Research

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Major Works:
Lenore J. Weitzman’s major works include many books and articles, such as: The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (1985), Women in the Holocaust ed 1998 Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998), The Marriage Contract: Spouses, Lovers, and the Law (1981) (First Search: WorldCat List of Records, 1992-2007), Sex Role Socialization: A Focus on Women (1979), The Status of Women in Society, 1968-1972. Report to the American Sociological Association of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (1973) with co-author Helen MacGill Hughes, Economic Consequences of Divorce: The International Perspectives (1991) with co-author Maclean Mavis (First Search: WorldCat List of Records, 1992-2007), The Economic Consequences of Divorce Are Still Unequal: Comment on Peterson (1996), To Love, Honor, and Obey? Traditional Legal Marriage and Alternative Family Forms (1975), When Husbands File for Divorce (1982) with co-author Ruth B. Dixon, and Evaluating the Impact of No-Fault Divorce in California (1980) with co-author Ruth B. Dixon, (JSTOR: Search Results, n.d.).

A Closer Look into Selected Works-

The Divorce Revolution:
In The Divorce Revolution, Weitzman documents the severely negative economic impact of no-fault divorce laws on women. Weitzman’s study contains extensive interviews with 169 Californian family law attorneys, 44 Superior Court judges, 144 recently divorced men, and 144 recently divorced women (View Record- CSA Sociological Abstracts database, 1985). She discusses how family law developed in the United states, the ideas about marriage and divorce as presented by the law, the failure of lax attempts to enforce child support payments, and is perhaps most quoted for the statistic claiming that the post-divorce standard of living increases by 42% for men, but decreases by 73% for women and children (View Record- CSA Sociological Abstracts database, 1985). A review of the book claims that Weitzman points to “inadequate court awards, greater demands on women’s resources, and men’s greater earning capacity” as the reason for the shameful discrepancy (View Record- CSA Sociological Abstracts database, 1985). As a remedy, The Divorce Revolution calls for the inclusion of pensions, education, insurance policies, social security benefits, and future earning capacity in the calculations of property gained during a marriage that is to be divided after divorce (View Record- CSA Sociological Abstracts database, 1985). Weitzman calls these assets “new property” which, when they remain uncounted in division of property, cause the husband to gain an unfair majority of assets that often a housewife has worked equally hard without a paycheck to secure (View Record- CSA Sociological Abstracts database, 1985). Such assets “are usually far more valuable than tangible marital assets” and it is a central concern of The Divorce Revolution to rectify the inequality (View Record- CSA Sociological Abstracts database, 1985)..
The Divorce Revolution has rendered astounding changes in the inequalities between the men and women who get divorced, which will be discussed presently. Yet it is significant to note that the easiest way to find out the extent of the impact Weitzman’s book has made is surprisingly by reading reviews that seem interested in discrediting it. Such reviews claim The Divorce Revolution contains hyperbolic misinformation centering around the 73/42 statistic. One of the main websites of this kind reports the book as having “had a critical role in shaping the national debate on divorce and its economic effects” (Rapp, n.d.). The article claims that the statistic has become the “philosophical basis” for divorce case decisions such as child custody and property division, and that it has been widely quoted by the press, scholars, and even President Clinton (Rapp, n.d.). Specifically, the critical article reports that Weitzman believes The Divorce Revolution has led to the enactment of 14 California laws, and that the 73/42 statistic was “cited in over 170 newspaper and magazine articles, 350 social science articles, 250 law review articles, 24 state appellate and supreme court cases, and one U.S. Supreme Court decision” (Rapp, n.d.).
The dramatic and clearly unjust difference in post-divorce standard of living for men and women rightfully shocked many people, and led Richard Peterson, a member of the Social Science Research Council, to perform and publish a review of Weitzman’s data (Rapp, n.d.). Peterson reportedly attempted to reproduce the study using the data samples and methods from The Divorce Revolution (Rapp, n.d.). In this attempt, Peterson “found that the information in Weitzman’s computer file in many cases did not match up with the paper records of the original respondent interviews” and that “income or needs data was missing for 134 of the respondents” for family size, age of the household head, oldest child, and other relevant variables was ‘problematic’ with notable ‘inconsistencies’” (Rapp, n.d.). Allegedly, Peterson was able to fix the file (how is unclear) and come up with a statistic stating that women declined only 27%, with men increasing 10% in the first year after a divorce- a figure that was somehow less maddening or shocking (Rapp, n.d.). Further claims made by the article are that using a ratio of income to needs does not incorporate all “revelant variables” for determining standard of living, and that Weitzman’s test sample was limited in number, time period, and location, in a way that produced the larger discrepancy (Rapp, n.d.). Therefore, while many reviews of The Divorce Revolution mention Peterson’s re-working of its data, others also claim that Peterson is still incorrect in not saying “that both women and men suffer economically after a divorce” based on other studies, like that of professors Gene Pollock and Atlee Stroup at the College of Wooster in Ohio (Rapp, n.d.).
In any case, Weitzman’s “study indicated the need for changes within the no-fault system of divorce which by 1986 was in place in 48 states.” (Rapp, n.d.). In Weitzman’s response to Peterson’s research, The Economic Consequences of Divorce Are Still Unequal: Comment on Peterson, she defends the integrity of her research as supported by large grants from NSF and NIMH, worked on in conjunction with “a scientific advisory board that included experts in social science methodology” and UCLA Survey Research Center which “did the interviews, coded the data, and subjected them all to a rather elaborate verification and retrieval procedure” (Weitzman, 1996). She explains that some incomplete data exists because “respondents at times provide incomplete or inconsistent answers that require clarification”, and that the necessary data cleaning process performed by programmers at Stanford and UCLA apparently and unintentionally resulted in “changes to the original raw data file” (Weitzman, 1996).
Weitzman is emphatic that the data stored at the Murray Center is the file from before the cleaning, that the clean file used for the 73/42 statistic has been either damaged or lost in the process, and that the file at the Murray Center contains what appears to be misinformation due to “the merging of many smaller subfiles that had been created for specific analyses” (Weitzman, 1996). Weitzman writes that when she left Stanford told programmers to get data ready for archiving, and that she knows now (but did not know then) that the original used for the book was not included because it had either been destroyed or lost. Most importantly, Weitzman wants her response to put the 73/42 statistic into perspective. She comments to this end, saying:

