[Indexed as: Gunther, Max, “The Fraternity of Crippled Men,” The New York Times Magazine (N.Y.), Sep. 19, 1965]

One bitterly cold day in November, 1964, an elderly man named Edward Eddington marched up and down outside the New York Civil Prison on West 37th Street. The prison, a former police station, is most often called “Alimony Jail” in reference to one of its common uses, and it was such that Edward Eddington addressed it that day. He had recently done time there for failure to pay alimony, and he carried a sign urging that the jail be abolished. In fact, he wanted the whole institution of alimony abolished.

Toward the end of the day a slim, dark-haired man named S. William Klein approached Eddington on the sidewalk. Klein, looking prosperous in a conservative dark suit and overcoat, seemed distinctly out of place in this rather grimy neighborhood. He was a stockbroker from Wall Street.

“I’m her for just one reason, Mr. Eddington,” said S. William Klein, falling into step alongside the lonesome picket. “I want to shake your hand.”

That a man would go so far out his way to simply shake a stranger’s hand suggests a certain depth of emotion. Alimony (from the Latin alere, to nourish) affects people that way. Klein had not been paying alimony as long as Eddington (four years, against Eddington’s 30), but he considered himself to be in the same boat. “The minute you hear the judge sentence you to alimony,” he says, gloomily, “you join a fraternity of crippled men.”

The meeting between Klein and Eddington that wintry day had a not very surprising result. The two men, with a group of others equally embittered, have formed an organization called Alimony Limited, with the objective of publicizing the alimony-paying man’s plight and eventually (“perhaps not in our lifetime”) doing away with alimony altogether. Alimony Limited now has some 200 members, mostly in the New York metropolitan area. It is loosely affiliated with a larger, older group that has headquarters in California and chapters in 30-odd other states: United States Divorce Reform, Inc. Such groups have been springing up throughout the country in the past 10 years and can almost be said to have proliferated in the past three or four. They represent a sudden surge of antialimony feeling and philosophizing. The viewpoint they champion is understandably most noticeable among divorced men. But it is shared by a few divorced women and a number of lawyers and other impartial observers.

“Alimony is an anachronism and has been one for years,” says a suburban Connecticut lawyer who has helped unmarry many Fairfield County couples. “Understand, I’m not talking about child support. I mean strictly alimony – the salary paid to a woman for the sole reason that she was once married. Alimony originated centuries ago when a woman had little chance to earn her own livelihood. In fact, woman of so-called ‘good’ families simply couldn’t work for a living. Most didn’t know how to, and social custom forbade it, anyway. So it was only fair to make a man support his ex-wife. Today an able-bodied woman can get a job as easily as a man can. Why should she get a free ride through life?

This is the nub of what promises to be an increasingly shrill argument. There are many who, while they agree that social changes have taken place since alimony was invented, doubt that the changes have been as far-reaching as antialimony groups claim.

“Sure, I could get a job,” says an attractive Manhattan divorcee in her mid-40s. “But what kind of a job?” Listen, I married right after college. I agreed to be my husband’s cook and housekeeper and raise his children. I voluntarily gave up my change of training for a career, and in return my husband agreed to share his salary with me as it grew. This is the deal a man and woman make when they marry. Now that my husband doesn’t want me around any more, I’m over 40 and not trained to be anything but maybe a $75 a week gal Friday. My husband’s salary is nearly 10 times that much. Is it fair to let him wriggle out of the deal and drop me back to a working girl’s income?”

The argument is a complicated and vexing one, with reason on both sides and no immediately obvious solution that can satisfy everybody. The only thing that can be said about it for sure is that it will continue to expand their beachhead in the world of business. (Title VII of the new U. S. Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination in hiring, firing and promotion because of sex – and is often and loudly referred to in antialimony propaganda.)

The volume of the debate will also be swelled by the sheer number of divorced people in the United States. As their number has grown, so has their tendency to band into groups and become vocal. According to the Bureau of the Census, there were 84,000 divorce men and 115,000 divorced women living in the country in 1900, together making up less than 1 per cent of the total United States population aged 14 and older. In 1963 there were some 1.3 million divorced women, a vociferous 5 per cent of the marriageable population.

New York’s divorce rate (0.4 divorces per 1,000 people per year, against a national average of 2.3) is the lowest of all 50 states – not demonstrably because New Yorkers make the best spouses, but because New York has the toughest legal requirements for divorce. The other two states in the New York metropolitan area, New Jersey and Connecticut, also have divorce rates far below the national average (respectively 0.8 and 1.1). But people from this wealthy area often go elsewhere to obtain divorces, and residents of other states often migrate to New York after divorce to savor the non-domestic excitements of big-city life. Thus, the number of alimony payers and recipients in the metropolitan area is about the same as in the country as a whole. Roughly 1 out of 20 adults you pass on a New York sidewalk is divorced.

