ABSTRACT
Divorce has become the number-one social and economic problem for women and children. The divorce rate exploded in the seventies, with nearly one out of two marriages ending in the courts. The egalitarian ideal behind no-fault is to treat the marital partners as equal autonomous adults with the ability to make decisions without the intrusion of the courts, thereby avoiding messy court battles. No-fault was widely favored by feminists and progressive groups as a way of promoting individual freedom. No-fault divorce, which swept through nearly all the states in the seventies, is not the only cause of the divorce revolution, but it removed the moral and economic sting from a previously forbidding legal procedure and allowed millions of people to do what until then was for them the unthinkable. Making divorce easier has been an economic disaster for women and children. The rationale behind the old divorce laws was protection rather than equality.
