Ex-Wives and the Welfare State

Abstract

Ex-Wives and the Welfare State Lauren Jae Gutterman (bio) Suzanne Kahn, Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women's Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021, 344 pp, Figures notes, and index. $55.00. In June 2022, in the days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a Twitter thread went viral arguing that white women lacked the political organizing skills required for the moment. "The majority of white people in the U.S. were taught how to join clubs, not build community," author Miriam Forster stated. Forster's tweets followed much debate—on social media as well as in mainstream news outlets—about white women's complicity in the Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. In particular, commentators pointed to white women's integral role in helping to elect President Donald Trump, who appointed three of the six justices who authored the majority opinion in in the case. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center study, 47 percent of white women voters voted for Trump in 2016. In the 2020 election, white women voters' support for Trump increased to 53 percent.1 While focusing on women's access to the welfare state rather than abortion, Suzanne Kahn's Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women's Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era, sheds valuable light on contemporary debates about white women's activism and political investments. Divorce, American Style centers on white, middle-class, cisgender women who mobilized beginning in the 1970s around their shared experiences as divorced former homemakers. These women were caught up in sweeping cultural and legal changes that doubled the national divorce rate between 1967 and 1979, and weakened the financial position of wives who had previously depended on their husbands' incomes, insurance, and assets. Divorce, American Style challenges the Twitterfueled misconception that white women are incapable of grassroots organizing by detailing how effectively these activists, whom Kahn terms "feminist divorce reformers," mobilized for their personal welfare. But the book also reveals how deeply these women remained invested in a social welfare system that grants rights to special "deserving" groups of people at the expense of others. Over and over again, Kahn shows how these women failed to build connections with less privileged, unmarried mothers or [End Page 353] to fight for universal social welfare benefits. Ultimately, Kahn argues, feminist divorce reformers used marriage to maintain their own class status and racial power. While studies such as Robert Self's All in the Family (2012) and Alison Lefkovitz's Strange Bedfellows (2018), have highlighted the ways the feminist movement culturally and legally destabilized the male-breadwinner model of marriage, Divorce, American Style reveals just how reluctant some feminists were to give up a marriage-based vision of social welfare, given their previous investment in it. A national transformation in divorce law that made divorce cheaper, easier, and less stigmatizing, catalyzed the feminist divorce reform movement Kahn traces. In 1966, a group of lawyers, judges, and law professors from across the country drafted the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (UMDA) which called for replacing the nation's fault-based system of divorce, in which one spouse had to prove the other "guilty" of some specific legal transgression. Instead, according to the UMDA, judges could declare a marriage "irretrievably broken" without having to prove fault. By 1974, forty-five states had a no-fault divorce option, thus relieving unhappily married couples from having to perjure themselves—by lying in court about instances of cheating or physical abuse—or go through the expensive process of establishing residency in a state with more liberal divorce laws. These legal changes also altered the process of determining financial support. Under the no-fault regime, a dependent wife who was found not to be at fault could be granted alimony, or ongoing financial support. The UMDA, however, encouraged judges to determine shorter-term "maintenance" payments based on how long they imagined it would take a dependent spouse to become financially independent. While some states adopted such limited provisions to protect former housewives, many states did not adopt any legal safeguards for them at all. Beginning with sociologist Lenore Weitzman's...