighting symbolic aspects of the history of divorce in the United States provides a useful foundation for studying divorce in American culture. However, I should note that this overview is necessarily general. Actual divorce legislation has varied and continues to vary widely among the states, and in that way also reflects both the American reverence for states’ rights and regional differences. Most southern states, for example, have had more conservative divorce legislation. My study focuses primarily on an Anglo-American middle class. The effects and history of divorce among other ethnicities and classes carries with it too many factors for the scope of the current study. For example, the influence of Catholicism on many immigrants curbed the tendency to divorce, as did the cost of legal divorce. Many marriages simply dissolved without the often-expensive legal procedure. Also, since slaves’ marriages were not considered legal, slaves were not considered eligible for divorce. Marriage was a “right” granted with manumission, and it thus has a more complicated significance among African Americans, reflecting myriad tensions encountered by seeking legitimation from the dominant white legal culture.2 Nonetheless, the power of divorce, as a reality and metaphor, has profound political and personal signification that transcends some of these class and ethnic boundaries as it becomes a symbol of American autonomy and citizens’ rights.
