Sorry, I don't think your information is useful. Admission is data relating to divorce rates of people that were married in their mid teens. The yearly marriage and divorces tallies you're offering include quite a bit of "churn" from the subset of serially married. Particularly since the overall number of marriages per year has decreased significantly despite population growth.

I recall one study that showed that simply the pressure of marriage was the source of many divorces. Perhaps the pressure that comes with marriage has changed over the years and couples of older times felt less of a need for divorce?

A divorce is never a good thing, certainly not if children are involved. But toughing it out is not an option either. Marriage is a human decision and we are known for making mistakes, aren't we? And if we did make a mistake, we have to rectify it or try to rectify it.

Over the time, the increase in divorce rate has has a lot to do with (personal) freedom, education and exposure especially of women; and not to the mention the era of women-emancipation and after.

Each period in the article correlates with women's status in society at the time, and is mentioned in there.

It would be interesting to know what were the % of divorces where women initiated it(it's recorded, right?).

Women initiate about 70% (or more) of no fault divorces.

http://www.divorce-lawyer-source.com/faq/emotional/who-initi...

Unfortunately the link does not provide further link to sources, but it claims it comes from US census.

I had seen the US census links, and it is correct, also the same is true in Brazil (our laste census resulted in also about 70% of women initiating divorce with no provided reason). Later if I have time I will edit this post to post the census links.