No-Fault Divorce, Marriage, and Partnership Systems

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for “The Chalice and the Blade,” she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She has received many honours, including the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honour for Science and Art, the Nuclear Peace Leadership Award, earlier awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Center for Compassion Humanitarian Award, the Humanist Pioneer Award, and induction into the California Hall of Fame. She is President of the Center for Partnership Systems and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). These contributions amount to a second series with Eisler.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Riane Eisler on marriage, divorce, and partnership systems. Eisler explains why no-fault divorce was a necessary reform but often harmed economically dependent women and children when introduced into unequal systems. Drawing on law, history, and systems analysis, she examines coverture, caregiving, child support, religious authority, and relational dynamics. She argues that genuine partnership requires legal equality, economic fairness, and recognition of continuing parental and family responsibilities after marital dissolution in society.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would the partnership studies orientation be toward marriage and divorce, the relationship between the people involved, and the involvement of the state or religion?

Riane Eisler: Well, I don’t think religion needs to be involved, but it is optional, obviously.

I wrote a book called Dissolution: No-Fault Divorce, Marriage, and the Future of Women. It was first published by McGraw-Hill in 1977 and was later reissued. The original edition may no longer be readily available, given everything that has happened in publishing, but McGraw-Hill was a major publishing house. The book was very well received by the press and others.

Its theme was that, although no-fault divorce was an important and fair legal reform, it was not being implemented on a level playing field. The book anticipated a pattern that Diana Pearce later described as the “feminization of poverty.” Many divorced women and their children experienced serious economic decline because formal legal equality did not erase the economic inequalities already present within marriage.

Divorce was no longer treated primarily as a matter of proving that one spouse was at fault. It became the legal dissolution of a marriage. But you cannot simply dissolve the economic and parental responsibilities of a family. Those continue.

Under the older fault-based system, alimony could be tied to findings of marital fault. As no-fault divorce became widespread, long-term alimony became less automatic in many jurisdictions and was increasingly replaced by temporary or rehabilitative support. Child support did not disappear, but enforcement and adequacy remained serious problems. The difficulty was that the law changed without fully accounting for women’s unpaid caregiving, lower earnings, interrupted careers, and responsibility for children.

Basically, no-fault divorce laws were necessary reforms, but when introduced into an unequal economic system, they could leave women, particularly women who had been economically dependent during marriage, and their children at a severe disadvantage. Poor women already had very little economic protection to begin with.

So we are back to changing the system. I began to see the system, and our heritage of domination, through my own progression from having absolutely no consciousness of these issues to developing some awareness that the subordination of women is one of the four cornerstones of what I call domination systems.

That took a while. I have changed, and I continue to change. That is the funny part. Even at my age, I still learn. That is my view of marriage. It is an institution that has changed quite a bit over the centuries.

In Jesus’s time, for example, Jewish law permitted a husband to divorce his wife by giving her a written certificate of divorce. Women generally did not possess the same unilateral right under Jewish law, although practices differed under Roman law and in different communities.

When Jesus opposed divorce, and we are not usually told this, of course, he was intervening in a debate over how readily a man could dismiss his wife. His teaching challenged a permissive, male-dominated divorce practice of his time.

It was against the custom of a man being able to dismiss his wife and remove her from the marriage. Marriage was a very one-sided institution for a long time. A husband could dissolve it, while women were largely stuck in it and had few comparable choices.

When I entered my second marriage, I did not want a conventional marriage because of all the baggage attached to the terms “husband” and “wife,” especially under the English common-law doctrine that the United States inherited. Under the doctrine of coverture, husband and wife were legally treated as one person, and that person was effectively the husband.

Laws codify customs, habits, and norms. So I started putting the pieces together. I think being an attorney was very helpful in systems analysis because that is part of what you learn in law school. You learn how to brief and analyze a case.

A client does not come into your office and say, “Apply Section 1222 of the civil code, penal code, or whatever it may be to my case.” The client comes with a story, and it is up to the attorney to determine what case law and legislation apply.

I also became acquainted with the methodology of systems analysis very early, during the 1950s, when I worked for the System Development Corporation. Even though its work was not what I would call whole-systems analysis, its researchers believed they were taking a broad systems approach. Of course, the norms of the 1950s were so strong that women, children, and intimate relations were often excluded from the analysis.

But I learned about systems analysis. So I was well equipped to develop my own methodology, which became the study of relational dynamics. It looks at relationships first. What kinds of relationships does a particular system support or inhibit?

It also examines the relationships among the major components of a particular social system. I kept seeing patterns and configurations that repeated themselves across cultures and throughout history. That was because my methodology drew from a much larger database: the whole of humanity, in both its female and male forms; the whole of our history, including that very long period of prehistory; and, of course, the family and other intimate relationships in which we all live.

If you think about it, these areas are largely left out of conventional categories such as right versus left, religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, and capitalist versus socialist. These categories tend to marginalize or ignore the experiences of the majority of humanity, especially women and children.

Jacobsen: What are the common objections to no-fault divorce?

Eisler: One objection is that it is not punitive, because some people believe that somebody must be declared at fault. But the old fault system often depended on legal fictions or manufactured evidence.

Under fault-based divorce laws, a person could seek a divorce on grounds such as adultery, cruelty, abandonment, or other legally recognized misconduct. Incompatibility or irreconcilable differences later became common grounds for no-fault divorce because they did not require either spouse to prove wrongdoing.

So, in one sense, no-fault divorce was a movement toward a more partnership-oriented approach. But it was not implemented within a partnership-oriented economic system. Many middle-class women had believed that divorce laws would protect them. Under no-fault divorce, they discovered that the law did not necessarily protect them from the economic consequences of marital inequality.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Riane.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 1,900 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.