No Safety Net

Comment from a post titled, the Safety Net from Darwin Catholic, citing a Salon article about a stay at home mom who regets her decision when later on she ends up divorced.

It's not no-fault divorce that's created this problem for non-working wives--no-fault divorce was a necessary and good thing (legally speaking) that lifted the burden of collusive divorces, where both husband and wife lied in order to "qualify" for a divorce, from the courts. The blame lies on unilateral no-fault divorces, whereby one partner could simply legally abandon the other, plus the disappearance of alimony. These left marriage as one of the few areas in law where two parties are legally unable to enter into an enforceable contract, and created a strong disincentive for a division of labor within the marriage, no matter how beneficial that would be, as it would leave one partner uniquely vulnerable. (my emphasis) The legislatures and courts have succeeded in making American marriage far more power-imbalanced than marriage critics like Shaw could have imagined. The leftie in me can't help drawing parallels to the disappearance of union contracts for working men in the U.S. and the now-univerality of firing employees for "good, bad, or no reason."