“It is one statistic in a 500-page book. In any case, The Divorce Revolution did
not win scholarly awards or attention because of the magnitude of that single
statistic. What was unique was the analysis of how specific features of the law (in
action) were creating a major social problem….[the widespread impact of the
book] was not caused by the magnitude of the reported gap, but by the fact that
disparities between former husbands and wives were being created by a legal
system pledged to equality.” (Weitzman, 1996).

Sex Role Socialization: A Focus on Women:
Another one of Weitzman’s writings, Sex Role Socialization: A Focus on Women, discusses how sex roles have been and currently are written about, noting “that individual and group differences in sex role socialization and behavior do exist” (Broschart, 1980). A review of Sex Role Socialization: A Focus on Women, along with the majority of her other reviews, compliments Weitzman’s writing style as formal yet unambiguous, “well written and well documented” (Broschart, 1980). The reviewer claims that while the author does not fail to talk about sex-role socialization beginning in childhood and early education, that “the most innovative portions of the work focus on socialization pressures in college and the interaction of socialization influences” (Broschart, 1980).

Women in the Holocaust:

In her most recent work, Women in the Holocaust, Weitzman worked with co-author Dalia Ofer investigating “how questions about gender lead us to a richer and more finely nuanced understanding of the Holocaust” (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998). Reviewers of the work are quick to point out the care and tact taken by the authors in recognizing “the dissenting voices of those who would say that nothing can be gained from reexamining the Holocaust through the critical framework of gender studies” (Ryan, 1999). Weitzman and Ofer are clear that their project is not to say that women’s experiences of the Holocaust were totally different from men’s experiences, but that the book looks to see what or can or should be learned from women’s experiences (Ryan, 1999). Many of the authors included in the book look at the Holocaust through the lens of female experience, but “acknowledge the secondary importance of gender” (Ryan, 1999).
Women in the Holocaust gives an overview of Jewish life in Europe between WWI and WWII, talks about efforts of rescue and resistance, describes the labor and concentration camps, and includes many personal narratives of survivors with scholarly analysis interspersed. The book has over 20 contributors, and Weitzman writes a section called “Living on the Aryan Side in Poland: Gender, Passing and the Nature of Resistance” for chapter 11 (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998). Weitzman’s section contains detailed analyses and case studies of the different experiences of Jewish men and women trying to pass as Gentiles in Poland to bring supplies to ghettos (Ryan, 1999). This data was collected via surveys and interviews. Weitzman states the claim of her section as determining “what types of people tried to pass and what skills, characteristics, and circumstances enabled them to succeed” (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998). The work finds that mostly women passed, and explains this as the case partly because “women could be confident that they could not be unmasked by a physical examination…[and] the greater cultural assimilation of Jewish women in Poland before the war” (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998).
Ofer and Weitzman’s book also includes a chapter by Gisela Bock called “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders” (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998). It describes how labor of German working women “contributed to the systematic genocide” (Ryan, 1999). Also significant is Lawrence L. Langer’s essay called “Gendered Suffering?” which urges readers not to “dredge up from this landscape of universal destruction a mythology of comparative endurance that awards favor to one group of individuals over another” (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998). His is one of the essays that gives the book its balance, as he claims that the Holocaust should not necessarily be examined in terms of gender. Langer’s point is that hearing from the women who survived the camps “reminds us of the severely diminished role that gendered behavior played during those cruel years” (Ofer & Weitzman, 1998).
Reviews of this work also praise its balance (Ryan, 1999), and its resolution to not say that one gender suffered more than the other, but rather to point out the differences that did exist (Mazon, 1998). The book has been critiqued as having abundant first-hand information on resistance and secondary analyses of that information, but that “there is not much explicit attention to the many theoretical issues surrounding the concept of resistance” (Mazon, 1998).

