The Pioneering Role of a Feminist Professional Organization to Promote No-Fault Divorce in the 1950s

What is it about?

A surviving pre-suffrage women's rights and professional organization, the National Association of Women Lawyers, drafted a model no-fault divorce reform Bill in 1952. The organization, that exists to this day, considered this effort its "greatest project" of the decade. Yet, when the divorce reform movement of the late 1960s took off, the women of NAWL, along with the Family Law Section of the ABA that they helped create, were marginalized. The reasons for that shed light on the state of divorce reform in the 1950s, the alleged culture of domesticity of the 1950s, and the continuity of women's activism in the so-called doldrums years.

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Why is it important?

Until now, NAWL’s campaign was an unstudied episode in the history of no-fault divorce reform, which has focused above all on the legal developments of the 1970s. NAWL’s project occurred at a time of significant social change in American families but when the legal establishment apparently could not summon the will to change old patterns of divorce law. The women lawyers were unique in that they advanced a concrete proposal for legislation. It is particularly fascinating, however, to view NAWL’s self-described “greatest project” in the context of who these women lawyers were: Historians have included NAWL in the so-called “core” of women’s rights organizations that survived after the achievement of suffrage in 1920 and continued to carry the torch of activism until a mass women’s movement revived in the mid-1960s. While by no means a tale of radical activism, the story of NAWL nonetheless confounds stereotypes about women in the 1950s.

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