ABSTRACT
In her 1985 book, The Divorce Revolution, Stanford University sociologist Lenore Weitzman stated that an economic consequence of no-fault divorce is that women’s standard of living drops an average of 73 percent
in the first year after divorce, whereas men’s rises 42 percent. Although sociologists challenged these figures almost immediately, they were the figures that stuck. They were cited in more than 100 national magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times and Cosmo, at congressional hearings, in more than 250 law review articles, in at least 24 state appellate and Supreme Court cases, and by the Supreme Court itself [1]. They were the figures of choice of critics of no-fault divorces seeking to overturn or block no-fault divorce legislation. The fact that they were inconsistent with other findings and had not been verified mattered little, if at all. A hot statistic was too good not to be true.
