Long-Term Perspectives on Divorce in the Nordic Countries – Introduction

Abstract

The Nordic countries are often put forward as forerunners in the acceptance of permissive divorce practices and in the shift away from a patriarchal family system during the twentieth century. This special issue focuses on the long term historical path dependencies that make Nordic institutions and norms regarding divorce stand out as liberal and individualistic in an international comparison, but also shed new light on the differences that exist between the countries. Specific traits that are raised is the role played by the shared Lutheran culture that facilitated the breakthrough of a secular notion of marriage as a civil contract, but also the important role played by the first wave feminist movement in all of the Nordic countries for the early breakthrough of liberal divorce laws. However, it is clear that permissive norms and institutions have tended to spread in two distinct waves with leaders and laggards within the Nordic context. In the early twentieth century, Denmark and Norway spearheaded the shift to bi-lateral no-fault divorce. In the 1970s, Sweden took over as the leader when the country adopted unilateral no-fault divorce while Finland consistently has tended to stand out as the conservative laggard within the Nordic context.

Keywords:

• Union dissolution
• Marriage legislation
• Divorce
• Second Demographic Transition

Introduction

An integral part of the reshaping of Western societies during the last century has been a profound change in the function of marriage and gender roles. Marriage as the only accepted form of heterosexual relationship has been replaced by a new order of intimate life in which close relationships are much more contingent, more diverse, and open to personal choice. The long-term increase in divorce can be regarded as a primary empirical and analytical indicator of these profound changes to the socio-sexual order of Western societies. The history of divorce in the Nordic countries is arguably of special interest as research focusing on changing family behaviour in the West during the 20th century, often describe the Nordic countries as forerunners in the shift away from collective solidarity within a patriarchal family. The family system that evolved in the Nordic countries has been perceived as emphasizing individual independence, autonomy, gender equality and reliance on welfare state institutions rather than on the family for social and economic security.¹

This special issue includes eight articles addressing how the long-term historical development in the Nordic countries has worked to produce a specific set of norms and institutions pertaining to divorce that in many ways stand out in international comparisons. These ‘persistent contrasts’ have caused family historians to talk of a ‘weak family system’² in Northern Europe as well as a late and non-universal marriage pattern.³ In these works the tendency to give greater weight to the autonomy of the individual over family solidarity is traced back to characteristics of Northern European historical development that became especially pronounced in the Nordic countries, such as the absence of serfdom, the protestant emphasis on scripture and a personal relationship to god, and the institution of the lifecycle servant system that afforded young adults a high degree of autonomy from the parents during youth.⁴ The works presented in this special issue gives further insights into this historical path dependency that help to explain the individualistic traits found in contemporary Nordic societies, but also sheds new light on differences between the countries.

Since the 1960s, Nordic societies have indeed exhibited comparatively high levels of cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, high divorce rates, and a high share of single-person households.⁵ This marked shift away from traditional family behaviour, which took off in the Nordic countries in the 1960s and increasingly emerged in other Western countries in the following decades, has been termed the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) by Ron Lesthaeghe and Dick J Van de Kaa.⁶ According to this influential theory, the change in behaviours regarding gender roles, sexuality, marriage and divorce that has spread across the West since the 1960s was the result of a shift in values driven by increased affluence and economic security during the post-war decades. Drawing on the results from the European and the World Value Surveys, Lesthaeghe argues that so-called post-materialistic values, which emphasize individualism and self-actualization at the expense of strong family ties, became especially prevalent in the affluent welfare states in the North. The Nordic countries thus spearheaded the development towards a decreased significance of marriage and the acceptance of an unconditional and individual right to divorce. This period of Nordic leadership in rapidly changing family behaviour is the focus of Glenn Sandström’s article on the Swedish divorce debate in the 1960s and 1970s in this special issue, as well as Sophy Bergenheim’s article on how divorce was framed as a social issue in Finland during the period 1951 − 1988.

Although it is true that Nordic societies emerged as the leaders in the Second Demographic Transition, it is important to stress that there is a high degree of similarity in the temporal pattern of the shift from a low to high divorce rate regime across Western countries.⁷ The general pattern is well exemplified in Figure 1, which shows the development of the divorce rate per 1,000 married women in the Nordic countries from about 1870 until today. Here we observe patterns similar to those in other Western societies, where divorce tended to increase primarily during two distinct periods of the 20th century: the first starting after the First World War, reaching a mid-century peak just after the Second World War to then stabilize or even decrease during the 1950s and early 1960s; followed by a second period of very rapid increase in the 1960s and 1970s.

FIGURE 1 Divorce rate per 1,000 married women in the Nordic countries 1870 − 2016.

