By Matt Stone
To blame feminism for the decline of the traditional family, if there ever was such a thing, is to accept something ugly without meaning to. It’s to admit the whole thing only held together because one person in it couldn’t get out.
Look at what “the old ways” actually required. In law, not in nostalgia.
Start with coverture. Under this doctrine, a married woman’s legal existence disappeared into her husband’s the moment she said “I do.” No right to own property. No right to sign a contract. No right to sue in her own name. No right, in a lot of cases, to keep the money she earned. This wasn’t a vibe. It was enforceable law, inherited straight from English common law, and pieces of it survived in parts of this country into the 1960s.
No-fault divorce didn’t exist anywhere in the United States until 1969. California went first. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the women’s rights movement had been calling for it for over a century before that, framed exactly as what it actually was: a woman’s right to self-ownership inside her own marriage. New York, of all places, was the last state to pass it. Not in some distant century. 2010.
Sit with that for a second.
Marital rape wasn’t a crime in all fifty states until 1993. A husband’s right to his wife’s body was law within a lot of living memory. Women, especially married women, often couldn’t get a credit card or a loan in their own name without a husband’s signature until 1974. None of this is ancient history. This is the actual legal architecture that made leaving nearly impossible, even in the rare moments when it was technically allowed.
Now here’s where the family instability argument gets flipped completely, using real data, not outrage.
Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers studied what actually happened once states adopted no-fault divorce. Wives’ suicide rates dropped 8 to 16 percent. Domestic violence dropped roughly 30 percent, for both men and women. Women murdered by their partners declined too.
Men saw no comparable change in any of these categories.
Giving women a real way out didn’t destabilize families…
It stopped people from dying inside them.
The instability was never the divorce. The instability was always the marriage, and divorce was just the first time anyone was allowed to admit it out loud.
A system that only survives once someone loses the ability to leave was never actually working. It was just successfully trapping people, and the data above proves it wasn’t the leaving that hurt anyone.
So, if it wasn’t feminism holding the traditional family up, what was?
Money. Plain and simple.
Wages for the bottom 70 percent of American earners have been flat since the late 1970s. The Economic Policy Institute doesn’t soften this. They call it the direct result of intentional policy choices made on behalf of those with the most income, wealth, and political power. Manufacturing jobs got shipped overseas, and with them went the ability of a man without a college degree to support a family on one paycheck. Adjusted for inflation, the average hourly wage in 2023 was only 12 percent higher than it was in 1980. Forty-three years. Twelve percent. Meanwhile productivity kept climbing the whole time, just not for the people actually doing the work.
Married women’s labor force participation went from 35 percent in 1966 to 61 percent by 1994. Dual-income households went from 30 percent of American families in 1970 to 70 percent by 2014.
Here’s the important part: Even in some fantasy version of history where every gender norm stayed frozen exactly where it was in 1955, that collapse still happens. Wages still stagnate. Jobs still leave the country. One income still stops being enough.
Feminism didn’t knock that leg out from under the table. Capitalism did, and it would have done it with or without a single woman ever demanding equal pay.
And this isn’t some settled argument about the past, either. Project 2025 has explicitly called for reversing no-fault divorce. Not studying it. Not debating it. Reversing it. The same people invoking “the traditional family” as something lost to feminism are, right now, drafting policy to take away the one legal tool proven to cut domestic violence by 30 percent and save women’s lives.
Say that part out loud and see how it sounds.
The traditional family wasn’t stable because it was good. It was stable because leaving wasn’t survivable, legally or financially, whichever one didn’t get you first. Once women could actually walk away, and once one paycheck stopped covering rent no matter whose name was on it, both of those props came out at the exact same time.
Only one of them has anything to do with feminism.
Blaming the wrong one isn’t an accident. It’s just easier than admitting what was actually holding the whole thing together in the first place, and easier still than admitting some people want it built back exactly the way it was.
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