There are no reliable statistics on the amount of alimony paid each year, any more than there are statistics on how many gallons of tears are shed in the process. Courts do not commonly keep neat tabulations of alimony payments ordered, and in any case many alimony arrangements are made out of court, in private conclave between spouses and lawyers. The only national alimony figure available is an outright guess, often mentioned in antialimony circles like some sephuchral motto; $4 billion a year. The guess is based on other guesses: that roughly three-fourths of the roughly 2 million divorced women in the country are collecting alimony, and that their average take is $50 a week.

“Whatever the figure is, its too big,” says Reuben Kidd, founder and president of United States Divorce Reform (U.S.D.R.). “Now, don’t get me wrong. If a divorced wife has to care for kids or can’t work for some other reason, her ex-husband should help her along until the situation changes. That’s only fair. The trouble is, courts go too far in what they think of as protecting the wife. The husband almost never gets a fair shake in court.”

The complaint is uttered so often in antialimony circles that it seems at times to be the main issue – and perhaps it is. “New York’s divorce law sees a husband as an opponent to be clobbered,” charges Harvey Seifert, a reddish-haired radio technician who is president and chief pamphleteer of Alimony Limited. “He is a bounder who plans to leave his wife and kids shivering unprotected in the storms of life. By contrast, the wife is treated with slobbering sentimentality. As the law sees it, alimony’s prime purpose is not to support a needy wife, but to punish the husband.”

Some judges (not many) admit there is partial truth in such charges. “Male promiscuity and female virtue have long been the adult version of the nursery rhyme about what little boys and girls are made of,” Florida Judge C. Pfeiffer Trowbridge wrote two years ago in the Florida Bar Journal. Rather sadly, Judge Trowbridge admitted that the nursery-rhyme view of the sexes dominates the courtroom and often costs the husband money. Usually, for example, said the judge, he awards custody of children to the supposedly more moral parent, the mother – even in cases where it would be more practical and cheaper for the father to have custody. “I admit that many cases have been decided in the husband’s favor . … They are the exception, however.”

The law profession in general does not go along with such maverick statements. “Bias against the male? That’s a lot of malarkey,” says a Connecticut clerk. “I’ve sat through hundreds of divorce cases, and sometimes the wife wins and sometimes the husband wins, Men gripe more, that’s all.”

“Naturally, in anything as emotional as a divorce case, people are going to come out thinking they’ve been given a raw deal,” say Gerald Barandes of a New York firm specializing in matrimonial law. “But the law tries to be fair. The courts aren’t inclined to award alimony as a bonus or consolation prize to the wife. Many factors are considered in making an award: how old the wife is, whether she has ever worked, how long the marriage has later, and so on. If a young woman marries a man and divorces him a year later, still childless, she isn’t likely to get alimony simply as a reward for having shared the man’s bed – not in New York anyway.”

It is hard to get at the truth behind the charges of antimale bias. In part, certainly, the embittered feelings of husbands are a public-relations problem of the courts. A divorce is seldom a pleasant affair, and a man coming out of it with part of his income confiscated (rough average: one-third) may understandably feel he has been through a giant chopping machine. Whether he has been treated fairly or not, he is not likely to be satisfied with the outcome.

Alimony payers are collectors of injustice stories. They seem to derive some black enjoyment from tales of legal maltreatment. Reuben Kidd, for instance, a big dark-haired man with a vague resemblance to Robert Ryan, begins his bitter narrative by mentioning he was awarded a medal for combat heroism for World War II. “I fought for freedom,” he says. “Freedom for almost all Americans, including my wife – but not including me.”

Kidd consulted a lawyer when his childless marriage began to break up. Listen, said the lawyer, “whatever you do, don’t bring the money question to court. California courts will murder you. Negotiate a private settlement with your wife beforehand. Whatever she asks for, take my word, it’ll be less than a court would award her.”

Kidd’s wife asked for, and got, a substantial share of Kidd’s property. What seems to have stabbed Kidd most deeply is the fact that his settlement included some Army pay he had saved during the war, before marriage. “One of the things we were fighting for in that was,” he notes gloomily, “was the right to own property – freedom from legal confiscation.” Reuben Kidd came out of this experience howling mad and promptly organized U.S.D.R.

S. William Klein, cofounder of Alimony Limited, is unhappy not only about the outcome of the divorce case, but also about the procedure in general. His case was heard in December, 1960. “I spent five or six days in New York Supreme Court,” he recalls, “almost the whole time was spent arguing about money. I felt like a criminal on trial, under cross-examination. Was I telling the whole truth about my income? How did I dress? Where did I eat lunch?” In the end, Klein was ordered to pay alimony and child support (two children) of $125 a week. This was at the time, he says, when his income from stock commissions was unusually high. Two years later he was earning slightly more than half as much, he applied for a reduction in alimony. But he didn’t get it. “I’m still paying $125 a week, and it’s strangling me.”