Sources: Denmark: On the number of divorces: For the period 1878 − 1900: Müller, Om adgang til skilsmisse, p. 124. For the period 1901 − 1916: Statistics Denmark, ‘HISB3. Nøgletal om befolkningen‘. On population figures (at 5 − 10 years intervals): Statistics Denmark, ‘Folketællninger‘. Finland: Nieminen. Väestötilastoja 250 vuotta. Väestö 1999:8. Helsinki: Tilastokeskus, 59 − 62; Pitkänen and Jalovaara, ‚Perheet ja perheenmuodostus‘; Statistics Finland. Befolkningsförändringar 2014. Helsinki: Tilastokeskus – Statistikcentralen – Statistics Finland, 2016, 160. Iceland, For the period 1873 − 1903: see Björnsdóttir, ‘Ég vil heldur skilja‘. For the period 1904 − 1990: Hagskinna, table 2.33. For the period 1991 − 2011 see: Statistics Iceland, ‘Marriages dissolved and judicial separations 1951 − 2011‘.Norway: Mamelund, et al., Divorce in Norway 1886 − 1995 by calendar year and marriage cohort. Statistics Norway, ‘Tabell: 09660: Ekteskap og skilsmisser‘and ‘Tabell: 05813: Folkemengde, etter kjønn og sivilstand‘. Sweden: Statistics Sweden. Befolkningsutveckling; födda, döda, in- och utvandring, gifta, skilda 1749–2016‘; ‘Befolkningsrörelsen 1911 − 1966‘; ‘Befolkningsförändringar 1967 − 1992‘; ‚Befolkningsstatistik del 3‘, 2001, 14. Note: The number of divorces per year is available for all the countries from the late 19th century. For the period prior to modern computer-based population registers (−1960s), the number of married women has been determined from the censuses available at five- to ten-year intervals. The yearly population at risk used as the denominator for the divorce rate has then been estimated through linear interpolation for the years between two censuses. The exception to this is Sweden, which has continuous records for the married population going back to the 19th century.

However, it is increasingly clear that the long-term consequence of the forerunner position occupied by the Nordic countries in the 1960s and 1970s has not been permanent leadership in family instability. As seen in Figure 1, after the 1970s the divorce rate stabilized at a level between 11 and 15 per 1,000 married women. Since the 1990s a number of countries in Southern and Central Europe, as well as the United States, have reached – and in many cases surpassed – the levels of divorce found in the Nordic countries.⁸ This is even clearer regarding other aspects of family behaviour, such as fertility levels, with the Nordic countries having reached levels around two children per woman while the ‘lowest-low’ fertility, below 1.5 children per woman, has primarily been observed in Eastern, Central and Southern European countries.⁹ Many scholars now argue that these 21st-century disparities can be explained by the fact that Nordic societies have managed to a greater extent to adapt to the new roles of women and men with greater acceptance of gender equality both at the institutional level and within the family. Here, research indicates that men in the Nordic countries have to a greater extent accepted taking on a larger share of the domestic workload and express higher acceptance of gender equality as a desired outcome.¹⁰

Apart from the initial stages of the Second Demographic Transition in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Nordic countries along with the US led the development towards a high divorce rate regime, it was only for a short period in immediate connection to the Second World War that Finland and Denmark exhibited a divorce rate that was among the highest in the West. The sharp upswing in divorce in the 1940s, seen for Finland and Denmark in Figure 1, occurred in more or less all the Western countries directly involved in the war (Norway being a Nordic exception to this rule). After the hostilities ended, the marriages of many returning soldiers ended in divorce for a variety of reasons related to the strains placed on relationships by the war.¹¹ The article by Antti Malinen gives an in-depth example of how, e.g., adultery, alcoholism, PTSD and spousal violence among returning soldiers worked to increase union instability in Finland immediately after the war. In his article, he investigates how former military chaplains worked with counselling troubled couples experiencing marital discord during the late 1940s in post-war Finland.

For the period prior to the Second World War, it is clear that the Nordic countries do not stand out as having had exceptionally high divorce rates compared to other Western countries. As seen in Figure 1, the divorce rate in the Nordic countries ranged from approximately one to three divorces per 1,000 married women during the first decades of the 20th century, which was only about half the levels found in the US¹² and, e.g., Germany and France.¹³

