Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women's Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era

What constitutes a good divorce or, rather, a fair divorce? This question animates Suzanne Kahn's eye-opening book—and impelled the generation of "feminist divorce reformers" at the heart of her study. As divorce rates doubled in the United States between 1967 and 1979, a generation of women who had entered marriages with the assumption of lifetime economic dependence on a male breadwinner found themselves cast out into the cold. Measly alimony (if any at all) wasn't even the worst of it. After years of caring for children and homes, dismal job prospects awaited them, and their dedication to family counted for nothing in the division of marital assets. Credit cards—granted on their exes' credit—were cut up the moment they were no longer wives. Generous employer-sponsored health insurance was terminated the day divorce papers were signed. Lucky divorcées held on to the spouse's less generous portion of Social Security. Pensions were a different matter: divorcing men walked away with their pensions intact. Not surprisingly, the country had a lot of motivated, angry women on its hands. Kahn argues that the feminist movement offered them answers and an outlet to channel their discontent.In drawing out the campaigns divorce reformers embarked upon from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kahn simultaneously illuminates histories of marriage and of the welfare state. At stake was women's economic citizenship, which divorce activists sought to rewrite through two claims: First, marriage was an economic contract, in which wives were equal partners, and for which they deserved state entitlements independent of their husbands. Second, marriage was also a status, which made wives worthy citizens, deserving of social and state recognition. Divorce reformers' often quite explicit counterpart to this worthy wife was the less meritorious unmarried woman on need-based public assistance.Painful compromises accompanied some remarkable wins as deeply ingrained male-breadwinner ideology, welfare state retrenchment, and conservative political ascendance blocked divorce reformers' most ambitious visions. The result, Kahn asserts, was that wealthier women, with private resources to divvy up, gained access to a range of family property. Lower-income women, whose primary household assets lay in access to selective entitlements like Social Security, still depended on meager and unequal distribution of dependent benefits by the state.Kahn lays out the step-by-step process by which this outcome emerged. The book opens with the no-fault divorce revolution. No-fault divorces were far easier to obtain, but they eliminated the presumption that wives merited ongoing support from their former husbands and left divorcing women at the mercy of judges in property distributions and with limited-duration "need-based maintenance" (32). The women who mobilized in response were largely middle class and white. When political compromises inevitably became necessary, they frequently clashed with lower-income women and women of color, as their backgrounds shaped their priorities. A grassroots push from below brought feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women and the Women's Equity Action League on board. Divorce reformers sustained this grassroots feminist energy through the 1970s; by the 1980s, political leaders and experts took the place of on-the-ground activists, nurturing a feminist agenda long past the conventional end point assigned to second-wave feminism.The middle chapters of the book follow debate over ten national laws targeted to divorced women's economic status that Congress enacted between 1974 and 1986. Kahn highlights how "functional equality" rather than "strict formal equality" was divorce reformers' goal (63). Among their desiderata were equal access to consumer credit, recognition of their unpaid household labor in property divisions, rights to their former husbands' employer-provided health insurance, equitable division of both private and federal-provided pensions, and restructuring of Social Security to give divorcing women adequate benefits independent of their ex-partners.The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) is illustrative. Divorcing women lost access to credit built up during marriages (it went to husbands), faced sex and marital-status discrimination in applying for new credit, and could not get child support and alimony counted as income. The ECOA rectified those barriers. Two years later, Congress added race, national origin, and receipt of public assistance as further protected categories. A major victory for feminists, the legislation broke "coverture's long hold on the credit industry" (94). However, the ECOA guaranteed only equal access to credit. Poorer women (like the welfare rights activists also fighting for credit reform in these years) still struggled to prove their creditworthiness. Efforts to reform Social Security are also revealing. Feminists envisioned multiple means for wives to get out from under the dependent-driven structure of Social Security benefits, but in the end they won only changes that broadened their entitlements as formerly married women. As Kahn effectively demonstrates, divorce reformers succeeded with laws "mandating that private institutions treat married women as equals and partners"; they failed in "instilling this understanding of married women into the public social insurance system" (95).Broad reluctance to abandon selective entitlements anchored in marriage combined with conservative political power to whittle away at feminists' ambitions. By the end of the 1980s, divorce reformers returned their attention to states and led campaigns to replace common law with community property regimes. They renewed pressure on judges to count women's unpaid contributions in property settlements. Slowly, divorce reform energies faded as feminists shifted attention to better benefits for working women. Kahn observes that in the 1990s children replaced the divorced "displaced homemaker" as the citizens deserving of welfare state entitlements.Divorce, American Style would have benefited from drawing more fully on recent scholarship on the women's movement that has shown that divorce reformers were not alone in making the arguments Kahn uncovered. ERA advocates, general feminist Social Security reformers, wages for housework campaigners, and legal feminists all shared common ground with feminist divorce activists. Together, they reinforce Kahn's important reframing of the 1960s–80s feminist movement and demonstrate that formal workplace equality was never activists' single, or even primary, concern. Kahn rightly concludes that feminists were not able to win the egalitarian vision they imagined. Her study reveals how path dependency and a tradition of awarding entitlements to the worthy meant that marriage remained entrenched in the US welfare structure to the detriment, mostly, of poorer and working-class Americans.