Draft – Do not quote – Footnotes to come Adelaide Madera University of Messina (Italy) Civil and religious laws (which have their own rules) concerning divorce: the condition of women and their empowerment

Historically, marriage has always been at the center of a tension between religious and secular systems, which relationships tend towards influence and cooperation rather than exclusiion and separation. Religious law has given an input to the process of emphasizing the freedom of selfdetermination of indiividuals in marriage matters and promoted a woman’s recognition of an equal position. Marriage crisis has been addressed in different ways by religious systems; they offered the exit freedom from marriage in different ways and in a different measure. Divorce is anyway an exception to marriage stability, even in historical periods when this freedom was not recognized in secular systems or it was in a very restricted way. Several western secular systems have adopted an institutional idea of marriage since the second half of the twentieth century, where individual freedom is protected only if it agrees with a more important state interest. For this reason public agencies were encharged to authorize (or not authorize) both the constitution and dissolution of marriage and to rule its life. More recently civil marriage has developed towards a secularized and private trend and it has departed from the Christian-religious model; in this way a full freedom to access to marriage is connected to a wider freedom to withdraw from an unsatisfying marriage for many reasons. Marriage is loosing its role as a factor of social cohesion, as a place where to “learn citizenship”, as a “seminarium rei publicae”; the greater weakness of marriage makes a person more vulnerable and excluded from the social context which he partecipates in.