‘The Marriage Outlaws’: Experiences of Marriage Breakdown Before Divorce

This chapter charts experiences of marriage breakdown and attitudes towards separation from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Although divorce was not legal until 1970, legal separations were permitted in this period. This chapter thus makes use of evidence from a case study of legal separations in late 1940s and 1950s Turin and from a smaller sample of diaries and memoirs that provide a broader geographical picture. While many of these writers separated in the 1970s, 1980s, and later, this chapter argues that the roots of breakdown can frequently be found in the economic miracle years, when the growing media focus on romantic love often did not match up to the reality of married life. Just as women were more likely to be ambivalent about their wedding, they were much more likely than men to ask for a separation or divorce. What we see also in these years is perhaps not simply greater dissatisfaction in marriage, but new languages to comprehend and give shape to it. The idea of marriage for love was key to the divorce campaigns, although the reality was that it was still very difficult for a woman to leave her marriage even up to the 1970s. While we see alternative narratives about love, marriage, and commitment developing from the unofficial culture around the post-war PCI to 1968, this chapter shows how work and feminism often gave women the tools they needed to leave their marriages.