Here are my concerns about this bill, regardless of some common sense aspects of it
After Roe v Wade was overturned, there were a series of news articles this past year about what the next play for conservatives would be to further erode women’s right, now that a woman’s autonomy over her own reproductive choices was no longer enshrined. A lot of writers started pointing to quieter movements in states like Texas and Florida to abolish “no fault” divorces.
Remember a few months ago when Steven Crowder was pissing and moaning about how his wife initiated their divorce and the thing that seemed to really miff him the most was how “apparently in the state of Texas, she can do that”? The issue as far as he is articulating it isn’t necessarily the stress of a divorce but that he couldn’t exert control over the situation or over her - she had the legal right to dissolve their marriage all of her own volition. That is unacceptable to men who will always want control over women. The fact that conservatives want to come after this legal autonomy after already “winning” the war on women’s bodily autonomy shouldn’t be glossed over.
No-fault divorce is an alternative to fault divorces. For states that permit no-fault divorce, people can still cite a fault. A no-fault divorce means that either party can initiate divorce proceedings without having to cite fault of the other spouse, usually physical abuse, infidelity, or inability to bear children.
However throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, if you were a woman being abused or raped by your spouse, it was exceptionally difficult to prove that abuse or to gain sympathy over that abuse in order to follow through with a fault divorce. And if your husband isn’t cheating on you and you have children, you can’t cite the other typical reasons for divorce. So a lot of women were trapped in domestic violence for hundreds of years in America because of these divorce laws.
Only in the late '60s, when California enacted a no-fault divorce law in 1969, did women’s rights around this matter advance. This is why divorce “skyrocketed” in the 1970s. I want to be clear that I believe that no-fault divorce should power all genders of spouses, but relating to the Women’s Empowerment movement of the 1970s, this was absolutely key to women starting to rebuild their lives away from being daddy’s little girl who was transferred like property to becoming Mrs. John Smith. This is one of a few key moments in American history that allowed women the opportunities to eventually become CEOs, Supreme Court Justices, congresspeople, and homemakers.
Though people tend to focus heavily on divorce rates as a metric of failure of a relationship (or failure of “family values”), the reality is that women in today’s era are technically better positioned to willingly enter into marriage knowing there are legal mechanisms in place should that marriage turn sour. If women understood that by entering into a marriage, there would be an almost impossible chance to escape it if something arose, then I think we will see many more educated women never accepting marriage at all for themselves. Educated women were already less likely to marry as young as uneducated women. The most vulnerable population affected are uneducated women who marry young to conservative spouses and are manipulated into (or socialized into valuing) being homemakers.
Hence even though there are common sense elements in this legislation coming out of Florida, there are very real harms that will come out of this 20 years from now that impact conservative women getting married in 2024. I also worry about the larger “give them an inch, and they invade Poland” posture of the Republican party as this alimony law could eventually lead to an erosion of no-fault divorce laws, as well.
Coming from my perspective of “currently researching a divorce case from the mid 1800s”, there are also parallels between divorce access and abortion access. In the 1800s, if you were rich enough you could travel to a state with less restrictive divorce laws, set up residency (ranging from a few months to 3 years) and file for divorce in your new home state.
Similarly, people with money and/or connections can afford to travel for medical procedures.
(I’m still figuring out how alimony worked in my 1872 Connecticut case-- I think she just got a default 1/3 of their combined assets and he skipped the state, never to pay a drop of support to his ex-wife or child.)
Thanks for adding this info!
For what it’s worth, this still happens in the 2020s, but as you point out, only for affluent couples. I’m picturing here how high earners can (or may be required by state divorce law) take a trial separation for a predetermined amount of time and establish residency in a new state. That second state may have more favorable laws to one parent over the other for child custody or may have no-fault protection whereas the first state doesn’t. Alimony is less of a concern for these scenarios, but family law for child custody usually gets very complicated when two states are involved.
Obviously spouses who have been homemakers can’t access these relocation measures, which further highlights who exactly is vulnerable under this law.
This is a really good analysis, thank you.
I feel like the “marriage” is an entity into itself that might need to be considered, much like a corporation. The whole deal with a “breadwinner + homemaker” arrangement (increasingly difficult to achieve in America) is that the “breadwinner” can focus more on their career, presumably advancing farther, making more money, etc. because the homemaker is taking care of basically everything outside of that effort.
That’s all an investment, not a one time thing. There’s a reasonable expectation of a “return” on that homemakers investment.
I feel like there must be a fair way to recognize that in a divorce, and I don’t think it’s “once the breadwinner decides to retire, the homemaker is cut off.” People share in retirement, too.
Perhaps the alimony should change to a reasonable share of the retiree’s retirement income instead of whatever the pre retirement along was? Like based on how long the marriage was or something.
You raise a great point of view here on investment on behalf of the homemaker. Stay at home spouses pursue this avenue over a career under the assumption that they will be financially provided for for the rest of their lives, including at retirement age. Homemakers wouldn’t opt to do this for 20+ years if there was the guarantee that they will be dumped and abandoned in their twilight years, and there goes the financial plans and security as well. Even when you talk to young adults about all the “What if…?” scenarios that are anything other than both spouses dying peacefully side by side in their sleep at age 95, the socialization in favor of “family values” creates such a deep resistance to believing it could ever happen to me.
I also have been very intentional to stay as gender neutral in this discussion as possible because I think there is a slowly rising tide of stay at home husbands/dads in American society that are also opting out of a career in order to be homemakers, and they could eventually be harmed by the erosion of ex-spousal rights. I don’t think anyone is really talking about the implications on this dynamic. For a connection to history, the first gender-discrimination case Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court was Moritz to expand a tax refund program “for care takers” to include men because it is discriminatory to assume that only women are caretakers and deny access to federal rights to men because of it.
This is something that I’ve been putting more thought into which has previously been a generalized “the patriarchy hurts men, too” concern. But this Florida law in specific could have surprising consequences for a demographic in society (men) who haven’t historically accepted being screwed over by the system this damn badly.
