SELFISH INTENTIONS - K-REx - Kansas State University

law from a geographic perspective. Jones investigates the variation and the changes in divorce
law and divorce rates. She tracks changes in numbers of state divorces compared to the changes
in divorce law to determine if a specific pattern could be identified for the region. This study
benefited from Jones’s work because it showed how divorce law changed by region. 6
In 1988, Roderick Phillips’s Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society
evaluated divorce law worldwide and provided several key arguments for the changes in divorce
law over time across the world. Phillips analyzes changes in the legal status and frequency of
divorce in Western society. This study ranged both geographically from Australia to
Scandinavia and chronologically from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century. However,
the focus of this study was on developments in France, Great Britain, and the United States from
the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Phillips’s book explains the history of divorce worldwide
for the past five centuries and the gradual liberalization of divorce legislation. This book
provides necessary background information for anyone who wants to understand divorce law. 7
Glenda Riley published the first essential book on U.S. divorce in the 1990s. In her work
Divorce: An American Tradition, Riley surveys the changes in divorce law in the United States.
In this book Riley argues, “conflict between anti-divorce and pro-divorce factions has prevented
the development of effective, beneficial divorce laws, procedures, and policies.” 8 She traces the
controversy of divorce in American life from the first divorce case in Puritan Massachusetts to
the present. Through this analysis, she concludes the most persistent difficulties in divorce have
involved child custody battles and the reality of financial survival. Finally, she notes that the
effects of industrialization, urbanization, and changing gender roles are often left out of divorce
6
Mary Somerville Jones, An Historical Geography of Changing Divorce Law, (New York: Garland Publishing,
Inc., 1987).
7
Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. (Cambridge: University of
Cambridge Press, 1988).
8
Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), viii.
xii