Congress chose a legal fiction of marital equality over real spousal property rights

Evidence

Needless to say, the idea of women getting “half the family bankroll” concerned members of Congress (all but eight of them men, and only two black members). They enacted a solution that provided all the benefits of income splitting, but none of the legal protections afforded to stay-at-home spouses in community property regimes. Under the new law, all married couples (not just those in community property states) would be permitted to file a joint tax return based on an assumption that husbands and wives are effectively equal partners sharing income and expenses fifty-fifty. While community property laws actually gave each spouse an equal share, the joint return would merely treat spouses as if they were equal, with no underlying rights. (Had Congress not acted, it is highly likely that more states would have converted from separate property to community property regimes and afforded legal protection to stay-at-home spouses.) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 94

Categorization

• SEED: The 1948 joint return as a calculated alternative to community property — a fiscally ‘equal’ rule adopted precisely to avoid granting wives real property rights — offers an essay angle on how facially neutral tax ‘equality’ can mask the withholding of actual legal protection. It gives the reader a nameable, dated mechanism for her third provision.
• QUESTION: Which states today retain separate-property regimes, and does legal-title marriage vs. community property still produce measurable wealth differences for divorcing spouses? Worth chasing for a paper trail on whether the fiction actually mattered.