When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz

The right liked to blame the rise of feminism for the new regime of divorce, but the trend toward no-fault laws in the states predated the women’s movement. In any case, the new laws were not really proposed to institute gender parity as much as to put an end to the often needlessly painful and difficult courtroom dramas required by “at-fault” divorces: even couples who mutually wanted to part had to contrive situations where one party could be implicated in misbehavior to the law’s satisfaction. Courts often winkingly colluded in these charades. Whatever its consequences, no-fault was as much about making a concession to reality and reforming institutionalized dishonesty as about signaling a great ideological change in society. Still, conservatives imagined a grand historical narrative of decline and destruction: according to National Review, no-fault divorce was the drawn-out consequence of the Protestant Reformation and “the domestic equivalent of a political revolution,” sharing with historical revolutionaries “a common willingness to scrap a civilization … and start again.”