This is not to say (1) that cultures do not vary in the degree of such marital conflict. Undoubtedly, for example, in periods of great change in the role definitions of the sexes there is (a) far more disagreement and conflict between spouses, and (b) certainly more expression of this conflict in overt behavior. We are merely asserting the inevitability of family conflict and personal unhappiness in all cultures, and the impossibility of there being meaningful, direct moral proscriptions against them.
Moreover, (2) what the culture defines as a bearable level or degree of conflict will also doubtless vary from one epoch or society to another; and (3) what the society or culture defines as an appropriate solution for conflict also varies. The first of these three propositions is borne out by general observations and some theory, although intensity of marital conflict has not been measured in any culture. With reference to the second, there are beginnings of systematic theory in the structural-functional hypotheses of the past decade, specifically those dealing with mechanisms for alleviating and preventing conflict. 5 Here, let us simply note, once more, the possibility of analyzing various elements in any kinship system by reference to their effect upon the stability of marriage. The universal nuclear family 6 is to be viewed as one type of boundary-maintaining social unit, under various internal and external pressures toward boundary dissolution and maintenance. Marital unhappiness is only a resultant of various factors that predispose toward marital instability. Among these factors, there are also various mechanisms which (1) prevent the building of tensions or external forces; (2) alleviate or deflect such forces; (3) define various difficulties as bearable; (4) and offer various solutions for changing the structure or direction of these forces, or even for removing them.
Within such a view, divorce is to be seen as one kind of mechanism for dealing with the pressures and problems inevitably caused by marriage. Divorce is in a basic sense "caused" by marriage.
A typical set of preventive mechanisms was found in pre-revolutionary China. According to traditional descriptions of this "classical" family, the roles of husband and wife were clearly defined. Respect and not romantic love was demanded between husband and wife. There was an extended family system, so that intimate emotional interaction between husband and wife was less continuous or intense than in our own system. Extended deviations from proper marital patterns were prevented in part by the continuous supervision by other, older relatives. If the wife built up any large reservoir of hatred and fear, it was more likely to be aimed at the mother-in-law, rather than at the husband, who was only rarely the most powerful member of the family in the first decade of a marriage.
When conflict does reach high limits, there are different solutions in different cultures. One rare solution is that of Dobu, where overt conflict is viewed as standard. There are, however, many outlets for aggression. There is an alternation of family residence each year, from the village of wife's family to that of husband's family. Thus, each of the two spouses may look forward to a period in which great freedom of unchecked, mostly unilinear aggression is permitted.
Perhaps the most common solution is that of divorce, the extended families of each spouse offering at times the necessary help. Divorce is, then, an institutionalized element of certain kinship systems. It is not always a kind of excrescence, a sort of pathology or unpredictable deviation. This does not ignore or minimize the difficulties that individuals experience in divorce, or the devastation that may occur in their private lives when a divorce conflict occurs. Rather, we are noting that all family systems have some kinds of escape mechanisms built into them, to permit individuals to survive the pressures of the system, and one of these is divorce.
Nor is this solution confined to industrial societies. As Murdock has shown, and as Hobhouse began to show earlier, divorce is very common in many preliterate societies. Even without a complete set of data, it is clear that the rate of divorce is often higher than in our own, or than in the other few nations that have at various times had still higher rates than the U. S.
It is then an error to think that, because primitive societies are mostly "rural," they are therefore to be identified with the classical family of Western nostalgia, an idealized picture of the rural family in America at some unspecified period prior to the 1900's.
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