Still, this does not mean the Nordic countries did not exhibit traits that made them stand out in comparison to other Western contexts. Rather than having exceptionally high levels of divorce during this earlier period, the Nordic avant-gardism pertained to the institutional and normative structure regulating marriage and divorce that developed in the first decades of the 20th century. As shown by Nordic family historians in a number of earlier works, and expanded upon in several of the articles published in this special issue, there is a long historical continuity regarding liberal and individualistic norms pertaining to spousal rights within marriage and the access to divorce in the Nordic countries. Here, the very early reforms to marital law during the first decades of the 20th century, when all the Nordic countries adopted formal gender equality within marriage and the right to bilateral no-fault divorce, many decades ahead of most other Western countries, have caused family historians to talk about a specific ‘Nordic model of marriage’.¹⁴ During the upheavals of the Russian revolution in 1917 a formally gender equal marriage law as well as the right to no-fault divorce was also implemented in the USSR. However, the early experiment with no-fault divorce in the Soviet was short lived and was largely rolled back already in the 1930s under Stalin.¹⁵ In comparison liberal no-fault legislation became a permanent trait of Nordic family law. The Nordic cooperation regarding the reforms of marital legislation in the early 20th century is an example of the closely interconnected historical development of the five Nordic countries. The common political and religious history of these countries resulted in great similarities in administration, legislation and political culture. Central to these similarities was that all the Nordic countries adopted Lutheranism during the 16th century, with the Church functioning as the most important administrative institution used by the Nordic kings to rule what were to become distinctly bureaucratic nation states. Although the shared history and similarities in the development of the Nordic countries is what stand out when the joint reforms of divorce laws are examined, there are still distinct differences between the countries related to specific national context and historical experience.

The articles by Bente Rosenbeck focusing on Denmark, Hanne Marie Johansen on Norway, Ólöf Garðarsdóttir and Brynja Björnsdóttir on Iceland, and Pasi Saarimäki on Finland all deepen our knowledge on the country-specific origins of the early breakthrough of liberal divorce legislation in the Nordic countries. Rosenbeck, Johansen and Saarimäki show how the bourgeois women’s movement influenced the reforms of Nordic divorce laws in the early 20th century. Rosenbeck, Johansen and Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir further contribute important insights regarding how the shared history of Lutheranism made religious opposition to liberal divorce laws weak in the Nordic countries. They furthermore point at the relatively easy access to divorce on grounds of incompatibility through royal dispensation as early as the late 18th century. Furthermore, Garðarsdóttir & Björnsdóttir improve our understanding of disparities in divorce across gender, social class and rural-urban contexts in late 19th- and early 20th-century Iceland.

After this brief presentation of the development of divorce in the Nordic countries and a discussion on how the articles in this special issue relate to different periods in the divorce transition, we will now give a more detailed summary of the results of each article. In a concluding section, we will raise some of the common themes found in the articles and point at some areas for future research.

Paper summaries

Bente Rosenbeck, Liberalization of divorce – no-fault divorce in Denmark and the Nordic countries in the early 20th century

Rosenbeck focuses on the reforms of Nordic divorce legislation that occurred during the period 1909 − 1929, paying special attention to the development in Denmark and the influence that the Danish women’s movement and the Danish State Church had on the reform. She argues that the Nordic development is exceptional from a comparative perspective, in terms of the acceptance of bilateral, no-fault divorce and formal gender equality regarding custody and property 30 − 50 years earlier than most other Western countries. Rosenbeck concludes that the new Nordic marriage laws were based on three major innovations: firstly, a shift from social to medical marriage impediments; secondly, a principle of formal gender equality whereby women retained their legal majority after marrying and equal division of property in cases of divorce; and thirdly, the right to dissolve an unhappy marriage without the need to specify a guilty party if both spouses agreed to the divorce.

Rosenbeck argues that an important condition for the conspicuously early reforms in the Nordic countries is to be found in the strong secular tradition and more individualistic outlook on religious matters caused by the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. As opposed to European contexts dominated by Catholicism, the Reformation resulted in the acceptance of fault-based divorce. The fact that the Lutheran Church functioned as an administrative institution, tightly intertwined with and controlled by the nation state, meant that it lacked an independent power base. This made it difficult for the Nordic State Churches to mount effective opposition to secular marriage laws. This comparatively weak political position is further illustrated by the fact that the Scandinavian Family Commission, appointed in 1910 by the governments of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, did not deem it necessary to include any representatives of the Church in the political process that followed. Rather, in their work on a proposal for a harmonized Nordic marriage law, the Commission chose to include representatives of the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian women’s organizations, who actively contributed the final report in 1918.

The women’s societies were dominated by bourgeois women, whose attitudes were strongly influenced by their specific class-based notion of marriage where marriage was regarded as a predominantly economic union. The fears of being abandoned by their male partner made these bourgeois women denounce any suggestions for unilateral no-fault divorce. Rather than emphasizing a radical individualism, they stressed women’s right to be treated as separate, but equal, and that wives should be recognized for their contributions to the family as housewives and mothers. The agenda promoted by the women’s representatives in the Family Commission was therefore to guarantee men and women equal legal standing within marriage, primarily by abolishing male legal guardianship and the formal demand for submissiveness within marriage as expressed in marital ceremonies.

