ith relatives in their native
villages, and indeed some workers continued to keep their families in
the villages.

Soon after the adoption of the Constitution in 1946, a number of laws
were adopted regulating marriage and divorce. The law on marriage,
adopted in 1948, provided that marriages had to be contracted before an
official of the local People's Council, and strong penalties were
prescribed for any clergyman performing a religious ceremony before a
civil ceremony had taken place. The legal age for contracting marriage
was set at eighteen for both sexes, but persons as young as sixteen
years of age could enter into marriage with the permission of the
people's court. In such cases the minors did not need parental consent,
and the law considered them "emancipated."

Marriage was based on the full equality of rights of both spouses. Thus
the concept of the head of the family, recognized by pre-Communist civil
law and so important for Albanian family life, was eliminated. Each of
the spouses, according to the 1948 law, had the right to choose his or
her own occupation, profession, and residence. Marriage with foreigners
was prohibited unless entered into by permission of the government.

The laws on divorce were designed to facilitate and speed up divorce
proceedings. The separation of spouses was made a ground for divorce
under the law, and in such cases a court could grant a divorce without
considering related facts or the causes of the separation. The basic
divorce law, which was originally passed in 1948 and, after some
modifications, was still in effect in 1970, provided that each spouse
may ask for divorce on grounds on incompatibility of character,
continued misunderstandings, irreconcilable hostility, or for any other
reason that disrupted marital relations to the point where a common
marital life had become impossible. Certain crimes committed by the
spouse, especially political crimes, the so-called crimes against the
state, and crimes involving moral turpitude, were also made causes for
divorce.

In the 1950-64 period the total number of marriages averaged about
12,000 annually, except in 1961, when 18,725 marriages were registered;
for the whole fourteen-year period marriages averaged about 7.8 per
1,000 population annually. During the same period there were about 1,000
divorces a year in the whole country; this represented about 0.2
percent of the total married population.

The problems still facing