Surviving Divorce

Research Approach and Methodology

The data used in the article are qualitative and have been obtained from the articles/interviews published in the Estonian women’s magazine Eesti Naine. We chose that particular magazine since among a great number of women’s magazines published in Estonia today, Eesti Naine has the longest history, dating back to 1924. As mentioned earlier, in the Soviet period, it was published under the name Nõukogude Naine. Today, Eesti Naine is largely respected as one of the leading quality magazines in Estonia.

The analysis of the interviews was conducted according to the principles described by P. J. Morrissette (1999):

In order to obtain data for the analysis we looked through thematic articles and interviews published in the magazine Nõukogude Naine/Eesti Naine over the time span 1983–2003.

With some exceptions where the interviewees preferred to remain anonymous, the interviews published in Eesti Naine and analyzed for the present study were conducted with divorced women who were or whose ex-husbands were local celebrities well known to the readers of the magazine. Their celebrity status placed the divorced woman being interviewed for the magazine into a completely new situation. Understanding that not only her ex-husband would be reassessed by the audience, that is, by the readers of the magazine, but also she as the storyteller, the interviewee had to decide how to present her story accordingly. Gubrium and Holstein (1998) called it narrative editing through which the interviewees could influence the perception of their personal stories. The divorcees interviewed for the magazine needed to decide on a perspective from which to tell their stories. Thus, the stories went through narrative editing, that is, they did not report all facts related to the divorce but only those which were considered significant from the interviewee’s standpoint.

Two research questions were posed in the study. In the first stage of the analysis, our goal was to look at the effects of radical changes that had taken place in Estonian society on the coverage of divorce in the magazine. The second goal was to examine the kinds of accounts that divorced women provided when they experienced the ending of their marriage. A social constructionist framework was adopted; that is,the texts of the interviews were approached as representing narratives constructed by the interviewees rather than the complete truth. In the analysis, we looked for common patterns constructed in the life stories of divorced women.

Divorce in an Estonian Women’s Magazine

For the present study, we looked through the articles of the Nõukogude Naine/Eesti Naine magazine starting from the 1980s. The first findings of our historical theme analysis of the magazine showed that in the issues published in the 1980s, it was impossible to find articles related to divorce or the breakdown of a relationship. The results of previous studies handling the Soviet period in Estonia have revealed that there were certain categories of topics that were not dealt with in the state-controlled media (Lauristin & Vihalemm, 2002). Our study suggests that in the 1980s, marital dissolution obviously belonged to the category of taboo topics. Accordingly, the texts analyzed in the present study are taken from articles published in Eesti Naine in the 1990s and early 2000s.

After the restoration of Estonia’s independence in 1991, the range of topics in the media expanded considerably. However, in the early 1990s Eesti Naine mainly covered thematic issues that were considered important in the period following the restoration of an independent statehood, such as the historic past of the country and cultural identity. A lot of space was devoted to descriptions of traditional holidays, the national costumes of different regions of the country, and even instructions on making a national costume. Great emphasis was placed on descriptions of women’s organizations active during the first period of independence (1918–1941), on the situation of women in Nordic countries, and on gender equality. There were also special columns for practical tips highly valued in the period of insecurity and financial difficulties caused by the reforms of the early 1990s. For example, the magazine gave advice on how to sew or knit clothes for children and how to grow vegetables, how to redecorate one’s home, and so on. The ideas of national rebirth were also reflected in the articles concerning the family. These texts provided pictures of seemingly happy families, which, according to the standards of the period, consisted of two parents in their first marriage with at least two children.

Although after the restoration of independence in 1991 Eesti Naine like other media in Estonia eradicated former ideological pressure (Lauristin & Vihalemm, 2002), in the early 1990s a reader could find almost no articles on serious relationship problems or problematic families. Similar to the Soviet period, the dissolution of marriage was still looked at as a private issue, something that was not suitable to be publicly discussed in a magazine. The earliest texts dealing with marital breakup and the problems of postdivorce families were found in a special section of the magazine called “Letters From Our Readers.” In this column, the magazine began publishing letters written by women about surviving divorce and dealing with their single-again experiences. The main idea of the contribution by anonymous readers was to show that in spite of the economic difficulties a divorced mother had to face it was possible for a divorced woman to bring up a child or children alone instead of staying in a marriage shadowed by the husband’s violent or abusive behavior. It was a step forward, as according to traditional cultural norms prevailing in Estonia in the 1990s it was considered a woman’s duty to keep the family together at whatever the cost may be(Narusk & Hansson, 1999). The letter section demonstrated that in reality, the Estonian family of the 1990s with all its problems very much differed from the picture of the happy family presented on the front covers of the new women’s magazines.

