Women and Divorce in Canada: A Sociological Analysis

Andrea Levan is Co-ordinator of Women’s Studies at Laurentian
University.

This book has an ambitious scope, undertaking to trace Western attitudes
toward divorce in religion, law, and sociological analysis, and to
provide a comprehensive review of the causes and consequences of divorce
for Canadian women and their families. In particular, it aims to expose
the biases in scholarship and policy-making that have uncritically
accepted the norm of the nuclear family and the sexual division of
labor, and that have tended to stress the negative aspects of divorce.
Sev’er points out some of the positive effects of divorce on women and
children, and argues that divorce can engender a feeling of empowerment.

Unfortunately, the book has many shortcomings that undermine these
laudable objectives. One problem is that the author treats too many
topics in a cursory way. For example, she covers pre-Christian,
Christian, and Islamic views of divorce in a few pages. Her critiques of
theorists such as Durkheim, Parsons, and Engels add little to detailed
studies that have been published elsewhere, and her summary of feminist
theoretical discussion of the family is superficial. By including such a
breadth of topics in her analysis the author has attempted to give a
comprehensive understanding of the divorce experience of Canadian women.
However, this intention is undermined by the lack of depth in her
treatment, as well as by her failure to explore, in specific terms, how
topics are interconnected and work upon one another.

A further problem is that the book is full of errors. Sev’er
acknowledges in her introduction that English is her second language,
but this does not excuse the appearance in a published work of sentence
fragments, errors in subject-verb agreement and spelling, and many
awkward examples of punctuation and usage, all of which should have been
caught by a competent editor. Other errors also suggest careless work:
for example, the well-known feminist theorist Hester Eisenstein is cited
as “Einstein” both in the bibliography and the note. Tables 1 and 2
list dramatically different Canadian divorce rates for 1986, 1987, and
1988. Errors such as these are inexcusable.

There is much useful information in this book, and an interesting
concept, but it should have been much more carefully proofread,
tightened, and revised before publication.