While I appreciate you pointing out that the Rosenfeld study is old enough to perhaps not be as relevant as it once was, a lot of the same issues still persist. Women still do the vast majority of child, elder, and home care today - and they still resent it. When I researched and wrote a story a while back on the phenomenon of men acting like their wife is their mom, I got a ton of comments from women who were fed up with just that. Young women may still want to get married - after all they are still fed the cultural narrative that this is the pinnacle of womanhood - along with having children. But what they most often find is that the Disney fairytale isn't at all what they thought it would be, and overwhelmingly, divorced or widowed women don't want to remarry. They prefer to have relationships that are not co-habitating where they don't have to cook and clean for a man, and can have greater independence and autonomy.
And, even though a lot of younger women still do want to get married, more and more of them don't. We're hearing a lot now about how young men aren't dating or finding partners but the same goes for women - mostly because they can't find situations that meet their basic standards and they want to focus on their careers (which is tough to do if you have to go home and pull a second shift). Maybe younger men don't really want to get married, but I don't think this bears out in other demographics. In my experience, most men who have been married want to marry again because they benefit so much from the arrangement - as one study pointed out, "female partners meet so many of their social, emotional, health and domestic needs."
And all this aside, the fact remains that statistically, divorce puts a lot of women into reduced economic circumstances or outright poverty. “Moreover, almost 50 percent of households with children move into poverty following divorce.”
And family courts (at least in the US) no longer favor women out of hand - they consider the welfare of the child(ren) and who has been actually caring for their needs so far. I still don't understand how in the face of those things, you find that modern divorce favors women or what changes you would like to see come about. I appreciate the discussion, but can you be more specific about what sort of "balance" you imagine?
