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

330 Pages·2021·9.344 MB·English

by  Suzanne Kahn

Divorce, American Style
POLITICS AND CULTURE
IN MODERN AMER I CA
Series Editors:
Keisha N. Blain, Margot Canaday,
Matthew Lassiter, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze po liti cal and social change
in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the pre sent, including ideas
about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public
sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels— local,
national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to
reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage
synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender,
race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popu lar culture.
Divorce, American Style
Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship
in the Neoliberal Era
Suzanne Kahn
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved.
Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation,
none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means
without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
on acid- free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-5290-3
For my parents, Paul Kahn and Catherine Iino,
who always knew I would write a book.
And for Noah, who made sure I could.

CONTENTS
Introduction. Divorce, 1970s Style 1
PART I. THE DIVORCE REVOLUTION
Chapter 1. From Alimony Drones to Breeding Cows:
Women and the Divorce Law Revolution 23
Chapter 2. From the Altar to the Grave:
The Beginnings of the Feminist Divorce Reform Movement 42
PART II. A GALAXY OF LAWS
Chapter 3. Partners or Parasites? Class, Race, and Credit Rights 69
Chapter 4. The Privileges of Marriage:
Divorced Women and Selective Entitlements to Health Care 97
Chapter 5. Marriage as Work, Marriage as Partnership:
Divorced Women’s Fight for Social Security 120
Chapter 6. “How You Lose Money by Being a Woman”:
Divorce in an Age of Proliferating Retirement Savings Options 145
Chapter 7. An Expensive Endurance Test:
Compromising Toward Success in the 1980s 165
viii Contents
PART III. STABLE DIVORCE RATES AND UNSTABLE POLITICS
Chapter 8. “Responsibility, Equity; Not Cruelty”:
Changing Venues for Feminist Divorce Reformers 199
Chapter 9. “Saving the Next Generation”:
The Changing Politics of Divorce 217
Conclusion. No- Fault Divorce in a Morality- Based Welfare System 239
Notes 251
Index 311
Acknowl edgments 325
INTRODUCTION
Divorce, 1970s Style
The first w oman to run for vice president of the United States on a major party
ticket, Geraldine Ferraro, did not start her po liti cal career as a feminist.
“When I ran for Congress in 1978, I did not consider myself a feminist. I ran
as a tough, no- nonsense prosecutor. My campaign slogan was ‘Fi nally, a
Tough Demo crat,’ ” the New York congresswoman told an audience in 1983.
In Washington, however, she began hearing from constituents. “I learned by
listening,” she explained. “I listened to a woman whose husband divorced her
while she was in the hospital having cancer surgery. Her husband’s former
employer is refusing to pay her part of his pension. The com pany claims he
earned it all by himself during 30 years of marriage.”1 Stories like this one
convinced Ferraro to adopt a feminist agenda.
Ferraro’s narrative of feminist awakening rooted in the par tic u lar expe-
riences of divorced w omen would have sounded familiar to her audience in
the 1980s. Between 1967 and 1979 the divorce rate in the United States dou-
bled.2 When it reached its all- time high in 1979, the divorce rate was two and
a half times what it had been in the 1950s.3 Ultimately, close to half of mar-
riages formed in the 1970s ended in divorce.4 For many women, divorce led
to a po liti cal awakening and brought them into the feminist movement. Th ere
they articulated a po liti cal agenda that sought to directly address issues
women faced after divorce like the loss of retirement security Ferraro de-
scribed. This book tells the story of these women— whom I call “feminist
divorce reformers”— women specifically politicized by their divorces who
turned to the feminist movement for answers and molded their corner of the
movement to fit their needs.
In 1976, the popu lar women’s magazine McCall’s ran an article about these
women titled “Divorcees: The New Poor.” It announced, “Amer i ca’s four mil-
lion divorcees are the new poor of our society. If last year’s divorce rate holds
2 Introduction
steady they will be joined by at least another million in 1976, swelling the
ranks of women and children who once lived in middle- class comfort who
now live in or near hardship and poverty.”5 The article explained what di-
vorce did to a homemaker: “Divorce wipes out her job, her health insurance
pension rights, and often old- age benefits. Many men have low- cost group
health insurance as a fringe benefit of their employment. When divorce
comes, it continues to cover the c hildren but not the ex- wife. To purchase a
health policy on her own she often has to pass a physical exam and many
women can’t qualify.”6 At divorce, the article showed, women discovered that
they not only depended on their husbands for their incomes but also for
myriad other economic rights and resources that by law and custom flowed
to women through their husbands.
The McCall’s story ended on a hopeful note, reporting on divorced
women’s efforts to address their economic situation through activism. One
woman told the magazine, “ Women are getting together out of frustration
and despair. . . . It’s a fragmented grass- roots kind of ferment.”7 This grass-
roots ferment was led by women who had been in their marriages and out of
the workforce for years. When divorced w omen tried to reenter the workforce
to regain access to the resources they had lost, they found that getting a job
was difficult, to say the least, especially when balancing ongoing childcare
responsibilities. For this reason, the divorced women who managed to also
add activism to their full plates skewed older with children out of the home.
Often self- conscious of the fact that they did not fit the popu lar image of rad-
ical young feminists, feminist divorce reformers frequently disagreed with
some of the analy sis offered by their younger colleagues in the movement.
Nevertheless, they found that, overall, the feminist movement offered a com-
pelling explanation for their experience and its organ izations provided a
useful home for their work.
The large number of divorced w omen who responded to their suddenly
precarious economic lives by joining the feminist movement tells us much
about the formation of po liti cal identity and sheds new light on the history
of feminism and how it intersected with the conservative backlash of the late
twentieth c entury. From the start, feminist divorce reformers had a complex
relationship with other feminists not just because of demographic differences
but also b ecause of their agenda. More focused on creating equality in mar-
riage and the home than in the workforce, their agenda often did not look
like the 1970s feminist agenda with which historians are most familiar. Fur-
thermore, the timeline on which feminist divorce reformers campaigned and