The 20th century gave women a long list of legal advances: the franchise, equal pay legislation, reproductive rights, anti-discrimination employment law. Each gets its anniversary, its commemorations, its standard place in the syllabus. No-fault divorce — the right to end a marriage without proving adultery, abuse, or desertion — rarely makes the list. The data argues it should sit near the top.
The case isn’t symbolic. It’s measured in women’s lives.
What “fault-only” divorce actually meant
Before California’s 1969 Family Law Act, signed by Governor Ronald Reagan, U.S. divorce required one spouse to prove the other was at fault. Adultery, cruelty, and desertion were typical grounds; standards of proof varied by state but were demanding. A wife seeking divorce had to publicly document her husband’s misconduct or, if both spouses wanted out, manufacture grounds through collusive perjury. Battered wives needed corroborating witnesses and physical evidence, often from a generation that didn’t intervene in marital violence. Women without independent income, social support, or evidence were effectively trapped.
By 1985, most U.S. states had adopted some form of no-fault divorce. The reform spread fast because lawyers, judges, and reformers across the political spectrum recognized the existing system was producing perjury at industrial scale and trapping women in genuinely dangerous marriages.
The mortality data
Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, in a widely-cited 2006 paper, examined state-by-state divorce-law changes and the lagged effects on female mortality. They found that no-fault divorce was associated with about a 20% decline in female suicide rates and a roughly 30% decline in domestic violence (both reported and unreported, measured through homicide statistics). The effects emerged over roughly a decade after each state’s reform and were robust across statistical specifications.
Note what those numbers represent: a woman who could leave a violent marriage without proving fault did, and lived. A woman who could leave a soul-destroying marriage without performative humiliation did, and didn’t take her own life. The mechanism is depressingly simple. Exit options change behavior — both the would-be exiter’s and her partner’s.
The persistent backlash and the conservative case
Periodic conservative campaigns to repeal no-fault divorce — notably some current state-level efforts in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas — argue that easy divorce has weakened the family. The argument has academic defenders; divorce rates did rise after the reforms, though they have declined steadily since 1980 to roughly mid-20th-century levels.
The honest tradeoff is between marriage stability as a population-level statistic and individual exit ability for the worst-off marriages. The mortality data suggests the people most affected by repeal would be those least able to assemble evidence, retain attorneys, and survive litigation — exactly the women fault-only divorce was already failing in 1965.
Bottom line
No-fault divorce is rarely listed alongside suffrage and Title IX in the canonical achievements of 20th-century women’s legal history. The omission says more about who writes those histories than about the actual stakes. A reform that demonstrably saved tens of thousands of women’s lives, mostly from the men who claimed to love them, deserves the recognition that more photogenic legal milestones routinely receive.
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