Comparison and Contrast - Essay Example

Comparison and Contrast between Two Opposing Views on Divorce Divorce in modern society is often considered as the unexpected necessity. On one hand, there are mounting negative consequences of divorce on family and society. But, on the other hand, it is the safest way to set the quarrelling parties of a marriage free from the deadlock. From a feminist perspective, divorce often serves as the path of freedom from patriarchal oppression and torture on women -whether they are mental or physical- under the patriarchal structure of marriage.

Though there are two opposing views about marriage, the line of compromise is: when remaining in a family is more harmful than dissolving it, divorce is more justifiable than continuing the family. According to the contra-divorce view, family is the smallest but the most important unit of a society, it has a huge impact on various social constructs and, at the same time, it plays significant and crucial roles in shaping a child’s mind during its earliest years. The process of socialization, which decides who and what a man will be, starts from this smallest unit of society.

But inevitably this familial organization significantly depends on the marital bond between a man and a woman for its existence in modern society. Consequently, divorce is considered to be a direct blow on this important societal unit. Divorce hampers a child’s harmonious mental and physical development. Family is accepted as a man’s first and foremost efficient training center through which a child becomes familiar and learns to revere the morals, rules, and regulations of the society. It is the family in which a child gets the fundamental behavioural patterns that tend to be further shaped by other social institutions such as religious convictions, educational, political systems, etc.

The issue of children’s welfare and strong marital bond are related to each other. Epistemologically children’s welfare refers to the overall development of a child such as its psychological development, social development, socialization, moralization, etc. Since divorce destroys the scope of a child’s psychophysical development, it, in the long run, causes irreparable damages to society. Again the pro-divorce asserts that since marriage is a form of a social contract, it unavoidably requires an institutional break-up, known as divorce.

In modern age, divorce is known as an unwanted legitimacy. Due to the complexity of human life in modern life, the essentiality of ‘divorce’ cannot entirely be discarded. Yet divorce has a paramount impact on the society or individual life, whether it is positive or negative. A close scrutiny of the effects of divorce will disclose the fact that it is more of a blessing for the two parties of marriage than for other family members and the society in which they live. In most of the earlier societies the faithfulness and chastity of a woman was believed to be crucial to the continuation of a family.

A woman in a marital relationship did not have any ‘say’ in the infidelity and unfaithfulness of her husband. Often the disloyalty of a husband or a wife often led to physical punishment and death penalty. Therefore, marriage often plays the role of a device -in a patriarchal society- to oppress and suppress women. But the context in modern society around the beginning of the 20th century, in the face of the movement of various human rights groups and civil organizations the women’s right to divorce come into being in Europe and America (Hopper 438).

Though both husband’s and wife’s right to divorce brings an equality between the two parties of a marital bond, the alarming increasing rate of divorce all over the world after the 1950s drew the attention of the scholars and the analysts.