Rosenbeck argues that it was the fact that the proposal for a new Danish divorce law included a requirement of bilateral spousal consent and a default equal split of the marital estate that made the more liberal divorce legislation acceptable for the representatives of the bourgeois women’s movement. Rosenbeck suggests that one explanation for the rather modest impact of the increased legal access to divorce on the divorce rate in the short term was that marriage was still not seen as primarily based on romantic love and mutual attraction, but rather primarily as an economic union. Here, Rosenbeck’s observations of a lack of short-term effects on the divorce rate are true for all the Nordic countries, as the divorce rate shows very modest increases in all the Nordic countries in the 1920s and 1930s immediately after the introduction of bilateral divorce, as evident in Figure 1.

Hanne Marie Johansen, The history of divorce politics in Norway – continuity and change

In her article, Johansen explores the long-term historical roots of Norwegian no-fault divorce practice. The Norwegians led the way in the early 20th-century liberalization of Nordic divorce laws with their introduction of no-fault legislation already in 1909. Both Johansen and Rosenbeck show that the Norwegian reform served as the basis for new legislation in all the Nordic countries. Johansen shows that the reforms of 1909 were not an innovation of the early 20th century, but rather a development of practices established already during the Enlightenment era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the absolute monarchs of the time.

But, going back even further, both Rosenbeck and Johansen argue that the Reformation served as the historical basis for later liberal divorce practices in the Nordic countries in terms of abolishing marriage as a sacrament and by accepting adultery, abandonment and impotence as the classical fault-based prerequisites for divorce. Apart from the strictly fault-based procedure provided by the Lutheran law, a system of divorce through administrative procedure was implemented by the Danish King, whereby the practice was to grant couples and even individual spouses divorce through royal dispensation after a period of three years of formal separation from bed and board. This meant that divorce could be granted for other reasons, such as serious spousal violence or mistreatment of children and even mutually stated incompatibility, which were not recognized by the Lutheran law as valid reasons. However, Johansen shows how this early period of no-fault divorce came to an end when Norway was forced to recognize the Swedish King as sovereign in the peace agreement of the Napoleonic Wars.

In the 1880s and 1890s, both liberalism and the bourgeois women’s movement gained momentum in Norwegian society as part of the liberal demands for independence from Sweden that went hand in hand with the introduction of Parliamentarism in Norway. These groups’ liberal ideology also resulted in criticism of the patriarchal notion of marriage that did not regard it as a voluntary civil contract. In this sense, both liberals and feminists worked deliberately for a return to a more liberal divorce practice. Johansen shows that this resulted in a return to administrative divorce of the same kind that had been practiced already in the late 18th century, during the 1890s. According to Johansen, the liberalization in the 1890s and subsequent change in legal regime in 1909 was facilitated by the way liberals and feminists could refer to the historical tradition of administrative no-fault divorce practices established in Norway already during the Enlightenment period. Apart from this historical tradition, the fact that Norway was the Nordic country that experienced by far the earliest breakthrough of Parliamentarism (in 1884) and universal suffrage for men (in 1898) highlights the fact that the change to Norwegian divorce law follows a pattern of the country being the liberal forerunner within the Nordic region. Additionally, it illustrates how political democratization, whereby women gained the right to vote in Norway in 1913, was incompatible with female submissiveness and male legal guardianship in marriage. In this sense, the breakthrough of universal suffrage for both men and women made formally gender-equal marriage logical. In turn, the legal autonomy of husband and wife made it difficult to oppose the idea that marriage should be regarded as a completely voluntary union that spouses should be able to dissolve if they wished.

Pasi Saarimäki, Bourgeois women and the question of divorce in Finland in the late 19^th and early 20^th century

Pasi Saarimäki’s article focuses on the attitudes towards divorce asserted by the Finnish bourgeois first-wave feminist movement in the decades leading up to the reforms to Finnish marital legislation in 1929. Here Saarimäki agrees with Rosenbeck and Johansen, and concludes that the attitudes and actions of the bourgeois women’s organizations merit special attention because they were ‘a noticeable and powerful political interest group in criticizing outdated marital legislation and in influencing its reform in all Nordic countries’ both as an important ‘pressure group’ and through representatives who were also members of parliament in different Nordic countries.

