How no-fault divorce laws reshaped who gets to leave a marriage

California's 1969 law removed the legal barriers to exit. More than 50 years later, the right it created is under renewed political attack

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Before the 1970s, a wife who wanted out of a bad marriage faced a legal gauntlet designed, in practice, to keep her in it. She had to prove her husband had committed a specific wrong: adultery, cruelty, or abandonment. If she couldn't, or if both spouses shared blame, the court could deny the divorce altogether. Until the late 1960s, divorce laws required the petitioning party to prove fault to obtain a divorce, and a person could not divorce their spouse merely because they were unhappy. That system didn't prevent marital misery. It prevented exits from it.

The legal mechanism that changed this is one most people have heard of, but few fully understand: no-fault divorce. It is the infrastructure beneath today's striking data on women leaving marriage, including the finding that women initiate about 70% of divorces overall and close to 90% among college-educated couples. The law didn't cause those numbers alone. But it made them possible.

What the old system required

Before no-fault divorce was available, spouses seeking divorce would often allege false grounds. Removing the incentive to perjure was one motivation for the no-fault movement. Under fault-based statutes, the filing spouse had to identify specific misconduct by the other party and prove it in open court. By the 1920s, the actual operation of the legal system was "completely at odds with statute and case law," as lawyers began advising clients on how to manufacture legal fictions to bypass statutory requirements.

One method popular in New York was "collusive adultery," in which the husband would check into a hotel........

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