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How Has Divorce Law Changed Over The Years?
The 2021 Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act is widely accepted as being the most significant change to divorce laws in over 50 years, and some would argue it goes well beyond that. The no-fault divorce instantly removed the concept of blame and finally acknowledged the fact that many divorces are amicable. The act also modernised the language surrounding divorce law, and was the most recent example over the hundreds of years that divorce laws have existed, of the divorce process moving with the times and evolving to match social attitudes, even if many people agreed this particular move was long overdue.
If you look back nearly 200 years, to 1837 when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, the Ecclesiastical (church) court was granting annulments and a divorce known as ‘a mensa et thoro’ was in place, which meant a divorce from bed and board. Since then, divorce laws have been slowly refined to reflect the changing role of women in society, the importance of children and the increase in same-sex relationships. It wasn’t until 1857 that the first Matrimonial Causes Act was passed, which meant the process of dissolving a marriage was passed from the church courts to courts for divorce and matrimonial causes. However, the late 19th century saw the first recognition of women as a separate legal entity.
Making the divorce process easier for women
Between 1870 and 1893 a series of Married Women’s Property Acts were passed, which removed from law the idea that a married woman was under the guardianship of her husband, and therefore had no individual legal identity. From that point there were a number of campaigns and failed bills which attempted to reform the divorce laws further. There were inconsistencies in the law, and it was also much harder for a woman to end an unhappy marriage. At this time, adultery was the only grounds upon which a divorce could be granted, but until a Private Member’s Bill was passed in 1923, resulting in a new Matrimonial Causes Act, it was a requirement for women to prove an aggravating factor in addition to adultery, in order for a divorce to be granted. The 1923 Act saw this requirement dropped and made adultery by the wife or husband sole grounds for divorce.
The basis of ‘modern’ divorce law in the UK first appeared in 1937, when a further Matrimonial Causes Act enabled divorce to be granted on grounds beyond adultery for the first time. This now included grounds of cruelty, incurable insanity and two years’ desertion, as well as adultery. However, it wasn’t until the Divorce Reform Act 1969 that it became possible to apply for a divorce on the grounds of ‘irretrievable breakdown’. This therefore was the first time it was acknowledged that a marriage could breakdown without a ‘marital offence’ taking place, i.e. the separation wasn’t the result of a single act, but evolved through natural causes.
How we arrived at ‘modern’ divorce laws
It was this 1969 act which introduced the divorce process as we have known it until the radical shake-up of the ‘no-fault divorce’ law in 2022. The Divorce Reform Act 1969 first brought into law the reliance on the five reasons of divorce; adultery, desertion, unreasonable behaviour, 5 years separation and 2 years separation with consent. This made it much easier for couples to be granted a divorce, and combined with the fact that more liberal attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s saw less social stigma attached to divorce, this resulted in divorce rates doubling in the UK.
By 2003 the UK divorce rate had reached a peak, with 150,000 divorces being granted, but this has since reduced due to a number of reasons, not least the fact that less people are getting married and are instead opting for cohabiting. And although there has been a long campaign to change the ‘antiquated’ divorce laws laid out in 1969, the legal landscape was tweaked to reflect social change in the intervening years. In 1993 the Child Support Agency was launched and took child maintenance cases out of the jurisdiction of the courts, in 2005 the first civil partnerships were introduced (including the process of dissolving a civil partnership), in 2014 the first same-sex marriages were allowed in the UK, while a year later it became a criminal offence to display controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship.
In 2025 people are more autonomous to control the divorce process than ever before, and this gradual shift in attitudes reflects the fact that divorce is more socially acceptable. Certainly, during the reign of Queen Victoria it would have been unthinkable that one day the current monarch would be a divorcee married to another divorcee, but perhaps this shows that finally, divorce laws truly represent the entire breadth of the population, and with the no-fault divorce, we are definitely much better for it.
Author: Laura Clapton
Consilia Legal