Saarimäki finds the same kind of ambivalence towards increased access to divorce among Finnish bourgeois women as Rosenbeck does for Denmark. It is clear that support for unilateral no-fault divorce remained a minority position among both Finnish and Danish bourgeois women. The majority clearly argued for a separate but equal gender regime, whereby motherhood and the home were framed as the natural domain of the wife, while economic activity outside the home was reserved for the husband. The strict domesticity of women according to this gender ideology made bourgeois women more economically dependent on their husbands than many working-class wives were, which explains why the majority of bourgeois women remained rather sceptical of individual rights to divorce. As Rosenbeck points out, the class-based economic differences fit the pattern that Social Democratic women in Finland, Sweden and Norway tended to go much further in their demands for increased access to divorce, and also often raised demands for unilateral no-fault divorce.¹⁶

On the matter of divorce, the majority position expressed by members of the bourgeois women’s organization was thus not the possibility of no-fault divorce but rather increased possibilities for fault-based divorce in cases of male alcoholism and domestic violence. Here the close ties between the temperance movement and bourgeois women’s organizations stand out clearly, as it was primarily the lack of possibilities for women to escape a marriage in which they were tormented by an ill-tempered, drunkard husband that was raised as a problem in Finnish women’s periodicals.

Ólöf Garðarsdóttir and Brynja Björnsdóttir, The implications of divorce in late 19th and early 20th century Iceland

The article by Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir gives a picture of the early development of divorce rates and the living conditions of divorced individuals in Iceland during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite Iceland being a small country with a low level of urbanization due to a rather modest industrialization in the 19th century, Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir show that divorce rates followed much of the same development as in the other Nordic countries. Although geographically and economically in the periphery, Iceland was an integral part of Nordic culture. The country was under Danish rule until 1918, and therefore shared legal structures with Norway and Denmark. Although, formally, no-fault divorce was not legally allowed until the reforms of the early 20th century, divorce due to incompatibility was possible in practice through royal dispensation after a period of three years of legal separation from bed and board, in the same manner as in Denmark and Norway.

Regarding the development of divorce rates, Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir show that both the levels and time trends are very similar to the changes experienced by the other Nordic countries. They stress that this similarity in development occurred despite substantial differences in the amount of economic restructuring that occurred due to industrialization in Iceland and its Nordic neighbours. Still, their results confirm that the early growth in divorce occurred primarily in towns and villages, with divorce rates being substantially lower in rural areas, as has been the case everywhere in the Western world.¹⁷

Apart from the relative development of the divorce rate in Iceland compared to other Nordic countries, Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir focus on how the socio-economic characteristics of divorced men and women developed in urban and rural settings of Iceland between 1880 and 1920. Contrary to William Goode’s so-called socio-economic growth hypothesis,¹⁸ which states that divorce tends to increase primarily in the upper social strata during the early stages of the divorce transition, Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir’s find a high proportion of pauperized individuals among divorced men and women during the 1880s.

The main conclusion drawn by Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir is that the change in economic and social structure related to urbanization worked to considerably improve the economic conditions of divorced individuals. This was especially the case for divorced women, as the growing urban centres of Reykjavik, for instance, offered improved possibilities for independent living and created a labour market that was less dependent on the family unit, compared to traditional agricultural production in rural areas. In this sense, Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir show how the urbanization process is one of the most important forms of societal restructuring that have worked to lower the constraints to divorce in the West.

Antti Malinen, Marriage guidance, women and the problem(s) of returning soldiers in Finland, 1944 − 1946

Both Antti Malinen’s and Sophy Bergenheim’s articles focus on organizations that dealt with marriage counselling that were founded in Finland during the Second World War. In line with earlier research, both authors emphasize a more conservative view of family life in Finland than in the other Nordic countries. The objective of Malinen’s article is to shed new light on marriage and marital dissolution among Finnish couples living in the capital city of Helsinki at the end of the Second World War through an investigation of counselling records from the Helsinki marriage guidance centre.

Malinen discusses the steep increase in divorce rates in Finland following the armistice with the Soviet Union in September 1944. Other European societies experienced similar developments of increasing divorce rates at the end of the war. In Finland, however, the peak was more noteworthy than in many other countries. Organizations that were created to promote marriage stability must be viewed in this light. Malinen shows that, in the view of the Helsinki marriage guidance centre, the reconstruction of the war-ravaged society was linked to the reconstruction of the family. A strong and stable family was seen as essential in the search for ‘normality’ and national consolidation. The documents from the centre reveal marriage problems that were sometimes related to hastily formed wartime marriages. The dislocation and traumatic experiences of the returning soldiers had wide-ranging effects on families, even in the case of marriages formed long before the war. Women were considerably more likely than men to seek advice from the centre. Alcohol consumption and domestic violence were common complaints of women seeking advice there. The advice offered by the centre was marked by traditional views on gender roles, and women were urged to be tolerant and understanding. Even though divorce was more common in the capital of Helsinki than in other parts of Finland, Malinen shows that, for women seeking advice at the centre, the divorce process was generally both long and painful.

