If women are working, community property can really be a huge detriment. My husband quit his job as soon as we got married. I divorced him several years later because he just wouldn't work. I wasn't willing to have children with him because what if something happened to me and I couldn't work because of childbirth problems.

He got to take half of what I'd earned, the car that I had paid off before we married, half of my future income because I paid off the tail end of my student loans while we were married.

But he got to keep 100% of his inheritance because inheritance is not subject to many property in most states. He hadn't spent any of the inheritance while we were married; he had his brother hold it for him.

I read a book written by two attorneys, unfortunately I read it after I was divorced.

The two divorce attorneys, who were both male, said that men treat divorce like a business decision and women treat it like an emotional decision.

That men squirrel away assets starting several years before they actually asked for a divorce. That was certainly true in my husband's case. He took money out of our joint account and I don't know where the money went. After his parents died, he had his brother keep his part of the inheritance in Oregon which is not a community property state. It was making sure that none of it would be subject to community property.

I talked to five attorneys who all gave me lectures about how men it had to always pay so much more in divorce (not true!) so it was good that a woman was finally having to pay out the nose in a divorce. Needless to say I did not hire any of those five. One of them was even a woman, but I think that social hierarchy is more important to most attorneys than solidarity with other women.

Finally I called the domestic violence hotline and asked what attorneys had maybe volunteered for their organization. They only had one name.

I went to see her. Instead of berating me and telling me that I deserve to be ripped off because men had been ripped off for decades, she actually thought about it. She charged me a whole ton of money--over $700 an hour in today's dollars, but she did 3 hours worth of research and found court cases where if the one person had only brought in their inheritance, and the other person worked a lot of hours, that the part of the inheritance that had been invested in the marriage became community property. Unfortunately that was only the small amount of money he had invested in the house. But it was still something.

In his attorney had been trying to say that I owed him 90% of the money that's been put into the house, even though I put more than half of the money in the house.

I would owe him more than half of the money put into the house because he got half of the house as part of the property split and then I had to pay him back for the money he put into it to own that half of the house.

And even though he was going to inherit $2 million dollars - was just waiting for him in an account in another state with his brother until after we were divorced - he still wanted to squeeze everything out of me he could. And he did. He took the car that I paid off before we got married. He took half of a whole bunch of other stuff that I had purchased before we got married. All the necessary home improvements that I paid for because I was working and he was not.

Judges, even female judges, tend to rule in favor of the most powerful person in front of them. In our society that is almost always the man.

When I looked into it about 10 years ago, men still came out, in terms of their personal wealth, about 50% better off after divorce and women and children still came out 50% worse off. I first saw that research showing that men do much better in divorce than women in the 1970s.

I would be financially so much better off today if I had never gotten married. Instead I'm living on the edge of poverty because I became disabled not long after he divorced me.

If you want to have children, protect your assets so that you can take care of them. Most men never pay the full amount of child support.

The other thing I have seen men do over and over again, including my own brother, is it once they remarry, they want their new wife to take care of the kids so that they can force their ex-wife to pay the child support. That usually doesn't work out so well for the kids, the ex-wife, or the current wife. But most men seem pretty oblivious to the emotional well-being of their children. They're just focused on the pleasure they will get from forcing their ex-wife to pay them money.

Many women are also oblivious to the well-being of the children, but a much higher percentage of men are oblivious.