In 1993, one could notice a certain spin in the content of the articles of Eesti Naine. The magazine started to publish thematic discussions based on interviews conducted with women about their family life. However, until the mid-1990s, the texts focusing on serious relationship problems and divorce experiences were based on interviews with anonymous divorcees. Speaking about personal feelings related to marital dissolution in the early 1990s, divorced women still seemed to experience certain uneasiness, and anonymity was seen as a norm.

We identified two distinct groups in the interviews that fitted Goffman’s (1976) differentiation between success stories and sad stories. The interviews of the first group, that is, the success stories, introduced a picture of a strong and active Estonian woman for whom the breakdown of the marriage had been a painful experience but who had managed to overcome the difficulties and start her life all over again. In contrast, the key point in the accounts of the interviewees of the other group, the so-called sad stories, was negative; the women felt that they had not managed to save their marriage although they had worked hard to keep the family together. These women seemed to be going through a period of contradiction between their inner egos and the picture they tried to present for the readers of the magazine. They understood that they were expected to present a picture of a strong and independent woman, but in reality they seemed to feel lost, insecure, sometimes even stigmatized, and still looking for their postdivorce identity. The interviewees of both groups stressed the importance of anonymity. Here, the choice of interviewees and the practice of anonymity refer to the extent to which divorce was socially accepted in Estonia. A divorced woman did not want to be identified as the ex-wife of so-and-so or as the wife whom someone left. Thus, in the Estonia of the first half of the 1990s, marital breakdown and the related problems were still considered to be highly personal issues usually not discussed in public and certainly not on the pages of women’s periodicals.

Changes in Attitudes in the Second Half of the 1990s

Although in the first half of the 1990 s the anonymity of interviewees talking about their divorce was a norm, then in the second half of the 1990 s the situation in the market of periodicals started to change gradually. The newly established periodicals included several yellow weeklies, which began highlighting the main events in society. Among the items favored for publication in these magazines, photos introducing happy new couples could be noticed. Most often there was a photo of a well-known successful middle-aged man attending an important reception or some other social event with a new, and as a rule of thumb, a considerably younger partner. Usually, bits of information about the new partner were added to the photo. At the same time, the ex-wife of the newly repartnered prominent man was mostly forgotten as far as the media was concerned. Thus, we can see a certain gendered approach toward the approval of divorce and the understanding of what was normal. By the mid-1990s, divorce and finding a new partner had become everyday events for Estonian men, whereas for divorced women, transition to the single-again status was still somewhat problematic and associated with changes in lifestyle and the narrowing of the social circle.

Compared to yellow weeklies and new women’s magazines, which mostly wrote about fashion, makeup, sexuality, and social events, Eesti Naine maintained its content as a well-balanced magazine, dealing with a broad spectrum of issues. Furthermore, in the second half of the 1990s, the magazine extended its scope. Among other positive changes, the magazine started to publish articles based on interviews with well-known women who were facing critical moments in their life, very often related to marital dissolution. And the most important change occurred in anonymity—while in the early 1990s, the interviewees preferred to stay anonymous, then in the second half of the 1990s several interviewees agreed to speak under their own names.

Construction of Divorce Stories and Single-again Status by Divorced Women

The interview texts used for the present analysis were characterized by the temporal sequence of events typical to narratives. The stories told by the interviewees usually started with accounts concerning their years of marriage, then progressed through the understanding that the marriage was going to end to the actual separation and divorce, and ended with postdivorce experiences.

In the analysis, we distinguished three rather clear perspectives or dominant narratives, which recurred in the divorce stories published in Eesti Naine in the second half of the 1990s. First, there were emotional breaking out stories, that is, narratives told by women who, after surviving an unrewarding marriage and getting divorced, had managed to find a new postmarriage status and positioned themselves as winners. The divorce accounts of the second group provided a different perspective and could be defined as the sad stories. In these stories, the focus was mainly on the divorce-related loss. At least in the first postdivorce stage, these women seemed to have felt as losers, that is, self-stigmatized themselves. The third group was made up of stories constructed around children and brave motherhood. Below are presented some excerpts from the stories of women in the three groups compiled under common headings. The interview texts are accompanied by references to the issue of the magazine from which the specific paragraph has been taken. For example, the reference “EN, 1998, 1” means that the text originates from the first issue of the magazine Eesti Naine published in 1998.