Sophy Bergenheim, From pronatalism to salvaging relationships – the finnish population and family welfare league’s conceptions of marriage and divorce, 1951 − 1988

Whereas Malinen’s article focuses on the role of Lutheran organizations in marriage counselling, Bergenheim analyses the framing of divorce as a social problem by Väestöliitto (the Finnish Population and Family Welfare League) during the post-war period. Väestöliitto was founded in 1941 in the form of a population research institute, but also acted as an important pronatalist agent in Finnish society.

In her article, Bergenheim argues that the Finish marriage and divorce legislation was more conservative than in the other Nordic countries. Firstly, the Finnish marriage legislation, enacted in 1929, had a pronounced eugenic character as it included conditional impediments on various eugenic grounds. Secondly, divorce regulations were less liberal than in the other Nordic countries. Legal separation on a bilateral basis was not introduced until 1948, and unilateral no-fault divorce not until 1988.

Väestöliitto was not officially political, but Bergenheim shows that members of conservative political parties and organizations were influential in the organization. It promoted normative views of family life, encouraging conservative family values. The ultimate goal of Väestöliitto was to elevate the size and quality of the Finnish population. Women were often explicitly blamed for neglecting their reproductive duties in the organization’s rhetoric.

As in other Western countries, the 1960s and 1970s were marked by radical changes in Finnish society. The urbanization and modernization of Finnish society was very rapid. New family values and views on gender roles gained ground. As a consequence, the conservative role of Väestöliitto became more pronounced. Bergenheim discusses the organization’s reactions to the proposals for a reformed marriage law in the 1970s, which finally resulted in a new marriage act in 1988. Initially, the Väestöliitto took a critical stance towards new ideas regarding family life in which marriage was regarded ‘as a voluntary form of cohabitation based on emotional affection.’ It was not until the 1980s that Väestöliitto’s conservative viewpoint finally started adapting to the new values regarding family life and sexuality that had gained in significance during the 1960s and 1970s. Starting in the 1980s, the organization exhibited a new acceptance of an individual view of the right to divorce, in which divorce was regarded as primarily a private matter rather than something the state should intervene in and regulate.

Sandström, Glenn, The breakthrough of a post-materialistic marital ideology – the discussion of divorce in Swedish newspapers during the 1960s

The article by Glenn Sandström analyses the public debate on divorce that took place in Swedish national newspapers prior to the introduction of the 1974 Swedish divorce law. After a period of public debate regarding the role of marriage and the legal rights to divorce that was particularly intense during the second half of the 1960s, the Swedish parliament voted to abolish fault-based divorce altogether. The new law went further than in any other Western country at that time, in terms of defining unilateral no-fault divorce as an individual right.¹⁹ The only limitation to the unconditional right to dissolve a marriage was an automatic waiting time of six months if the couple had children under the age of 16, or if one spouse formally objected to the divorce.

In his article Sandström investigates the extent to which the public debate leading up to the new Swedish divorce law in 1974 was influenced by an increasing significance of post-materialistic values as predicted by the theory of the Second Demographic Transition.²⁰ Sandström argues that although the Nordic family laws, prior to the reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, were liberal in an international comparison, they were still clearly framed around values of collective solidarity, duty between family members, and the basic premise that the conjugal family, rather than the individual, was the most important social unit in society.

Sandström shows that this traditional view was primarily supported by representatives of the Conservative party as well as representatives of Christian organizations in the public debate during the 1960s. For those who argued for restrictions on the individual right to divorce, the main supporting argument was the supposed detrimental effects of divorce on children. Increasingly, this position was challenged and criticized, first and foremost by representatives and editorial pages associated with the Liberal party and the Women’s movement. Feminists and liberals demanded both increased individual rights to divorce (unilateral no-fault) as well as the abolishment of damages and other post-divorce economic obligations, apart from the right of the custodial parent to receive child support for minor children. Sandström shows that Social Democrats also increasingly joined this radical front arguing for increased access to divorce, especially after 1968. Sandström argues that the reforms of the divorce legislation can be viewed as an expression of a renegotiation of the gender regime. Men and women who were critical of the divorce law used the value of gender equality to argue against aspects of marital law that tied spouses together economically and limited their self-sufficiency. Interestingly enough, he also finds that those arguing for increased access to divorce rarely found it necessary to disprove the argument that children would be vulnerable to the effects of divorce. It is clear that these liberals had ceased to view children as a restriction to parental divorce, and conversely had internalized a marital ideology that prioritized the rights of the parents to emotional fulfilment and self-actualization over family stability. This shift in attitudes regarding children and divorce is also a key empirical indicator of the breakthrough of post-materialistic values that Sandström finds was evident in the Swedish debate on divorce in the 1960s. Therefore, Sandström concludes, that decreased economic interdependence between men and women due to the large influx of married women onto the labour market, in addition to the expansion of individually based social security, served to strongly reduce the barriers to divorce in Sweden during this period, these changes were accompanied by a shift in values that further facilitated the deinstitutionalization of marriage during this period in Western history.

