Divorce and the Right
Following up on yesterday's flipness, the time has come for some serious feminism. David Brooks, riffing on my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta's latest article, contends that "If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing."
On one level, this is just silly. How much you have to fear from outsourcing just depends on what the nature of your job (or your husband's job) is. Some people have a great deal to fear, others have very little to fear. The non-silly point, however, is that divorce usually has bad economic consequences for women and often has devastating economic consequences. Conservatives have grown fond of pointing this out in recent years, but I find their concern a little hard to take seriously. The obvious remedy, after all, would be a combination of legal changes to make divorce-resolution more economically favorable to women and measures to have the government take more action to provide general economic security and especially to provide more support for parents (particularly single parents) of children. But conservatives typically oppose these things.
Instead, the right's idea is that we should make it harder for people to get divorced. That would, indeed, have beneficial consequences for some women. But the notion that divorce restriction would be a generally pro-woman measure seems to assume that divorces are always initiated by men. In reality, of course, many divorces are initiated by women. Indeed, though I haven't made a detailed study of it, it seems to be the case that divorces are typically initiated by women.
The combination of measures favored by conservatives and that were, in fact, in place decades ago -- inflicting economic pain on divorces women while making it hard as a general matter to get divorces -- are overwhelmingly favorable to men, shifting the balance of power inside married couples decisively in favor of the man and leaving women with little in the way of appealing remedies when faced with a husband who cheats or in other ways falls short of the mark.
One could make an at least quasi-plausible argument that this kind of social system could be justified in the name of its benefits to children, with the fact that sacrifices "for the kids" are being borne disproportionately by women just swept under the rug. But the effort to portray the agenda here as designed to help women is pretty disingenuous. Instead, roughly the reverse is happening.
Environics' study, the subject of Franke-Ruta's article, points out that red states suffer from high divorce rates and resulting societal disfunctions(?). That folks that live in those states should want to do something to reduce those rates seems unremarkable.
Democrats have to figure out some way of not appearing to impose High Church Massachusetts solutions on the border-ruffian Scotch-Irish of the Appalachian South.
January 26, 2006 8:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Seriously, it is hard to see where that line of thought takes us. OK, it's their problem (speaking as a blue-stater), and their solution doesn't work and may even be counterproductive. So what do we tell them? Suck it up?
January 26, 2006 10:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think I fully follow Matt's reasoning. As I understand the Right's arguments re divorce, many would eliminate the "No-Fault" divorce and restore economic benefits/penalties associates with fault. In that model, as I understand it, domestic violence and adultery (inter alia) would constitute "fault" and would enable the wronged person to receive additional benefits based on that fault (and the person at fault would naturally suffer penalties in that amount). Inasmuch as women are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic violence and in the majority of cases the victims of their husbands' adultery, women would likely be the beneficiaries of this policy (in any case, people who observe their marital vows would be). Further, the elimination of "no-fault" would make it more difficult for couples whose issues don't rise to "fault" to quickly end their marriages. This would have benefits to children inasmuch as children tend to do much better in homes in which their mother and father are married to each other, to women because they seem to suffer the most economically due to divorce and inasmuch as couples that report a desire to divorce often change that view if they stay together (absent domestic violence).
The way the law currently works, the marriage contact is basically unenforceable. Either party can get out for any or no reason with no penalty for termination. It is the women who usually bear the brunt of the pain for this arrangement because their husbands can leave them for another women with no real economic penalty (other than child support and in rare cases alimony, which is not designed as a penalty, but as compensatory damages).
January 26, 2006 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I guess you're right. : -(
But see, Albion's Seed for a history of our regional differences and cultural continuities of long duration.
January 26, 2006 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
How common is it for men to divorce their wives to marry another woman? So far I've known more women to do this (divorce and then marry a lover they had on teh side) than men. One of the loonier arguments I have heard from the right in opposition to gay marriage is that it will encourage middle-aged men to divorec tehir wives and marry younger women since the cast-off first wives (thoigh premsuably straight) will have the option of marrying their also cast-off friends in order to better survive.
January 26, 2006 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
As I understand it (I have little experience in this field of law), this kind of amounts to a de facto no fault system anyway, as one of the grounds for divorce -- "cruel and inhuman treatment" -- has grown to encompass nearly everything that can go wrong in marriage.
