by Ismail Ahmed Alashmi

Freedom from marriage was once loved by the liberal female elite as one of the most important acts of women's emancipation. But researchers have found out that now well-educated women of today are turning against divorce in droves.

Divorce is becoming the preserve of the poor and ill-educated as career women shun the easy way out of marriage, a study claims. Despite divorce rates rocketing in the past decade, researchers claim that it is the least educated who are responsible for increasing numbers of family breakdowns as they have the more liberal attitude towards divorce.

Women of today's time with university degrees are the social group most likely to think divorce should be made harder.

In a trend that is said to be mirrored in Britain, researchers at the University of Maryland in the U.S. say well-heeled women are becoming more conservative in their views about marriage as they blame break-ups for soaring crime rates and yobbish behavior. A survey of 5,000 women aged 25-39 carried out annually since 1970 revealed that almost two-thirds of female graduates from 2000 to 2004 thought divorce should be made more difficult.

But by contrast, when women were asked between 1970 and 1979 whether divorce should be made easier, more difficult or left the same, only 36 percent of university educated women supported making it harder.

The study also found the divorce rate among graduates in the first ten years of marriage had fallen by a third between 1970 and the 1990s.

Researchers have also proposed that highly educated women in past in the 1970s were the most likely to say divorce should be made easier. They now say divorce should be made more difficult.

Women who had not completed high school education have moved from being essentially neutral to having the least restrictive attitudes toward divorce. It is thought that many affluent women are more determined to work through the problems in their relationship having witnessed the damage caused by divorce in their parents' generation.

In Britain divorce rates have quadrupled since 1970, with about 40 percent of marriages breaking up. There has also been a gradual shift in attitudes of women towards divorce attempts. It used to be very common in women advising their female mates to set her free of marriage snare, while divorced life has a strong feeling of freedom.

But very slowly there's been this move towards women staying at home, women looking after the children and all these women are giving up work.

Charles Murray, a British Sociologist, was the first to predict the split in attitudes of the early 1970's and today's women and termed it as the 'New Victorians'. He found out that well-educated women will edge back towards traditional morality, whereas he still affirms that a large portion of what used to be the British working class has espoused the way of the American underclass.

Today's mother has got alarmed of the devastating consequences of divorce and has become increasingly conservative in attitude towards marriage. Working mothers today are contentedly laying off their jobs in order to give a stable and healthy shape to the family. We find that attitudes towards marriages have changed since recent generation. Divorce used to be acceptable because one of the couple got to a certain point in life when things get harder and people just gave up on the marriage.

People try harder now, because it seems giving up is copping out. It's about working through a marriage, fixing it.Many of us think that people tend to get married later in life when they know what they are looking for.

We generally hear "I want to get settled first"; "I wanted my career first". It is very obvious that people aren't in a rush to get married anymore and there is more consideration going into marriage. Remember it isn't a character in a film, but it's your real life.