Demography and Social Change

New Right thinkers tend to believe that government policy has not supported marriage and that the welfare system encourages people not to marry. Right-wing thinker Sheila Lawlor in 2012, claimed that paid maternity leave should be scrapped because it encouraged women to go back to work part-time and they then claimed in-work tax credits because they earned low pay. She argued that young women depend on the state to pay for their children. Charles Murray (1990) links welfare payment to unmarried women, illegitimate births, crime and refusal of young men to get jobs because they no longer need to be responsible for the children they father.

There is evidence that formal traditional religious belief in England and Wales is replaced by personal and individual beliefs. This process is known as secularisation. The Christian church believes very strongly in the religious nature of a marriage vow. Not only that, but the belief is that sex should only take place within a married relationship. As fewer people are involved in organised religion, this means that people feel less pressure to marry in order to have sex or children.

For most people divorce was almost impossible for legal, cost and social reasons until the 1940s and very difficult unil the 1970s. The figures in the table reflect the legal changes as much as anything. The recent fall in divorce numbers is almost due to the fall in marriage rates and the increase in co-habitation. In 1949, legal aid for divorce and the availability of divorce courts in cities other than London meant people could afford divorce. In 1971, the Divorce Reform Act made it easier to obtain a divorce and more changes in 1984 and in 1996 continued that trend. The New Right argue that it is too easy to divorce and this results in casual attitudes towards marriage. However, given that fewer people are choosing to marry in the assumption that they can or will divorce if marriage does not work.

Social attitudes towards divorce have changed. It was a matter of deep shame for a family until the 1960s. This can be linked to secularisation, Wilson (1966) argues that as the influence of formal declined, the belief of the Church that people should stay married became irrelevant. Fletcher (1966) claimed that people expected more of marriage than in the past. Probably the most significant social change is the social status of women who no longer need to be married because they have economic independence. One significant contributory factor to this social change has been the rise of feminism. Women have come to expect more from life than marriage and domestic work.

Social attitudes towards sex outside marriage have changed, but cohabitiation has shown the most change. Fewer people are accepting of extra-marital or same sex relationships than are accepting of cohabitation . Coast (2009) used the British Panel Survey to look at cohabitation which she defined in terms of a sexual but non-married partnership. She claimed that evidence suggests that cohabitation…