Socio-economic status and the rise of divorce in Sweden: The case of the 1880–1954 marriage cohorts in Västerbotten

Abstract

An established negative association between socio-economic status (SES) and divorce has applied to most Western nations since 1960. We expected a positive association between SES and divorce for low-divorce contexts historically because only individuals in higher social strata had the resources to overcome barriers to divorce. According to Goode’s socio-economic growth theory, this relationship was reversed as industrialization and modernization began removing the economic and normative barriers. Making use of longitudinal data from parish registers, we investigated SES and other micro-level determinants of divorce among men and women in northern Sweden who married between 1880 and 1954. Results indicated a positive association between SES and divorce among those who married 1880–1919, with the middle class, not the elite, featuring the highest divorce risks. This association changed for couples who married in the 1920s, for whom divorce became more common and the working class faced similar divorce risks to the higher social strata.

Keywords:

• divorce
• Sweden
• socio-economic status (SES)
• economic independence
• event history analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Glenn Sandström is based in the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR), Umeå University, Sweden. Maria Stanfors is based in the Department of Economic History and the Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, Sweden.

2 Please address all correspondence to Maria Stanfors, Department of Economic History and the Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, PO Box 7080, 220 07 Lund, Sweden; or by Email: [email protected].

3 Previous versions of this paper were presented at the European Network for the Sociological and Demographic Study of Divorce in Florence, October 2019, and at the Social Science History Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago, November 2019.

4 This work was supported by Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser under grant number P17:0184 and by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, grant number MAW 2019.0029.