Separate Futures: The Physical, Emotional and Financial Aspects of Separation and Divorce: A Canadian Woman's Survival Guide

Nancy Gibson’s Separation and Divorce: A Canadian Woman’s Survival Guide is a useful resource for women who are thinking of divorce, in the process of divorce, or who have placed a divorce behind them. This book may also be of interest to women who are married, about to be married, or women who consider marriage as a future possibility. As a survival guide, Separation and Divorce is useful within its limitations.

Gibson goes through the emotional, legal, and financial confusions which confront women in the process of a separation and divorce. Practical suggestions, examples, personal testimonies, and guides are put forth in a reassuring manner; references to other works are also included at the end of each chapter for further consultation. Legal processes, jargon, and documents are presented in a way that familiarizes and demystifies. Of special note are the legal agreements, petitions, and affidavits which appear at the end of the book.

But the emphasis of Gibson’s book is placed on overcoming the loss of an identity which is shaped by a marriage, a changing identity which affects the woman’s parents, her children, and her friends. Taking the model of Kübler-Ross, Gibson constructs the stages towards independence. The feelings of denial, resistance, anger, and depression are viewed as stages towards acceptance, autonomy, and responsibility.

Separation and Divorce touches briefly upon the “mythological marriage” and society’s constrictive image of the good wife and mother. However, Gibson does not question the idea of marriage itself, as myth and institution. Nor does Gibson analyze the social and economic power dynamic which exists between the terms man and wife. Separation and Divorce also addresses, by its very nature and assumptions, a middle-class readership and does not confront the implications of the physical, emotional, and economic realities which face women who are not of that class. There is also the assumption that some day the prince will come — again. But despite the limitations of a white, middle-class, heterosexual assumption, Separation and Divorce offers practical tools for surviving a marriage.