Success Stories

The first group of stories could be characterized, in the words one of the women interviewed, as hell-to-heaven stories. These stories were shaped by a common plot. The interviews began with the claim that the marriage had been dysfunctional from the very start. The stories were characterized by four key sets of elements. First, the primary emphasis in these stories was on emotional descriptions of the troubled times in the marriage. It was probably a great shock for many subscribers of the magazine to read about family life that was characterized by the abusive behavior of a man whom they had admired. The pictures painted by the interviewees were quite different from the pictures the readers had been used to seeing on the front covers of women’s magazines. In these stories, the predivorce period was most often described as a depressing and difficult experience, and the former husband was portrayed as violent, selfish, unfaithful, and abusive. Accordingly, for the interviewees of the hell-to-heaven group, the decision to file for divorce was seen as a rational response to the circumstances that had helped them to go on with their lives. Consider the following extract from a story told by an interviewee—a singer and song composer, from whom comes the expression hell-to-heaven:

Constant psycho terror! He didn’t allow me to continue my career (as a singer) and I was not allowed to bring home my flowers…Always so jealous, and he managed to empty a whole crateful of whisky in a week! (EN, 2000, 7)

Second, it was characteristic of the interviewees of the first group to stress that they were well-educated contemporary women who were unable to control their own lives, as they were under the control of the husband. A well-known athlete outlined her previous marriage:

I don’t want to think about my ex. The way we finally separated…I thought that I knew him, but it turned out that I didn’t. I was not happy with my life. My brothers stopped visiting me as they did not get along with my partner, and me and my brothers, we drifted apart…I should have ended this relationship much earlier, but I didn’t have the guts. (EN, 2001, 4)

The third common element in these stories was a feeling of relief that the divorce had brought about after the depressive years of marriage. The interviewees stressed that although there were some aspects of divorce that were difficult to adjust to, their single-again period was a time of increasing autonomy, confidence, and dignity. The interview texts suggested that having finally escaped a violent or overly controlling husband, the single-again women positioned themselves as independent people with strong negative attitudes toward men and remarriage. The following extract from an interview with a novelist is an example of the initial feelings of the women in that group:

What a relief it was! I was tired, exhausted and terrified. To marry again? Heaven have mercy! When you have survived one disaster, why jump into another one? (EN, 1998, 1)

Although immediately after years of unhappiness the interviewed women of the first group thought that remarriage was not what they really wanted and were prepared to go on without a permanent partner, the fourth common element in the stories was the depiction of a new phase of life—a new romantic relationship. A year or two after the divorce, the majority of women of that group had met a new partner. With only a few exceptions, the interviewees did not want to speak about the new relationship in more detail but were convinced that compared to the ex-husband the new partner represented different values. Accordingly, the main common element presented in the texts of the first group was a positive experience of finding a new identity. The interviewees admitted that for them, one of the main consequences of the breakup of an unsuccessful marriage was emotional liberation and personal empowerment. The texts offer several examples for this. For example, here an actress speaks about her second marriage:

The misfortune of divorce turned into fortune. With my current partner I feel like I’m in a citadel – safe from rains and storms.… And at last I understand what kind of inner power and values I really possess. (EN, 1999, 8)

Thus, the narratives of women of the first group had two objectives: to justify their own divorce and to show that it was possible to survive a divorce and find new meaning in life. The main key words of these stories were relief, independence, empowerment, and new self-confidence. Although divorce had been a critical moment in their lives, both psychologically and in terms of their social position, the interviewees reinterpreted it as a positive opportunity to end an unrewarding period of life and turn over a new leaf. That is, by shaping their stories the interviewees demonstrated that they were strong and had managed to prove to themselves (and probably also tried to convince the readers of the magazine) that they were getting on with their lives. By publishing the stories the magazine in turn provided Estonian women a positive role model—a strong and independent woman who managed to break free of stereotypical gender expectations.

Sad Stories

The second group of stories could be characterized as heaven-to-hell stories. The pattern of the stories of the second group differed from those told by the interviewees of the first group in several ways. Although their narratives also started with pictures of the marriage, contrary to the first group, their recollections of married life were idealized. The dissolved marriage was mostly depicted as a sunny period or the best period of one’s life. Our first example is an interview with a TV journalist and former pop singer who described her first years of marriage with a famous rock star with great emotions:

Our marriage was wonderful, a happy life under the eyes of Estonian people, a life like a great party with many friends… We were partners in marriage and partners on stage, and we were a perfect showpiece of a happy couple (EN, 1999, 4).

