This same article was posted on another magazine, so I’m reposting my comments from that thread here in response to comments left by @Retix@cassetti and @amberprince
Please know that the Venn diagram between me and DeSantis is razor thin, and the only thing (I think) we have in common is that we are carbon-based life forms. I also see some common sense items in what was described in the article, but I have my larger misgivings, which I’ll explain much further below.
Why alimony is important and necessary
Here’s why alimony is important for the rest of an ex-spouse’s life. I want to be clear that I believe a spouse of any gender should have access to alimony, but the most traditional situation is a woman who forfeited having a career outside of the home to be a mother and homemaker, while a man furthered his career for - let’s just say - a long enough time that once the divorce occurs, it’s too late for the woman to reasonably start a career and expect to rise to the same level the man is at in his career at time of divorce. Let’s use an arbitrary number like 20 years for my example. Let’s assume these two people met and married no later than 25 years old for the sake of my example, as well. Alimony is not relevant for couples married for very short periods (less than 5 years), nor is it relevant if both spouses worked full-time jobs.
So in my example here, both people are about 40-45 years old. Retirement age is going to vary by industry, but roughly let’s say 65 years old. By this point, the man has paid into either a 401k, pension, a Roth IRA, or some other retirement financial tool for 20+ years as well as a federal retirement program, usually Social Security. One of the stipulations of paying into these financial tools is that you have to have a job in which you’re submitting W-2/I-9 documentation. A stipulation of receiving the money you paid into Social Security in specific, is that you have to make enough dollar-amount SS contributions that amount to a little more than 10 years of working a W-2/I-9 kind of job/career. And to boot, the amount of SS you get paid after retiring is based on your highest earning 35 years of your lifetime of work.
So when a woman has skipped college, not worked outside the home, hasn’t gained job skills, etc. etc. for 20 years, she is now coming back to the job market with zero tools and equipment to get into a career (though obviously could enter the workforce through a paycheck-to-paycheck poverty wages kind of job), has no Social Security credits for a retirement that is just about as far away for her as it is for her ex-spouse, and has no savings or other financial resources because she was a homemaker and didn’t earn money as her compensation for her labor. She is also now going into new situations at a time in life in which we have all lost neuroplasticity and may find it difficult to learn new things or go back to college. And we should also be realistic about the subtle/legal ways in which older people are discriminated against in the hiring process.
This is why alimony exists. It helps to make up for the opportunity-cost in an adult’s older career years and for lack of retirement security. When the members of the First Wives Association and other ex-spouses seek lifetime alimony, it’s because they either will never have access to their own Social Security benefits, or will have access to extremely scant benefits whenever they do retire.
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.
This same article was posted on another magazine, so I’m reposting my comments from that thread here in response to comments left by @Retix @cassetti and @amberprince