University Study: Divorce harms women’s health.

Imagine how much good this study could have done if the deterioration of men’s health after divorce had been investigated and studied as critically as that of women was.

AMES, Iowa — There’s a popular belief among spouses in bad marriages that divorce might relieve their stress and lead to a happier life. But divorce actually increased chronic stress and produced greater physical illness over a 10-year span, according to a study of 416 rural Iowa women by researchers from Iowa State University’s Institute for Social and Behavioral Research.

Fred Lorenz, K.A.S. Wickrama, Rand Conger and Glen Elder produced the latest paper on their research titled “The Short-Term and Decade-Long Effects of Divorce on Women’s Midlife Health,” which was published last summer in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, a professional journal. (Full Story)

The study report gained wide-spread attention in the media throughout the world, even in China. Here is an example of media coverage: Divorced Women have more Illness.

Women as victims always draw the unquestioning crowds, even if in the manufacturing of concern for women it is obvious that one side of the argument glares by its absence.

So, at the danger of being considered to be a party pooper (as Sally Jacobs from the Boston Globe, for example, surely would see me to be), let me ask whether divorce doesn’t usually involve two parties, one of them being the husband, a man that is? Why was men’s plight after divorce not worthy of an equal amount of attention? (Even someone as old as I knows the answer to that one: “A study of divorced men would not have received any funding.”) However, is it truly wrong to garner some of the social capital and expend it on sympathy or a little bit of concern for men? Is that not the right thing to do, and is objective social research no longer the object of academic endeavours in our bravenew world?

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