Concluding discussion

The articles in this special issue provide important additions to our knowledge on similarities and differences in the history of divorce in specific Nordic contexts. We are especially pleased that Finland and Iceland are the focus of no less than four articles, as these countries arguably have not received the same amount of attention in historical divorce research as the Scandinavian countries have. In this concluding discussion, we will point out a couple of common themes we find in the articles. We will also discuss some possible directions for future research on the history of divorce in the Nordic countries.

The view on the Nordic countries as forerunner societies characterized by an earlier and more extensive deinstitutionalization of marriage compared to other Western countries is largely reaffirmed in the articles of this special issue. However, as discussed in the introduction, it is clear that this Nordic avant-gardism took different forms during the various stages of the divorce transition. Clearly, the Nordic countries, along with the US, stand out as the leaders in the shift to a high divorce rate regime in the West during the remarkable increases in marital instability that occurred at the onset of what has been called the Second Demographic transition, in the 1960s and 1970s (See Figure 1).²¹

Sandström shows how the very rapid increase in divorce in Sweden was accompanied by a shift in values that prioritized the parents’ emotional fulfilment and self-actualization over family stability. Both Sandström and Bergenheim show that conservative voices in the debate on divorce were increasingly marginalized in the discussion that led to the unilateral divorce laws adopted in Sweden in 1974 and in Finland in 1988. The Swedish unilateral no-fault divorce law of 1974, described by Roderick Phillips as ‘extremely permissive’ compared to other Western divorce laws, confirmed the forerunner status of the Nordic countries set by the early introduction of bilateral no-fault divorce laws in the first decades of the 20th century.²²

However, as already pointed out, the levels of divorce were by no means exceptional in the Nordic countries before the Second World War, and Nordic divorce avant-gardism during this early period was thus primarily found in the liberal norms towards divorce that were institutionalized in the Nordic family laws adopted between 1908 and 1929. This legislation has caused family historians to talk of a distinct ‘Nordic model of marriage’ that emphasized formal gender equality within marriage and included rights to bilateral no-fault divorce already during the first decades of the 20th century. Several of the articles in the special issue extend the knowledge on the historical roots of Nordic divorce liberalism.

Rosenbeck, Johansen and Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir show how the homogenous Lutheran culture and strong integration of the Church within the secular state in all the Nordic countries formed an important historical precondition for the breakthrough of the notion of marriage as a civil contract between two independent parties rather than a non-dissolvable union ordained by God. Another contribution of the articles by Rosenbeck, Johansen and Saarimäki are further insights into the significant role played by the first-wave feminist movement for the early breakthrough of no-fault divorce in Denmark, Norway and Finland, and also how attitudes differed within the women’s movements depending on, for example, different class-based positions.

Another important conclusion that can be drawn is that there are clear differences between the five countries in the development of Nordic divorce liberalism. In line with earlier research, we identify two different regimes.²³ On the one hand we have the Western forerunners, and on the other the Eastern laggard. As for the Western forerunners, it has been shown that long before the reforms of marital law were implemented at the beginning of the 20th century, a system of divorce through administrative procedure was implemented by the Danish King. As early as the late 18th century, it became practice to grant couples divorce through royal dispensation after a period of three years of formal separation from bed and board.

In her article, Johansen then shows how Norway took on a leading role in promoting liberal views towards divorce in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, the Norwegians led the way in the early 20th-century liberalization of Nordic divorce laws with their introduction of no-fault legislation already in 1909.

Whereas Norway led the changes towards liberal divorce legislation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the leadership shifted to Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s with its radical unilateral divorce law in 1974. Previous research has described Finland as the laggard in Nordic divorce reforms, having the latest and least extensive changes to divorce laws throughout the 20th century.²⁴ Saarimäki, Malinen and Bergenheim all provide examples of how this relatively more conservative climate influenced how marriage and divorce were perceived within the Finnish women’s movement as well as within public and private organizations working with marriage counselling in Finland. An interesting line of future research would be to further probe the historical underpinnings of these differences between primarily Finland and the other Nordic countries.

It is generally acknowledged that the increase in divorce rates throughout the Western world is closely related to urbanization,²⁵ and that divorce was primarily found in the upper social layers that had sufficient resources to traverse the high structural barriers working against divorce.²⁶ In the initial stages of the divorce transition, the increase in divorce rates was thus mainly confined to higher-strata individuals living in urban settings. The urban-rural gradient is confirmed by Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, who show that in the case of Iceland divorce was considerably more common in urban than rural areas. They do, however, stress that despite a low degree of urbanization, the increase in divorce rates in Iceland coincided with the developments in the other Nordic countries.

