Critics of the new law, which ends permanent alimony, claim it will disproportionately harm older women.
On the last day of June, at the tail end of a hectic legislative session in Tallahassee, Florida governor Ron DeSantis quietly signed a landmark bill ending the practice of permanent alimony whereby Floridians could be made to financially support their former spouses until death.
Unlike many of the massively popular conservative bills DeSantis signed into law over the preceding months, the alimony legislation exposed a rift among Florida Republicans that broke down largely along lines of gender and views of traditional masculinity. Under the new law, couples married less than three years are ineligible to receive alimony and those who have been married 20 years or longer are eligible to receive payments for up to 75 percent of the length of the marriage.
Though the bill easily passed both chambers of the state house, it attracted heated supporters and detractors among everyday Floridians given its massive effect on personal finances and the emotional resonance of divorce.
The law quietly pitted competing visions of traditional and modern masculinity against each other, dividing Republicans who are otherwise united on many of DeSantis’s policy victories.
As critics who argue the bill is misogynistic often point out, men remain the payers in up to 97 percent of alimony cases, meaning the law will disproportionately harm women. Supporters, meanwhile, insist that the bill is gender-neutral.
Florida Family Fairness (FFF), an organization that has lobbied to free Floridians from what it sees as unjust, burdensome financial responsibilities imposed by courts, cheered the governor for backing the bill.
“We are thrilled that Gov. DeSantis signed SB1416, modernizing Florida’s alimony laws and providing much needed guidelines and changes,” FFF chairman Marc Johnson told National Review. “This law will benefit families for generations to come and I couldn’t be more proud to have played a part in helping to fix a broken system. There are still positive amendments to come that will further benefit Florida’s families, but SB1416 becoming law is a monumental step in the right direction.”
On its website, FFF spotlights two women’s accounts before a husband’s voice is heard. Johnson points out that the role of women in the economy is changing, placing more husbands on the other side of the alimony equation.
The statistics are clear: Women’s climb up the economic ladder since the 1970s has dramatically changed American households. In 1972, only 5 percent of women were the sole breadwinners of their households; by 2022, that number had more than tripled to 16 percent, a 2023 Pew poll found. Egalitarian households, with both partners working outside the home, represented another 29 percent of respondents. Another study conducted by the Urban Institute in 2021 found that women headed nearly half of all American households.
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Orr v. Orr that state laws governing alimony need to be gender-neutral. “The old notion that generally it is the man’s primary responsibility to provide a home and its essentials can no longer justify a statute that discriminates on the basis of gender,” Associate Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority at the time.
Still, as critics of the bill who claim it will disproportionately harm women are keen to point out, little has changed in terms of alimony settlements over the decades. American census data from 2010 found only 3 percent of the nation’s 400,000 alimony recipients to be men. The Tallahassee Democrat reported in 2023 that men continue to carry the financial burden in 90 percent of alimony cases in Florida. It’s for this reason that the women’s magazine, Elle, called alimony the “Last Feminist Taboo” in 2018.
“Women have become the target of this legislation because 98% of alimony recipients are women. Statistically divorced women have a greater chance of falling into poverty after divorce,” Jan Killilea, founder of the First Wives Advocacy Group, which lobbied against the bill, told NR.
Killilea is “a lifelong Republican” who “voted for DeSantis.” She says her “allegiance is to the Republican Party,” although “that’s not to say I’ve never voted for a Democrat in a local election.”
Killilea moved to Florida from Connecticut in 2005, but shortly afterward her marriage of 25 years ended, leaving her in a difficult financial situation. According to Killilea, while her husband was earning $500,000, a vocational expert assessed her skillset during the divorce proceedings to be worth around $12 an hour.
“Permanent alimony is rarely granted. All alimony awards are based upon need versus ability to pay. The new law that we’ve been fighting against for a decade benefits the wealthy breadwinners who started this snowball running downhill,” she said.
Killilea is not alone. Other conservatives came out of the woodwork to bash the bill as unfairly targeting older women. The governor “has just impoverished all the older women of Florida, and I know at least 3,000 women across the state of Florida are switching to Democrat and we will campaign against him, all the way, forever,” another Republican woman, and permanent-alimony recipient, told CBS News after the bill was signed into law.
This wasn’t the first time alimony reform was on the docket in Florida. In 2013, then-Republican governor Rick Scott vetoed a similar measure that had won widespread legislative backing. Three years later, Scott again refused to sign a nearly identical bill when it came to his desk with the blessing of Florida’s house and senate. The Tampa Bay Times called it “the single most contentious bill from the 2016 Legislature” at the time.
Nor was this Governor DeSantis’s first showdown with alimony proponents.
In 2022, DeSantis vetoed a similar alimony reform, proposed by Republican representative Joe Gruters, over fears that its wording was unconstitutional and permitted former spouses to retroactively litigate existing payment schemes. A senior DeSantis administration official noted that the governor chose to support the latest incarnation because of a change he said would bar retroactive litigation, an important bulwark against a wave of lawsuits that would have further stressed the courts in the notoriously litigious state of Florida.
Although SB1416 swayed some former skeptics, there were a few Republican holdouts who were unconvinced alimony reform – as drafted – was a step in the right direction. Republican senator Clay Yarborough of Jacksonville, a social conservative who sponsored a bill in March that would curtail gender-reassignment surgery for minors, voted against the measure.
“The new law does not make clear that it would not apply retroactively,” an official statement from Yarborough’s office insisted. “Also, older Floridians, especially women, are at risk of being negatively impacted and might be compelled to turn to taxpayer-funded assistance in the event they are unable to obtain employment or otherwise generate needed income once alimony support concludes. For these reasons, I voted ‘no.’”