This is the sixth of 10 articles about unhappiness in contemporary women.

Q: Is there any relationship between divorce and women's unhappiness?

A: Alan Booth and Paul Amato from Penn State University conducted a landmark survey of divorce in America. They surveyed 2,000 married women and men up to six times per respondent for 20 years. Booth and Amato then interviewed some of their children. In 2000, the team surveyed a second random sample of 2,100 married persons. Researchers were looking at changes in individual marriages through time and how married couples generally have changed between the years of 1980 and 2000.

Working women do not cause divorces, they found. If anything, two incomes make things better. Current studies agree that 60 percent of married women work, and their employment benefits their families financially and psychologically.

In 1980, men commonly reported making all the decisions. But today, both men and women report more egalitarian decision-making. The team reported that both husbands and wives were happier in more egalitarian relationships.

Booth and Amato developed the concept of divorce proneness in order to identify risk factors and stabilizing factors. One of the most reliable stabilizing factors is home ownership, they found, because buying a home together represents a commitment.

On an opposite note, a compelling risk factor is a parental divorce history. Divorced parents double the odds their adult married children will divorce. The researchers found that those persons raised in divorced families do not learn to communicate effectively and therefore do not learn the skills they need to make marriages succeed.

None of their research found that divorce causes unhappiness in women. However, there is much information from additional sources about why women leave their husbands. These factors are related to unhappiness in women.

Dr. Willard Harley wrote an article titled "Why Women Leave Men," pointing out women buy most of the books on how to improve marriage, usually initiate marriage counseling, and file for divorce twice as frequently as men.

Women cite mental cruelty as the most common reason for divorce, but what they describe is emotional neglect, indifference and failure to communicate. Men report women are spoiled, take them for granted, and have unrealistic expectations of them.

Married men, according to Harley, find it harder and harder to figure out what wives want. Trying harder doesn't help if men do not understand the changes women want. Harley postulates that women want partners they can trust, husbands to whom they can feel emotionally connected, and spouses who take their feelings into account when decisions are made.

Studies of unhappily married partners who stay together document that two-thirds of these couples report five years later that they are happy. What's more, those couples who were the unhappiest when first surveyed were the most happy five years later. Other research documents that unhappily married couples who divorce and unhappily married couples who stay together are equally happy five years later.

The subject of the relationship between unhappiness in women and divorce has arisen because the incidence of divorce has escalated in recent decades and because the majority of divorces are filed by women. In a 2004 edition of the Undergraduate Social Science Journal at Duke University, Margaret Swanson proposes the hypothesis that marriages are failing because they have not adopted to modern gender roles. Egalitarian roles have evolved for women in the workplace and in education more than they have evolved in marriages.

When women marry, they expect equality in gender roles that is not altogether forthcoming. Marriage then becomes a tug-of-war between spouses about who's supposed to do what. Swanson believes the lion's share of work still falls to women because the traditional roles for married men and women increase with increasing responsibilities, especially after children are born. These traditional role functions conflict with egalitarian expectations of women.

Thus, divorce is not a cause of unhappiness in women but rather an outcome for women who find themselves increasingly dissatisfied and discontented with their life circumstances.

* Next week's column will discuss women's unhappiness and work.

Judy Caprez is associate professor and director of social work at Fort Hays State University. Send your questions in care of the department of sociology and social work,

Rarick Hall, FHSU.