Community Property Laws

I'm not finding a good pull quote, but the piece Paternity touches on the fact that our ideas about marriage and laws about marriage are old and the social context in which those laws were written largely no longer applies. 

I've had relationships to older men who took responsibility for the relationship in ways men my age and younger typically no longer do. Tom Fejeran married his first wife because she was pregnant by him. In contrast, when I was afraid I was pregnant as a teenager, my boyfriend said "I'm not the father." 

I wasn't pregnant and he had reason to think he couldn't have gotten me pregnant, but there was no "Honey, you don't feel well. Can you get a test and not jump to conclusions?" or something like that. He simply leapt to covering his own ass.

Community Property Laws -- the idea that the wife is entitled to half of all assets if they divorce -- were written in a context where:

1. Birth control was essentially non-existent, so married couples typically had many children which made it nigh impossible for a woman to have a career at all.

2. There were no fast food places or refrigerators or microwave meals. A large part of what women did was cook from scratch to feed the family and it was a huge time sink equivalent to a full-time job.

3. There were no washing machines or dryers or vacuum cleaners. Cleaning up after a family of eight or ten people was an extremely laborious process done mostly by hand.

4. There was a lot less in the way of written books, there was no Internet etc. Having a smart wife who could serve as a sounding board was highly likely to be a large factor in career success for most men.

Basically, community property laws implicitly assume that she earned half his assets because he wouldn't have those assets without her as his wife.

Women today continue to earn less than men. I began reading feminist literature in my twenties trying to sort out how I ended up a 1950s style housewife after graduating at the top of my class. I found myself cooking and cleaning and supporting his career.

That's not what all wives do these days. There is a 1980 film called Gloria and the 1999 remake goes weird places.

In the remake, Sharon Stone as the titular character says something like "Women have the best deal in the world. All you got to do is marry and you are set for life."

Community property laws were never intended to be a winning lottery ticket where simply being a woman meant you would be taken care of without lifting a finger. They were written at a time when most people were struggling to survive and being a wife involved working sixty or more hours a week at very unglamorous work.

I once commented to my sister that the grocery store was a madhouse right before Thanksgiving "As if no one had any food in the house." And she said "They don't. People don't cook anymore."

In the world today, an upper class couple likely has a maid to do much of the cleaning and orders take out or delivery most days of the week. The wife frequently only nominally has a serious career and may be getting the occasional deal based on past accomplishments or perhaps because of her association with her husband.

I mean if he's actually happy with the marriage, there's nothing inherently wrong with enjoying the good life if you married well, but if he was already quite wealthy and they only have two or three kids, my suspicion is that a lot of established men are getting shafted by younger wives who have absolutely no plans to support his career the way I supported my husband's career and who instead see him as a winning lottery ticket in their Cinderella fairytale.

And these are likely old fashioned men who take their obligations to the wife and kids seriously and it would never cross their minds to argue that she didn't really earn her keep.

Worse, if you want your wife to be interesting and have a real career and have absolutely no desire to have the wife be your live-in maid and cook, this likely boils down to a sex for money deal in a world where the entire point of a wealthy man marrying her is to maintain respectability while actually getting his needs met.

So even if it occurred to him that it's a sex for money deal and he doesn't feel she delivered, good luck arguing that in the courts without effectively losing for bringing it up at all.

And as noted in The F Word, society no longer tolerates wealthy men having mistresses and wealthy men typically have a high sex drive. Career drive tends to be linked to sex drive.

So we have a situation where a wealthy man can play by the rules and do everything society asks of him and still have a chronic case of blue balls though a large part of his reason for doing all the stuff he did was to position himself such that he had a socially acceptable means to take care of his sexual needs.

And I believe closeted gay women trend towards being likely to marry well because "He has MONEY!" is the only thing about a man that ever excites them and I believe this promotes Social Pathology rooted in being closeted.

I have consistently viewed a man's wealth as a threat to be accounted for, not a potential winning lottery ticket. If a woman is marrying for his money and doesn't really like him as a person and is being psychologically warped by the situation, odds are high she's effectively a con artist counting on historically based community property laws to give her a winning lottery ticket no matter how badly she treats him so long as her shitty behavior falls below some obvious threshold like beating him senseless.

There are lots of ways to quietly shaft someone and make their life a living hell that would never be noticed by anyone else, especially if you live together and most interactions occur in private.

I'm not looking to shaft WOMEN here. There are still women who make significant personal sacrifices to support a man's career and I've written about that recently.

But I also don't want to see good men shafted. And we currently live in a world where it seems like playing by the rules is for chumps and fools and we only reward awful people who have figured out how to game the system and I don't believe that's the way you make a better world.