How no-fault divorce laws reshaped who gets to leave a marriage

California's 1969 law removed the legal barriers to exit. More than 50 years later, the right it created is under renewed political attack

By Ambia Staley6 min readUpdated May 20, 2026

Add QZ to Google

How no-fault divorce laws reshaped who gets to leave a marriage

Daniel de la Hoz / Getty Images

Before the 1970s, a wife who wanted out of a bad marriage faced a legal gauntlet designed, in practice, to keep her in it. She had to prove her husband had committed a specific wrong: adultery, cruelty, or abandonment. If she couldn't, or if both spouses shared blame, the court could deny the divorce altogether. Until the late 1960s, divorce laws required the petitioning party to prove fault to obtain a divorce, and a person could not divorce their spouse merely because they were unhappy. That system didn't prevent marital misery. It prevented exits from it.

The legal mechanism that changed this is one most people have heard of, but few fully understand: no-fault divorce. It is the infrastructure beneath today's striking data on women leaving marriage, including the finding that women initiate about 70% of divorces overall and close to 90% among college-educated couples. The law didn't cause those numbers alone. But it made them possible.

What the old system required

Before no-fault divorce was available, spouses seeking divorce would often allege false grounds. Removing the incentive to perjure was one motivation for the no-fault movement. Under fault-based statutes, the filing spouse had to identify specific misconduct by the other party and prove it in open court. By the 1920s, the actual operation of the legal system was "completely at odds with statute and case law," as lawyers began advising clients on how to manufacture legal fictions to bypass statutory requirements.

One method popular in New York was "collusive adultery," in which the husband would check into a hotel with a hired "mistress," a photographer would suddenly appear, and the resulting photos would be presented in court so the judge could convict the husband of adultery and grant the divorce. The system was, in effect, a theater of blame. It punished honesty and rewarded fabrication. And because women had fewer economic resources and less legal power, the burden of performing this theater fell on them.

The National Association of Women Lawyers began working to change this as early as 1947, in what the organization later described as "the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken." But the push would take two more decades to break through.

California's 1969 revolution

California was the first U.S. state to enact a no-fault divorce law, signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan. The Family Law Act of 1969, which became effective Jan. 1, 1970, abolished California's action for divorce and replaced it with a proceeding for dissolution of marriage based on irreconcilable differences.

The law's intellectual architect was Herma Hill Kay, a UC Berkeley law professor. Kay worked on no-fault divorce laws through her appointment to Governor Pat Brown's Commission on the Family, whose report paved the way for California's adoption of its no-fault statute in 1969. She later co-authored the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, which became a model for other states.

The change spread fast. In the decade and a half that followed, virtually every state in the Union enacted a no-fault divorce law of its own. From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled, from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6. New York was the last state to enact a no-fault law in 2010.

The connection between these laws and women's welfare is not abstract. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers examined the impact of no-fault divorce laws adopted by states in the 1970s and '80s and found decreased rates of suicide, domestic violence, and spousal homicide for women, according to their research published through the National Bureau of Economic Research. Looking longer term, they found close to a 20% decline in female suicides 20 years after the change to no-fault divorce.

Why it matters that women do the leaving

Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld found that women initiated 69% of all divorces, compared to 31% for men, using data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. The finding echoed decades of prior research. Women have had a "predominant role in initiating divorces in the U.S. as far back as there is data from a variety of sources, back to the 1940s," Rosenfeld noted.

But his study contained a critical insight. Women initiated 69% of the 92 divorces in his sample, but there was no statistically significant difference between women and men when it came to nonmarital breakups. The asymmetry existed only within marriage. Rosenfeld said his results support the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable, adding that "marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality."

No-fault divorce did not create this dissatisfaction. What it did was remove the legal barrier between that dissatisfaction and action. Under the old system, a wife who was unhappy but not beaten, neglected but not abandoned, had no recognized grounds for divorce. No-fault gave her a recognized reason: The marriage is irretrievably broken. That was enough.

The political contest over exit

That right is now under renewed scrutiny. Lawmakers in several states, including Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, have introduced or discussed legislative proposals that could restrict or eliminate no-fault divorce. In January 2024, Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers introduced SB 1958, a bill to modify the grounds for divorce. Texas lawmakers tried again in 2025 to eliminate no-fault divorces with House Bill 3401, but the bill was rejected on June 2, 2025. In Indiana, the House voted in February 2025 to withdraw House Bill 1684, which would have required couples with children to provide evidence of an "irretrievably broken" marriage rather than simply asserting it.

In a 2016 sermon, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said that no-fault divorce, along with abortion and feminism, had turned America into a "completely amoral society," according to Reckon — remarks made in the context of blaming mass shootings on cultural changes since the 1960s. As of early 2025, no state has officially repealed no-fault divorce, though discussions continue in several legislatures.

The pattern of these proposals is consistent: They aim to reintroduce friction into the exit process, whether through fault requirements, witness mandates, or extended waiting periods. Domestic violence advocates have pushed back. "HB 1684 is a terrible idea," said Kelly McBride, executive director of the Domestic Violence Prevention Network. "Victims of domestic violence are not believed when they come forward so many times."

The contest over no-fault divorce is, at bottom, a contest over who controls the terms of exit from marriage. For more than half a century, the answer has been: either spouse, for any reason. The efforts to change that answer have so far failed. But the fact that they keep surfacing, in state after state, signals that the legal architecture women have relied on to leave marriage is not as settled as it appears.

The essential business news, delivered fresh every morning.

Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.

By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.