An alimony payers’ bull session brings forth floods of even greater bitterness. Almost inevitably, alimony payers who have grumbled for a few minutes and built up a head of steam will turn to the subject of sin as a byproduct of alimony. Many states, including New York, require that alimony payments be terminated when the ex-wife remarries. “So what does the little woman do when she meets a new man she likes?” asks Reuben Kidd. “Marry him and lose her alimony man’s check? Hell No! She lives with him, shares his income and keeps getting her alimony. You see, alimony is actually an invitation to scoff at the marriage laws.”

It is difficult to say how common this practice is among divorcees. It probably is not as common as antialimony propagandists would contend. But a U.S.D.R. member in Florida, in an angry letter written to a men’s magazine, contends that it is virtually a way of life in some Florida leisure towns. “There are whole communities down here,” he writes, “whole communities, populated by people from their 30’s to their 60’s, living in sin. Half the women are widows who don’t want to lose Social Security money by remarrying. The other half are divorcees who don’t want to lose their alimony. It makes me sick to think this is what my money checks are being used for.”

Nonorganized alimony payers are not always as bitter. “Yes, it’s a cross to bear,” says a New York publicity writer who, required to live on 55 per cent of his income, shares an apartment with two other divorced men. “But look, I’m still alive. I eat well. I have fun. Each month when I mail that alimony check I tell myself, ‘Charlie, this is to buy your freedom.” It’s high-priced, but so is anything worth buying.”

Probably the majority of alimony arrangements are made out of court, as in Reuben Kidd’s case. If a New York man and wife want to get a Mexican mutual-consent divorce, for example, or a Nevada divorce based on the literally interpreted ground of “cruelty,” the wife’s lawyer will usually insist that an agreement about money be worked out beforehand. “Depending on how hard it is worked out, says Gerald Brandes, “such an agreement can be set up as a private contract, or it can be incorporated into the divorce decree of a foreign state. Either way, if it’s properly done, it’s enforceable in New York.” And either way, as in Reuben Kidd’s case, the terms of the agreement are bound to be influenced by what a court would allow if the case were taken to court.

Antialimony groups claim that courts have been growing steadily more generous with divorcing husbands’ money, though there are no reliable statistics to back up the claim. Certainly, some huge alimony awards have been reported in recent years. Late in 1964, for instance, New York socialite Patricia Ann Shephard won temporary alimony of $3,000 a week while in the process of divorcing Bruce V. Norris. This is believed to be a record high among published awards, though unpublished ones may have been higher, Norris, a multimillionaire, got small sympathy from the public, but his case was feverishly noted by antialimony groups as a dramatic sign that ex-wives are being given more and more. “This kind of thing makes us worry for the little guy, the middle-income guy,” says Harvey Seifert. “With these tremendous awards in the papers every week, you can no longer believe alimony is figured on the basis of need.”

The record $3,000 a week was awarded in New York, which gave fuel to the contention of Alimony Limited that New York hates husbands more than do other states. But alimony payers in other states take macabre pride in their own files of injustice stories. Californians for instance, yield to no one in the matter of who gets clobbered hardest; neither do ex-husbands in Florida, Oklahoma, Maine or Illinois. The fact is, judging from what evidence is available, that there is no important difference among the states in alimony practices – with a few exceptions. Texas has no provision in its law for permanent alimony, though temporary alimony can be awarded and can be renewed over and over again. Pennsylvania, largely as a matter of case precedent, awards alimony only in cases of patent need. New Hampshire has a three-year time limit on alimony when the ex-wife has no children to raise.

European nations, to which our own laws can be traced historically, have substantially the same legal attitude toward divorce as do most American states. Alone among the great powers, Soviet Russia has the kind of alimony rules that U.S.D. R. would consider sensible. A Russian ex-wife gets alimony, in general, only when there is a likelihood that she would become a public charge without it.

Will American divorce and alimony practices ever be changed? Or are U.S.D..R., Alimony Limited and all other such groups simply gripe clubs, all petulant sound and silly fury, signifying nothing?

There is a distinct possibility that these groups will actually work real changes in the law. In California, for instance, two U.S.D.R. members have written and are circulating a document called an “initiative.” California law provides that, if a specified number of citizens sign an initiative, it can gain roughly the status of a legislative bill, bypass the State Legislature and be voted upon directly by the people in the next general election (in this case, 1966).

