Title of paper:
‘To Count or not to Count? Examining the Quantifying Quandary Regarding the Prevalence of Jewish Divorce Refusal (In Defense of a New Method of Analysis)’
Abstract:
Changes to civil laws in the United States and Canada attempted to solve get (Jewish Bill of Divorcement) refusal or extortion by husbands, yet the phenomenon continues to anchor some women to their marriages, unable to remarry under Jewish Law despite legal pluralist remedies, notwithstanding claims to the contrary (Syrtash, 1992 and 2005). At the same time, researchers investigating this issue are often faced with the view that there are not really enough women so affected to be worth investigating from a policy perspective. This paper argues that attempts to place numeric value on the number of women who experience Jewish divorce refusal and extortion are doomed to fail and will help to promote the inequality these women face. Moreover, obsessions with and attempts to quantify these women and their stories prevents meaningful and constructive engagement with and usurps attention from the issue of divorce refusal and extortion by men, locking their wives into unwanted marriages. This paper also uses divorce refusal and extortion as a case study to investigate more broadly the questionable use of quantification to trivialize policy issues and will argue in favour of an alternate method of inquiry and analysis which more accurately illustrates the significance of the issue at hand at the human level (divorce refusal, or any other) – in other words, the use of narratives in academic research, the need for women to speak, and the need for others to listen in order for there to be social change.