To some extent, the results presented by Garðarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir contradict the socio-economic growth hypothesis suggested by William Goode, stating that the initial increase in divorce rates was largely restricted to the upper social layers. This socio-economic pattern of divorce during the early stages of the divorce transition has been confirmed for a couple of settings.²⁷ Garðarsdóttir´s and Björnsdóttir’s study shows that the upper social layers were somewhat overrepresented among the divorcees. They do, however, show that initially a great majority of divorced people belonged to the urban and rural poor. Less than half of all divorcees in 1880 headed a household, and a higher proportion than the national average lived on poor relief, or worked as domestic servants. They show that changes in the societal structure at the beginning of the 20th century entailed improvements in the social situation of divorced individuals, and by 1920 they were more able to lead an independent life without being dependent on poor relief or working as a domestic servant in households of non-related individuals. These findings for Iceland point to the need for further research on how socio-economic status have influenced the risk of divorce during different stages of the divorce transition. The important issue being to what extent increases in divorce during the 20th century can be interpreted as a democratization in the access to divorce where divorce became more accessible for couples with low socioeconomic standing and consequently transforming it from an elite to a mass behaviour.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Glenn Sandström

Glenn Sandström, PhD Research Fellow, Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University. [email: [email protected]]

Ólöf Garðarsdóttir

Ólöf Garðarsdóttir, Professor in Social History at the School of Education, University of Iceland. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1 Esping-Andersen, Families in the 21st century; Berggren and Trägårdh, Är svensken människa?; Reher, ‘Family ties in Western Europe’; Lesthaeghe, ‘The Second Demographic Transition’; Popenoe, ‘Beyond the Nuclear Family’.

2 Reher, ‘Family ties in Western Europe’.

3 Hajnal, ‘European Marriage Patterns’.

4 Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations.

5 Lesthaeghe, ‘The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition’.

6 Lesthaeghe, ‘The Second Demographic Transition’; Van De Kaa, ‘Europe’s second demographic transition’.

7 See Phillips, Putting asunder, 585; Chester, Divorce in Europe, 294−97.

8 Esping-Andersen, Families in the 21st century, 58; Eurostat, ‘Divorce indicators’; Anderson, Divorce rate in the U.S.

9 Crosgnani et.al.,, ‘Europe the continent with the lowest fertility’.

10 Esping-Andersen, Families in the 21st century; Esping-Andersen and Billari, ‘Re-theorizing Family Demographics’; Goldscheider, Bernhardt, and Lappegård, ‘The Gender Revolution’; McDonald, ‘Gender Equity in Theories of Fertility Transition’.

11 Phillips, Putting asunder, 555−61.

12 Stevenson and Wolfers, Marriage and Divorce.

13 Phillips, Putting asunder, 553.

14 Melby, Pylkkänen, & Rosenbeck, ‘The Nordic Model of Marriage’.

15 Therborn, Between Sex and Power, 83−5; Goode, World changes in divorce patterns, 110−15.

16 Melby, Pylkkänen, Rosenbeck, and Carlsson-Wetterberg, Inte ett ord om kärlek, 118.

17 Kalmijn, Vanassche, and Matthijs. ‘Divorce and Social Class’; Phillips, Putting asunder, 271–2; Sandström, ‘Socio-economic determinants of divorce’; Schultz, ‘Divorce in Early America’.

18 Kalmijn, Vanassche, and Matthijs, ‘Divorce and Social Class’; Matthijs, Baerts, and Van de Putte, ‘Determinants of Divorce in Nineteenth-Century Flanders’; Sandström, ‘Socio-economic determinants of divorce’; Van Poppel, ‘Family breakdown in nineteenth-century Netherlands’.

19 Phillips, Putting asunder, 571.

20 Van De Kaa, ‘Europe’s second demographic transition’; Lesthaeghe, ‘The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition’.

21 Anderson, Divorce rate in the U.S; González and Viitanen, ‘The effect of divorce laws on divorce rates’.

22 Phillips, Putting asunder, 571.

23 See for example Melby, Pylkkänen, Rosenbeck and Carlsson Wetterberg, Inte ett ord om kärlek, 91−124.

24 Ibid.

25 Chester, Divorce in Europe, 311; Gautier, Svarer, and Teulings. ‘Sin City?’; Lyngstad, ‘Does Community Context’; Norval and Shelton, ‘Regional Difference in Divorce’.

26 Goode, World changes in divorce patterns, 26−7.

27 Kalmijn, Vanassche, and Matthijs, ‘Divorce and Social Class’; Matthijs, Baerts, and Van de Putte, ‘Determinants of Divorce in Nineteenth-Century Flanders’; Sandström, ‘Socio-economic determinants of divorce’; Van Poppel, ‘Family breakdown in nineteenth-century Netherlands’.