For the past fifteen years I have taught a course in Family Law at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. At the start of each semester I take a poll to gauge my student’s predispositions concerning Family Law. Without fail, the poll indicates that a vast majority of the students believe that the Family Courts generally favor women in divorce actions. My personal experience after nearly 2 decades of Family law practice assures me that the application of Family Law is gender neutral; however, my students’ misconception seems to pervade the general population as well.

Our Family Laws have been drafted to be gender neutral. New Jersey’s custody statute specifically states that each parent has an equal right to have primary custody of their children. Alimony can be awarded to either gender and I can attest to the fact that there are many women paying alimony to their ex-husbands. There was a time when many states only allowed for alimony to be awarded to women. Those statutes were found to be unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1979, not because they were unfair to men, but because the policy reasons behind the statutes were archaic. Those policies reasons essentially stated that women should not have careers and should stay at home and be subservient to men; hence, women could never be able to pay alimony. Needless, to say, the Supreme Court was not impressed with those arguments and struck down all alimony statutes that were not gender neutral. The reality is that until recent times, Family Laws across the nation were patently unfair to women. In the past, upon marriage, a woman’s property automatically and irrevocably became her husband’s property. Indeed, a married woman essentially became her husband’s property and there were some state statutes that actually codified that notion. The custom of a woman assuming her husband’s surname came from the archaic notion that a woman’s identity was subsumed by her husband upon marriage. Studies showed that women often faced a life of poverty after a divorce, while men saw increases in their standard of living.

Women have been playing catch up since the advent of recorded history. Women were non-participants in the drafting of our Federal Constitution and, indeed, are not even mentioned in that document. Women didn’t even have the right to vote until 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. How much political power could they wield when they didn’t even have the right to vote?

In 1949 Simone DeBeauvoir of France released her classic book, “The Second Sex” (“Le Deuxieme Sexe”), which would become the mantra for the Women’s movement which took root in this country during the turbulent 1960’s and continues in more subtle forms through the present. In 1963 Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” which provided insight to the American woman’s dissatisfaction with the narrow role imposed upon them by society. That book further galvanized the women’s movement which has sometimes been referred to as the Women’s Liberation Movement and/or Feminism. However, its true essence was simply a matter of approximately fifty percent of the population seeking to be vested with the same rights and dignities as the other fifty percent.

Among other things, that movement was instrumental in the major reform of New Jersey’s Divorce laws which took place in 1971. Besides liberalizing the grounds for divorce, those new laws made New Jersey an “Equitable Distribution” state, which meant that women would now get a fair share of marital property, although it took at least a decade of Judicial applications of the new laws before equity would begin to take hold.

Women have successfully moved forward, although not without some resistance. Less than 20 years ago, working women, generally, only earned 60% of what their male counterparts were paid for the same work. Twenty five years ago our Law schools and Medical Schools admitted few women and, indeed, saw few female applicants. That has changed. New Jersey has elected a woman to be Governor twice, sending Christine Todd Whitman to the Governor’s mansion in 1994 and 2008. Deborah Poritz served as the Chief Justice of New Jersey’s Supreme Court from 1996 until her retirement in 2006. Locally, our Superior court is led by a woman - The Honorable Valerie Armstrong.

We have even changed our nomenclature in recognition of the advancement of women. The occupations of Firemen, Policemen, and Mailmen have given way to the more contemporary titles of Firefighters, Police Officers, and Mail Carriers. We have even changed the name of an entire section of our court system. The old Workmen’s Compensation Court is now known as Worker’s Compensation Court.

43 different Presidents have led this nation. They have all carried varying political philosophies but they have all had at least two things in common - they have all been white males. During the current Presidential primary season, one party is giving us two alternatives to that pattern. For the first time in our Nations history, there is a very real possibility that a woman, or a man of color, could be elected as our next President. But even if it doesn’t happen in 2008, it’s only a matter of time.

You’ve come a long way, Ladies.