Research comparing the relative significance of economic exchange theories and gender norms on parents' division of income‐producing and domestic responsibilities often fails to consider sufficiently the role that marriage may play. This article shows that, in the United States, numerous aspects of state and federal law relating to marriage encourage spouses to specialize in distinct breadwinning and caretaking roles. Same‐sex marriage offers new opportunities to assess the importance of marriage in household labor allocation decisions while controlling for gender. For any data gathered before June 2015, however, it may be distorting to characterize same‐sex couples as simply “married” or “unmarried”; rather, legal recognition during the past 10 years is better conceptualized as discrete bundles of rights and tracked accordingly. This article, written by a legal scholar, provides substantive legal analysis that is integral to developing a research agenda in this area.
In recent years, domestic violence legislation has migrated out of its traditional locus in family law and criminal law to include a rapidly growing body of employment law. The new laws respond to a relatively simple problem: Economic security is one of the most important factors in whether a victim of domestic violence will be able to separate from an abusive partner, but domestic violence often interferes with victims' ability to maintain jobs, thus causing job loss that further traps victims in abusive relationships. By providing support to victims and empowering employers to take direct legal action against perpetrators of actual or threatened workplace violence, the new legislation helps employers and employees work together to address a shared interest in reducing the effects of domestic violence on the workplace. Thus, addressing domestic violence as an "employment" issue bolsters other strategies for combating domestic violence. Equally important, because the vast majority of victims of domestic violence are women, the new legislation complements traditional employment laws, such as Title VII and the Family and Medical Leave Act, that seek to promote sex equality by addressing a significant, though little recognized, barrier to women's full participation in the workplace. This Article situates the burgeoning body of new state legislation within developments in domestic violence law and employment law, particularly those relating to accommodation of individual needs within the workplace. It shows that domestic violence legislation modeled on employment law accommodation mandates, such as the Fam
This article brings together legal, historical, and social science research to analyze how couples allocate income-producing and domestic responsibilities. It develops a framework-what I call the marriage equation-that shows how sex-based classifications, (non-sex-specific) substantive marriage law, and gender norms interrelate to shape these choices. Constitutional decisions in the 1970s ended legal distinctions between the duties of husbands and wives but left largely in place both gender norms and substantive rights within marriage, tax, and benefits law that encourage specialization into breadwinning and caregiving roles. By permitting disaggregation of the marriage equation, the new reality of same-sex marriage can serve as a natural experiment that should inform both study design and policy reform.
Key Points for the Family Court Community:• This article shows that although marriage law no longer explicitly requires wives to provide domestic support and husbands to provide economic support, non-sex-specific aspects of the substantive law continue to encourage couples to specialize into breadwinning and caregiving rules.• Same-sex marriage can serve as a natural experiment to expose the extent to which substantive marriage law-as opposed to gender norms-may encourage couples to specialize into breadwinning and caregiving roles.• Research on same-sex marriage can help inform how best to achieve equality within all marriages and what is fair compensation for a dependent spouse in the event of a divorce.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.