To Love, Honor, and Obey?:
Another article of Lenore J. Weitzman’s, To Love, Honor, and Obey?, argues that “The law imposes an unwritten marriage contract on all men and women who enter legal marriage” (Weitzman, 1975). In this imposed contract, the husband is held as the family’s head, responsible for economic support, and the wife is in charge of caring for the children and performing domestic duties (Weitzman, 1975). The claim is that the existence of a sex-based understanding of marital roles discriminates by limiting alternative family forms, and explicitly restricting “homosexual unions, communes, and egalitarian-partnership marriages” (Weitzman, 1975). Weitzman reviews places in the law that have recently provided possibilities for more protective measures concerning alternative families, intending each section of her article to be “a challenge to the present legal structure of marriage…[and to show] that the law is sex-based and anachronistic; it serves to enforce a rigidity and specificity which denies legality to the diversity of family forms in the United States today” (Weitzman, 1975).
Systematically, Weitzman explains how specific aspects of law force men and women into roles that are not compatible with the trends of today’s society. For example, laws require wives to take their husbands last name, costing career women “a real loss of recognition when she marries…and a greater loss if she marries more than once” (Weitzman, 1975). Laws that insist upon a wife assuming her husband’s dwelling place upon marriage affect where a woman can vote, run for public office, perform jury duty services, receive decreased college tuition, tax payments, and divorce rights (Weitzman, 1975). That such laws are anachronistic in today’s society “where the decision of when and where to move is not made by the husband alone and is not based solely on his career” is obvious (Weitzman, 1975). Since financial support comes under the tacitly bestowed role of husbands, courts will not allow married couples to make private contracts that change or limit the husband’s responsibility as the financial provider- such as paying the wife for doing housework. Feminists have often suggested paying the housewife for performing domestic duties so to lessen the fact that saying a wife’s work is owed to her husband, her status becomes devalued and unimportant to society compared to paid vocations (Weitzman, 1975). Weitzman claims that this system, even corroborated by the existence of alimony, makes women “less financially competent than their husbands” because they are in a sense forbidden to practice and/or develop financial proficiency (Weitzman, 1975). Again, such laws are clearly out of place, since 43 percent of married women have paying jobs (Weitzman, 1975).
The ground-breaking qualities of this book come through in its call for women to receive financial gain for contributing to their husband’s career, be that his employability or otherwise (Weitzman, 1975). Weitzman explicitly endorses the Equal Rights Amendment three times in this article, once as the only way to rid the law of “traditional sex-based marital obligations”, again when she emphatically states that it would directly prohibit sex-based roles, and finally by explaining that “the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution would require that the sex-based disabilities imposed by the marriage contract be removed.” (Weitzman, 1975). In a tone prophetic of what comes to fruition in The Divorce Revolution, Weitzman will not excuse the injustice she sees in the fact that “a woman cannot ensure the survival of her marriage, and since with no-fault divorce she may have no choice about its dissolution, the marriage may be dissolved and she may be punished though no fault or intention of her own” (Weitzman, 1975).
In a manner that reinforces the woman’s sex-based role in current marriage laws, mothers can be excluded from job opportunities, or even not covered in health plans for pregnancy-related disabilities. Although most women want custody of their children, the almost automatic granting of custody by courts does not necessarily consider the child’s best interest or the qualifications of the parents, causing “the mother to bear the greater, if not the total, financial burden of child support” and presents an obstacle in allowing fathers to obtain equal custody (Weitzman, 1975).
Courts have defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, restricting legal recognition from people wanting a different number or sex for their partner(s) (Weitzman, 1975). Refusing to recognize alternative families as legitimate can cause more than the burden of non-recognition. For example, economic advantages on income tax returns, receiving social security, pension benefits, getting loans, and adopting or obtaining child custody are dependent on legally recognized marital status (Weitzman, 1975). Plural marriage, intentionally unmarried couples, and communal families cannot usually gain these economic advantages. One of the strongest arguments for Weitzman’s claim that marital laws are anachronistic is her observation that “While the productive and economic functions of the family have declined, the family’s role as the major source of psychological and social support for its individual members has increased” (Weitzman, 1975). The claim in this article is that in today’s society, not all people want the specificity of a marriage relationship, its intensity, or even intimacy more than at specific times (Weitzman, 1975). People seem to increasingly want a flexible and adaptable legal model for relationships. It is on these changes that Weitzman bases her argument that traditional marriage with its sex-based roles is not consistent with today’s pattern of more egalitarian families (Weitzman, 1975). She notes that there is increasing interest in marriage contracts for legitimating egalitarian families and alternative family forms (Weitzman, 1975). Weitzman concludes To Love Honor, and Obey? with the powerful statement that “certainly the time for change has come” (Weitzman, 1975).

