Jerome Wilson, key in revamping New York’s divorce law, dies at 88
Jerome Wilson, a former Democratic state senator from Manhattan who helped liberalize a rigorous 18th-century law that had left New York as the sole state that required a spouse to prove adultery as the only legal ground for divorce, died Friday in Essex, Connecticut. He was 88.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter Sarah said.
Wilson was the chairman of the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on Matrimonial Law, which recommended that the legal grounds for divorce be broadened.
The amended act, which took effect Sept. 1, 1967, added four other grounds for divorce: cruel treatment, abandonment for two years, the sentencing of a spouse to prison for five years or more and a couple’s living voluntarily apart for at least two years.
As a sop to the Roman Catholic Church, which does not recognize divorce and that for decades had resisted attempts to broaden the legal justification for dissolving marriages, the Legislature also instituted a compulsory conciliation procedure in a last-ditch effort to preserve marriages. (Of nearly 20,000 cases that came to the mediation bureaus in their first year, less than 3% of the couples were reconciled.)
“Sen. Wilson not only introduced the commission bill but vigorously fought for its passage,” Howard Hilton Spellman, chairman of the special committee on matrimonial law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, wrote in The New York Times in 1965. “He refused to be discouraged by delaying tactics and so strongly persevered in fighting for our aims that, to a great extent, the ultimate result should be credited to him.”
After it was approved by both houses of the Legislature — it had drawn sponsors from both parties — the act was immediately signed by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, whose own divorce in Nevada in 1962 and remarriage the following year had scandalized Republican primary voters and contributed to his defeat for the 1964 presidential nomination.
In the second year after the law went into effect, the number of divorces granted in New York ballooned to 18,000 in all five categories — compared with 4,000 granted only for adultery during the last year that the old law had been in effect.
Supporters of the changes said the new law also reduced instances of perjury (because so many estranged spouses had to lie about allegations of adultery) and end runs by wealthier couples who could afford to fly to Mexico or Nevada and remain there for two weeks to qualify for a divorce.
Jerome Linwood Wilson was born July 16, 1931, in Washington, D.C., to William Jerome Wilson, a medievalist with the Library of Congress, and Hazel (Hutchins) Wilson, a children’s book author.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Colgate University, served in the Air Force and worked for the National Urban League.
After three terms as a Reform Democrat representing Manhattan’s East Side in the state Senate, he challenged the Republican incumbent congressman from the district, Theodore R. Kupferman, but was defeated.