The Coming Attack on an Essential Element of Women's Freedom

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/no-fault-divorce-laws-republicans-repeal/675371/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/jjsbe

For the past half century, many women in America have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom and legal protection, not because of Roe v. Wade or antidiscrimination laws but because of something much less celebrated: “no fault” divorce. Beginning in the early 1970s, no-fault divorce enabled millions of people, most of them women, to file for divorce over “irreconcilable differences” or the equivalent without having to prove misconduct by a spouse—such as adultery, domestic violence, bigamy, cruelty, abandonment, or impotence.

But now conservative politicians in states such as Texas and Louisiana, as well as a devoutly Catholic husband who tried to halt his wife’s divorce efforts in Nebraska, are attacking no-fault divorce. One of the more alarming steps taken in that direction came from the Texas Republican Party, whose 2022 platform called on the legislature to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage.” Given the Republican Party’s control of the offices of governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature, Texas has a chance of actually doing it.

Until 1857, divorce in England—whose ecclesiastical laws formed the basis of divorce laws in most American colonies outside New England—was available only through an act of Parliament. A total of 324 couples managed to secure one; only four of those were initiated by women. Husbands could divorce their wives based solely on adultery, but women had to prove additional aggravating circumstances. Proof of brutality, rape, or desertion was considered insufficient to support a divorce. Not until 1801 did a woman, Jane Addison, finally win a divorce based on adultery alone.

Divorce in the American colonies was often decided by governors, while colonial courts required the innocent spouse to prove marital fault by the other, making divorce virtually nonexistent. Married women were mostly bound by laws of “coverture,” which, in the words of the English jurist William Blackstone, meant that “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” As recounted by the historian Catherine Allgor, American women had no right to enter into contracts or independently own property, including their own wages and “the clothes on their backs.” Mothers lacked basic parental rights, too, “so that if a wife divorced or left a husband, she would not see her children again.”

*snip*

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I remain vigilant.

They’ll come up with legal restrictions for single women (never married, divorced, widowed) and women post-menopause.

[Elessar Zappa]

2. They'll probably be successful

in implementing those laws in some of the red states, especially southern ones. I would hope the Supreme Court would overturn laws like that but with this Court, who knows?

[Lonestarblue]

3. Excellent article. Republicans are determined to take away every right women have gained

over the past decades, including the right to personal safety from abusive husbands. Will they next choose to force women to marry men with no thought as to whether they want that marriage. One of the problems that extremist right-wing men are having today is that sane women do not want to marry them. I’m sure they would love to have forced marriage just as they’ve now achieved forced birth, with women having no right to divorce.

[2naSalit]

4. Onward to Gilead!

That's where they are headed.

[Bayard]

5. I was divorced in Calif.

No-fault divorce is all well and good, but it doesn't enforce the division of community property, at least, not where I lived. My ex took off with damn near everything of value, including emptying out my business bank account.

He got away with it.

[littlemissmartypants]

6. I wonder if this will discourage marriage more than it is already avoided now? eom

[niyad]

7. KNR and thank you for sharing this important information. I have posted several

articles about this, and it is good to see more attention being paid.