In her case, it was the husband who had moved on to a new partner and filed for divorce. The interviewee stressed that her ex-husband had lived a double life for several years, but she had been the last one to find out.

In the narratives of the second group, the end of the marriage was presented as a totally unexpected event. The accounts of the interviewees were mostly focused on the happy past, and very often the stories followed a common plotline characterized by Jallinoja (2000) as disaster-movie stories. The first common element that was stressed in the majority of stories was the fact that the women did not see any sign of danger before the sudden end of the idyllic relationship. The following extract from an interview describes the feelings of an interviewee when her ex-husband informed her of his decision to leave. The announcement was fully unexpected, or as she put it, “like a bolt out of the blue”:

It was Sunday morning and I was making pancakes. All of a sudden he asked me: “Where’s my suitcase?”—“Your suitcase? Why do you need your suitcase? You’re not going on a business trip on Sunday, are you?”—“I’m leaving!”—“What do you mean—leaving? Where?”—“I’m leaving you! Forever!” There was something in his voice that made me realise that he was not joking…. He slammed the door, and I collapsed on a chair. It was like a bad dream. Like a shadow theatre where I had to play a very depressing role. (EN, 1997, 10)

However, there was another important similarity in the stories of women of the second group. When the interviewees started to analyze their former married life in detail, they understood that there had been certain signs of disaster in the air. The interviewee cited earlier described how being satisfied with her marriage prevented her from seeing signs of danger. It was not until later that she understood that something had been wrong. She continued:

And suddenly I remembered that during the whole year he had spent more and more time at work, and less and less time at home. And when at home, he was usually in a bad mood without an obvious reason. And what a fool I had been. I had accused his boss, blamed it on difficult times, and felt sorry for him. Can you believe – I had felt sorry for HIM. (EN, 1997, 10)

Compared with the representatives of the first group for whom divorce had meant breaking free of an unsuccessful relationship, the women of the second group perceived divorce as an end to their trouble-free past. Accordingly, compared to the interviewees of the first groups, it had been much more complicated for the women of the second group to adjust to their single-again status:

I think that it may take you as long as five years, and then at last you can stand on your own two feet again. It took me two years to finally understand that our marriage was over…that he was not coming back. At first I couldn’t believe it, I still hoped that maybe one day…(EN, 2001, 5).

The gendered aspects of divorce were touched upon by several interviewees. In spite of the fact that in the 1990s divorce rates were high in Estonia, divorce still did not fit into the model of a proper family. The expectation in that it is the woman’s duty to save the marriage—at whatever the cost may be—has long been prevalent in Estonian society. The interviewees stressed that a woman who failed to save her marriage was most likely taken for a loser. Accordingly, the stories of women of the second group were often illustrated by rhetoric questions and statements stemming from certain insecurities, such as “What am I now? Half woman?” For the interviewees of the second group, the institution of marriage seemed to have remained an important identifying factor, and marital breakup had brought about certain insecurity regarding their status and identity.

In spite of the fact that in the accounts of the second group, divorce was often described as a disaster, the interviewees were sometimes quite humorous in describing their reactions to their husband’s announcement that he wanted a divorce. For example, one of the interviewees—an actress who had divorced twice—had created her own typology of female divorcees. She differentiated between two types of women—the fighters referred to as she-lions and the losers referred to as weeping cows. The interviewee placed herself into the latter group, that is, with the representatives of sad stories:

After the divorce I was totally lost, my heart was broken…There are two types of women—the she-lions and the weeping cows, and that’s where I belonged! Some women drown their sorrows, others rush into new relationships…I plunged into my work—acting and teaching—, started jogging, redecorated my home. (EN, 1998, 4)

She-lion was the way the interviewee referred to powerful women who did not accept the fact of marital breakup easily. According to the interviewee, a she-lion was not willing to let her husband go, and in order to keep him, she was ready to do anything, up to raising a public scandal.

Although the main elements of the stories of women in the second group were rather similar, the stories mostly ended in two ways. First, several interviewees described themselves as still traumatized from the divorce. According to their statements, they were worried about strong social expectations to normal life, which predominantly meant marriage or, as put by one of the interviewees, “having someone to share your bed with.” For example, a textile designer worded her thoughts thusly:

My future is the world of lonely people, and I don’t know whether it’s going to be blissful or completely horrible. (EN, 1999, 10)

For these women, the institution of marriage seemed to be very important and superior to the single status. Consequently, they often dreamt of a new romantic partnership, and a steady family life seemed to be most desirable, an element by which to identify themselves. For example, we can see this in an interview with a pop-star who remarried within a month after divorcing her first husband and put it as follows:

I can’t take women who proclaim that they don’t need a man very seriously. As a matter of fact, in their heart of hearts they are unhappy; they just don’t have the courage to admit it. There has to be a man in every woman’s life. (EN, 1998, 6)

The extract shows that in the 1990s many Estonian women observed traditional norms and cultural expectations that marriage—or at least permanent relationship—was the standard for women.

