Girl in the Locker Room! ... because she and her friends don’t know the reality of a few short years back, they don’t recognize the threats to 21st century female life in the current political climate. We have to tell them. We have to tell them now. ...This is a cyber history project. Contribute stories about your own experiences by e-mail or comment on my running blog entries as a barrier-breaking generation gives context to contemporary female life. (how to contribute your real-life stories/recollections/anecdotes)

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Sunday, November 14, 2004 Marriage Blues   “If blue states care less about moral values, why are divorce rates so low in the bluest of the blue states?” So opens The New York Times article “To Avoid Divorce, Move to Massachusetts "It's a question that intrigues conservatives, as much as it emboldens liberals."   But the article left me not altogether satisfied about the answer to the question [disclosure: GITLR lives in Massachusetts and has been married 23 years] so I went to The National Center for Health Statistics for figures on divorce in America for the past 40 years.   Yes, today the lowest divorce rates are in the Northeast and the highest are in the South and West, but looks like that geographic distribution goes back many, many years, even as the country as a whole saw an average increase in the divorce rate for reasons economic and cultural. Massachusetts is lowest today with 2.4 divorces per 1,000 population. Two decades ago it was also lowest with 3.1 divorces per thousand. Even four decades ago, the map looks virtually the same: couples in the Northeast and upper mid-West were least likely to get divorced.   1960: Northeast         0.9 divorces per thousand Northcentral    2.1 South               2.8 West                3.4   In 1960, the very lowest rates of divorce (between 0.4 and 0.9) were in New York, New Jersey, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Alabama had the highest (5.3) after Nevada, which doesn’t really count because people would go there expressly to establish residence and get divorced.   What accounted for the regional differences? The Center for Health Statistics 1960 report analyzed the demographic profiles of divorced couples and in dry language, notably absent opinion, came up with the strongest marker for eventual divorce: a young age at marriage – and the states with the highest divorce rates had the youngest brides and grooms. The way the report put it, couples married younger were “overrepresented” among divorced people. The analysis showed that with every five year increase in the age of newlyweds, the probability of divorce was lower.  In Alabama, divorced women on average had become brides at 18.4 years of age and divorced men became grooms at 21.9 years of age. These were averages a couple of years younger than the national average.   What does it mean when people get married young? It means they probably find themselves in a less advantageous socio-economic position relative to older couples ie. By virtue of their age, they almost certainly have had less education, are less employable, have lower income and all in all face a more difficult household situation than more established couples. They are also, by definition, less mature.   How “morality” impacts the age at which a person gets married can only be speculative. However, these statistics suggest a twist on the “abstinence only” message. When concerned adults tell teenagers to wait before getting involved, maybe the emphasis of the message shouldn’t be so much on wait for sex, but wait for marriage….   -RH 5:49:02 PM    comment [] © Copyright 2005 Robin Herman. The Girl in the Locker Room™ name and design are trademarks owned by Robin Herman. Last update: 5/31/2005; 11:24:29 AM. Powered by