The U.S.D.R. initiative calls for the abolishment of divorce courts as now constituted and the establishment of Family Arbitration Centers instead. These centers would abandon to so-called “adversary” concept of divorce, historically entrenched in California as in New York, under which one spouse must accuse another of some wrongdoing in order to get unmarried. The adversary concept leads to bitterness, says U.S.D.R., and almost always leads to a situation in which the wife and her lawyer are trying to gouge as much cash as possible out of the husband. Instead of asking who is guilty of what, U.S.D.R.’s proposed centers would try to get everybody calmed down, would forget the whole idea of “grounds” for divorce and would strive for fair, amicable settlements. Divorce would become the province of social workers, financial counselors and psychiatrists, rather than lawyers.

A somewhat similar bill was filed in the Maine legislature early this year by Representative Stanley Harvey, not a member of any antialimony group but lustily cheered by U.S.D.R.’s Maine chapter. Harvey’s bill would set up a Department of Family Relations, which would have authority to grant divorces without reference to “grounds.” Childless couples asking for divorce by mutual consent would be granted their wish automatically. A needy ex-wife might be given alimony (it would probably be called something else), but at the same time would be referred to a job counselor who would help her become financially independent in time. Harvey’s bill has been debated desultorily, but there has not yet been any decisive action on it.

Harvey’s bill and U.S.D.R.’s initiative represent a recurrent daydream of those who have been hurt financially by divorce: a dream of diviorce engineered by benelovent psychologists instead of nasty lawyers, stern judges and the uncaring machinery of law. Alimony payers as a group hate lawyers. In fact, U.S.D.R. in some of its publicity flatly alleges that the states’ present divorce and alimony laws are guarded by sinister “power structures” of lawyers who derive income from matrimonial practice. But whether the family-center or kindly sociologist idea would work better than the present legal system has yet to be tested.

On other fronts, antialimony groups have recently been trying to get colleagues elected to public office on divorce-reform platforms. None have yet won election, but all have won what U.S.D.R. considers useful publicity. U.S.D.R. vice-president Jay Burchett, for instance, ran for a seat in the California State Assembly in 1964. Little daunted by his defeat, he has now announced his intention to try for the United States Senate. He plans to run against Senator Thomas H. Kuchel in next year’s Republican primary election. “I don’t expect to win,” he says humbly, “but by keeping myself in the public eye I hope to draw attention to the need for divorce and alimony reform. I want people to start thinking. Sooner or later people who think will act.”

In New York, pressure for divorce reform so far has come mainly from the New York Bar Association. The association’s Special Committee on Matrimonial Law, headed by Howard H. Spellman, is drafting a whole new set of divorce regulations to replace those that have been on the state’s statute books, virtually unchanged, for 178 years. Among other things, the proposed new laws would introduce new legal grounds for divorce in New York (adultery is the only one recognized at present). The State Legislature has empowered a special committee of its own to study this and other proposed changes in the law.

The bar association is pressing for reform not particularly because it is sorry for alimony payers, but because, in its view, New York’s present strict laws encourage fraud and perjury among people who want divorces at any cost. However, a few changes in alimony rules might slip in among other revisions. Among the proposals being studied by the legislative committee, for instance, is an alimony time limit something like New Hampshire’s.

“A revision of New York’s matrimonial laws has almost come,” says Spellman optimistically. But the kind of revision alimony payers want – a complete turn-around in official philosophy regarding what a divorced man and wife owe each other – still seems decades in the future, if that close. It will take a lot more social change to obscure Judge Trowbridge’s nursery-rhyme view of the sexes, or to nullify the generals feeling that a lone woman needs protection and financial help. “And,” says one angry young U.S,D.R. man, “it’ll be a long time before we get rid of the religious notion that divorce is sinful and, therefore, somebody ought to pay for it.”

A long time, but it can happen. “We’ll get there,” promises Reuben Kidd, “step by step.”

NOTES

“so-called ‘adversary’ concept of divorce” – The author is imprecise here. The adversarial aspect which is criticized by activists is fundamental to all American law (based on English common law) and thus when the adversarial aspect is criticized in divorce law, there is an implicit demand to remove divorce from the standard American legal process which is always based on an adversarial concept. The opposition of the concepts of “fault”-based and “no fault” divorce is not one of an adversarial concept as opposed to a non-adversarial one. Both are based on adversarial law. It is the misunderstanding of the fundamentally adversarial aspect of American law that has led to the failure of the “no-fault” divorce model to eliminate unfairness. In “no-fault” divorce “guilt” per se may have been abandoned but all other aspects of the case are dealt with under an adversarial concept and procedure.

Activists:

Burchett, Jay – U.S.D.R member

Eddington, Edward – co-founder, with S. William Klein, of Alimony Limited, headquartered in New York, N. Y.

Kidd, Reuben – founder and president of U.S.D.R. (United States Divorce Reform, Inc.), California, originally called Divorce Busters (founded 1960); Kidd had no children when he founded the organization

Klein, S. William – co-founder, with Edward Eddington, of Alimony Limited, headquartered in New York, N. Y.

Seifert, Harvey– member of Alimony Limited