To sum up, the key element in the stories of the second group was justification or explaining why the woman had failed to maintain her marriage. By placing the main fault for the end of the cloudless past on her ex-husbands, they constructed a typical sad story where the divorced woman is the victim.

Child-Centered Stories

The stories of the third group of interviewees confirmed the belief that narratives are not just descriptions of events but are usually told for a particular reason. The stories of the women in the first two groups were characterized by a rather individualistic approach, that is, everyone deserves to be happy and I do not have to sacrifice my happiness for him, and the main focus in the stories was on the adjustment problems of divorced women. The problems that the children may face were rarely mentioned. The stories of the third group in turn were mostly child centrered. According to their stories, the divorce had served to refocus the former partners’ attitude toward being a parent. The interviewees agreed that often, it was not only the wife who felt abandoned but also the children. Due to traditional gender role attitudes and cultural expectations it has long been common practice in Estonia that regardless of the initiator of the divorce, custody rights are almost always automatically granted to mother. Although nonresident fathers are obligated to provide child support, in reality a large proportion of Estonian single mothers do not receive regular support payments. Thus, the perception that parenting is primarily the mother’s responsibility has survived in Estonia, and the stories of the third group were constructed from this position.

The women interviewed for the magazine took it for granted that children should stay with them, that is, stay at their home. Furthermore, it was still seen as the only possibility. In her interview, a historian described how her husband had left her with a 5-year-old daughter and an unborn son and moved to a new partner. When her friends asked her how she had managed to survive and not start drinking, she answered:

How could I (start drinking)? I was the one who had to bring up my daughter, and I had to give birth to my baby. (EN, 1999, 3)

In the texts of the third group, considerable space was devoted to the economic problems that the divorced women had to face. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the economic situation of the country and the large gap in men’s and women’s wages made single mothers especially vulnerable. It was difficult to bring up a child alone without any support from the nonresident father. For that reason, divorce was usually accompanied by a decline in the economic well-being of the family headed by a divorced mother. Estonian laws were very liberal with respect to financial obligations and alimony payments, and the control over the support that nonresident fathers were obligated to pay their children was insufficient. The stories in this group described how, after the divorce, the nonresident father drifted away from his children with whom he no longer resided. In the letter column of the magazine, a divorced woman addressed her former husband:

In the divorce court, I burst out crying and you promised to keep in touch with us. But you have forgotten your daughter’s birthday, let alone Christmas. She keeps waiting, longing for a Christmas card, if nothing else. (EN, 1997, 10)

Usually, the interviewed women neither turned to authorities for legal advice nor brought action against the nonresident father for alimony. In fact, on one hand, it seemed to be complicated to bring legal action against the ex-husband who in the present case was a well-known person. And on the other hand, women were afraid that the constant attention of media, which typically accompanies the legal actions of celebrities, may have a negative impact on their children. The situation made the interviewees of this group feel hurt and embittered up to the point where one of the interviewees used the pages of the magazine to publicly address her former husband who had refused to have anything to do with his son after the divorce:

And when our son has—thanks to his talent and hard work—become famous, now you step up and introduce yourself as the proud father. In every interview you stress that the talented young pianist is your son. Of course, no one can deny that you’re his biological father. But when I think of all my sleepless nights helping him to get ready for concerts, all the unpaid rent and electricity bills…You didn’t know about these things!…I’m very proud of what we have achieved, my son and me. But the results of our work are as far from your “efforts” as the North Pole is from the South Pole…You can collect newspaper scraps and photos, that’s all there’s left for you now. (EN, 2002, 4)

Apart from the disappointment caused by the ex-husbands’ lack of interest in their children’s lives and troubles related to bringing up children alone, there was another plotline in the stories of the third group of women. Remarriage is usually seen as the most likely route to overcome postdivorce economic difficulties and loneliness. All the interviewees of the group stressed that compared to childless women it was very difficult to remarry for a divorced woman who was bringing up a child or children alone. The interviewees were convinced that Estonian men generally had nothing against dating a divorced woman, but they were wary of marrying a woman with a child from her previous marriage.