Summary:
Lenore J. Weitzman’s work is clearly focused on a sociological approach to gender issues. The umbrella issues found in her works are marriage law, pre/post-marital contracts, and more recently on the experiences of Jewish women passing on the Aryan side of ghettos in WWII. Weitzman consistently calls for change in laws that establish sex-based roles on the grounds that such roles oppress mainly women. Weitzman does not limit her advocacy to women, but extends her studied passion for equality to alternative family forms and men who are oppressed by a sex-based role.

References

Broschart, K. (1980). Review: [Untitled] of Sex Role Socialization: A Focus on Women.
By Lenjore J. Weitzman. Contemporary Sociology, 9(6), 838-839. Retrieved
February 14, 2007, from JSTOR database: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-
3061%28198011%299%3A6%3C838%3ASRSAFO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O.

FirstSearch: WorldCat List of Records. (1992-2007). Retrieved February 15, 2007, from
http://0-firstsearch.oclc.org.library.uor.edu/WebZ/FSQUERY?format=BI:next
=html/recor….

JSTOR: Search Results. (n.d.). Retrieved February 14, 2007, from http://0-www.jstor.org/.
library.uor.edu/search/AdvancedSearch?si=1&hp=25&All=lenore….

Mazon, P. (1998). Review [Untitled] of Women in the Holocaust with Dalia Ofer and
Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences,
vii(402), 1-2. Retrieved February 14, 2007, from http://www.h-net.org/reviews/
showrev.cgi?path= 29736913403654.

Ofer, D., Weitzman, L. (Eds.). (1998). Woman in the Holocaust. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.

Rapp, C. Lies, Damned Lies, and Lenore Weitzman. (n.d.). Retrieved February 15, 2007,
from http://www.acbr.com/biglie.htm.

Ryan, J. (1999). Review: [Untitled] of Women in the Holocaust by Dalia Ofer; Lenore J.
Weitzman. The Slavic and East European Journal, 43(2), 399-401. Retrieved
February 14, 2007, from JSTOR database: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-
6752%28199922%291%3A43%3A2%3C399%3AWITH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0.

View Record- CSA Sociological Abstracts. (1985). Retrieved February 15, 2007, from
http://0-http://www.md1.csa.com.library.uor.edu/ids70/view_record.php?id=12&rec%20num=cited&....

Weitzman, L. (1996). The Economic Consequences of Divorce are Still Unequal:
Comment on Peterson. American Sociological Review, 61(3), 537-538. Retrieved
February 14, 2007, from JSTOR database:
http://www.jstor.org/view/00031224/di974431/97p0126s/0?currentResult=00031224%2bd....

Weitzman, L. (1975). To Love, Honor, and Obey? Traditional Legal Marriage and
Alternative Family Forms. The Family Coordinator, 24(4), 531-548. Retrieved
February14, 2007, from JSTOR database: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-
7214%28197510%2924%3A4%3C531%3ATLHAOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O.