However, for the very reason that MY identifies in his article, that divorce tends to leave women worse off than men, I've been told by attorneys who mostly represent women in divorce matters that they are the lobby in New York State keeping NYS from moving to a de jure no fault system, because the requirement to show "fault" is a bargaining chip that women -- the poorer party, more often than not -- can use to extract a better settlement.
At the end of the day, this doesn't do too much to keep families together. In my view, if you'd want to cut down on divorce, make it harder to get married in the first place, especially for people who are young. Why it's still legal to marry at age sixteen in some states is beyond me.
January 26, 2006 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
"measures to have the government take more action to provide general economic security"
This is of course the solution to the problems caused by both divorce and outsourcing.
January 26, 2006 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Making divorce laws more favorable to women won't solve the problem. Part of the reason that not just women, but both parties, often have a lower quality of life, in purely economic terms, following divorce is that it's more expensive to maintain two households than only one. Also, to the extent there is evidence that single men have labor market disadvantages and lower standards of living relative to married men, the combined earning power of the two could be less.
The growth of dual earner families in some ways makes families more secure, because it means the income isn't totally wiped out if one earner leaves, dies, is hurt, or loses a job. (This is particularly true for women in cases of divorce relative to their mothers who had no careers.) But it also makes them less secure, because a family dependent on two-full time wage earners is, all else equal, exposed to greater risk that one of them will leave or lose a job, and, second, less able to recoup lost income if one of them leaves or experiences an extended unemployment.
I think this is an important piece also of what Garance is talking about, in terms of traditional families and economic security.January 26, 2006 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, the conservative solution would just bring back the bad old days of the 1950's where couples separated but stayed married, often leaving the woman financially destitute as well as unable to remarry.
January 26, 2006 4:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Conservatives have profound difficulties with logical thinking.
Divorce is a proof that something potentially very valuable and beneficial failed. Is such a failure good? No. What the state can do? Perhaps lower the incarceration rates and increase job security -- there is pretty strong correlation between incarceration and divorces and extra-marital cohabitation, and between unemployement and marital conflicts and divorce.
Increasing aid to dependent children can alleviate the bad effect of divorce on children. Perhaps it may encourage divorce.
By the way, do middle class conservatives divorce? Upper class conservative indulge in the practice with vengance...
January 26, 2006 5:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
NY (where I am also licensed) has a truly terrible divorce system. Not only is it not a true "no-fault" state (you can get a no-fault divorce if you separate for a year), but it is nearly impossible to prove adultery under the Alexander Hamilton-era statute. The system thus encourages individuals to perjur themselves (claim or admit to a false "fault") in order to get a quick divorce. To my mind, the answer is not to make NY a true "no-fault" state, but to clean up and improve the grounds for divorce and the evidentiary rules for proving them.
January 27, 2006 1:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
With all due respect, that is not the case. Abandonment and neglect of marital obligations would still constitute grounds for divorce. Further, under the conservative system, the law would favor the spouse who was not a fault (thus, disincentivising such conduct).
In fairness, many of us would like to bring back a few elements that disappeared during the sexual and no-fault divorce revolutions of the 1960's and 1970's. To wit: substantially reducing the divorce rate, reducing the number of children born out of wedlock and reducing the number of children living with only one parent, even if that means returning to a time when divorce is frowned upon.
I do not suggest returning to a time of double standards regarding infidelity or turning a blind eye to domestic violence.
January 27, 2006 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Environics' study, the subject of Franke-Ruta's article, points out that red states suffer from high divorce rates and resulting societal dysfunctions.
The higher divorce rates in red states are not so much due to less commitment to marrage; they are more due to the fact that they even bother to get married. Red states have higher divorce rates largely because people in red states are more likely to marry in the first place. You canb't divorce if you don'r marry, and if you wait to marry until you are in your mid-30s or mid-40s, you have much less time to get divorced.
January 27, 2006 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, but in the "good old days" you still needed to drag the errant spouse into the courtroom. Absent some national law extraditing scofflaw spouses (kind of like the child support law the Bushies just gutted) that's not always going to be easy even now...
January 27, 2006 7:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can anyone really suggest that people in the blue areas of the country do not marry? Having grown up in a liberal area of Michigan I can attest that this is a red herring. However the fact that people's average age of marriage is lower in the red areas of the country does have something to do with their high divorce rates since people who marry too young are at much greater risk for divorce.
January 30, 2006 6:05 AM | Reply | Permalink