It seems that in almost every pivotal political change, we look first to the ancient Rome and Greek cultures to see how they dealt with similar issues and what were the results. On the subject of divorce, the Roman saying was, “matrimonia debent esse libera”, meaning that “marriages ought to be free”.
While this would seem to make divorce exceptionally common, it was not. Family members, in the interest of preserving the sanctity of the family, would prevent most marriages from ending in divorce by helping, or coercing, the distressed couples to work it out.
In old Islam, in the 15th century, divorce was surprisingly common. In Egypt, Al-Sakhawi looked into the practice of divorce and found that of 500 Egyptian and Syrian women interviewed, one-third had married more than once.
In Europe, during medieval times, the Church had all authority over marriages. While divorce was disallowed, annulments and separations were nonetheless common. The term “divorce a mensa et thoro” (“divorce from bed-and-board”) referred to separations in which a husband and wife moved into separate places and, while refused a divorce, were committed to no longer cohabiting from that point forward. Annulments were only granted for cases of marriages considered invalid in the first place.
In Japan, from 1600 through the late 1800s, women were not allowed to seek a divorce. Only men could do so by writing a letter of divorce. Family often intervened to try to help the couple work it out, as family permanence was highly valued.
If a woman was in a seriously bad marriage, she could only seek sanctuary in Shinto divorce temples, as they were called, and after several years could then be granted a divorce. Yet, by the 19th century, Japan had caught up with the rest of the world and had a divorce rate of 1/8th of all marriages. Today, most developed countries have some of the highest divorce rates in their recorded histories, and the trend seems to be relatively stable worldwide.