The American Emmy-winning actress Ellen Barkin has made more from her brief marriage to billionaire Ron Perelman than she has ever done from her acting, and not from her divorce settlement but from the sale of the trinkets he gave her. Her divorce from him was so acrimonious that she claimed to be selling the jewels because each time she looked at them, they reminded her of him.

It had nothing to do with the money, you understand, though she raised a cool $20.37 million through the Christie’s auction. Fair enough – he gave them to her because he wanted to, and she sold them because they were hers and she had the right to do it. You can’t eat jewels in your old age, and if she had tried to sell them in 30 years time to pay for her old people’s home, the response would not have been as frantic as it was now, when the divorce is Big News.

This slots in nicely, though, with the big debate in the English media a few months ago, about whether a certain kind of woman is seeing marriage to a certain kind of man as the quickest and easiest way to make lots of money with no capital investment. There were huge articles in the London broadsheets, saying that the most dangerous thing a wealthy man can do now is get married. He might as well leave the bulk of his money out on the streets in a sack.

The discussion was sparked off by a spectacular settlement ordered by a British court in the divorce of a wealthy financier and the woman he had married a mere four years earlier (and they didn’t even have children). She claimed that she was owed the money – several million pounds – because she gave up her career for four whole years when she married. The judge found in her favour, and ordered that a huge chunk of her husband’s assets, which he had earned before he even met her, be sliced off and given to her.

British law is different to Maltese law in this respect, you see. It is largely arbitrary, and based on case law and the whims of individual judges. Maltese wives, on the other hand, have no chance of even sniffing at anything that was brought into the marriage, and the same goes for husbands. Most times, Maltese wives don’t even get a scent of the assets that were accumulated during the marriage, either, because they’re owned by a complicated tangle of companies and holding companies, which their husbands have presciently arranged in case the marriage founders when a desperate eastern European comes along looking for a meal ticket.

The debate in the British press centred on the morality or otherwise of women who cream off millions from their husbands in return for putting up with them for a few years. The case that hit the headlines was at the extreme end of opportunism, which made matters worse. The woman in question was clearly thinking: “Well, if he’s going to dump me, then I might as well grab everything I can and never have to worry about money again.” As one commentator pointed out, she has ended up better off now that her marriage is over than she was when married, because when she was married the money was her husband’s, and now she’s rich, rich, rich. It’s hers.

There was lots of soul-searching over reams of newsprint. Is this what feminism has come to, etc, etc? I think that there is an obvious place where the moral line should be drawn, though the legal line doesn’t necessarily follow, and a more obscure place where matters are rather more difficult to untangle. The original thinking behind divorce settlements and alimony in Britain, and the division of assets when marriages break down in Malta, was directed at protecting the wife.

This was at a time when married women from a certain background were prevented or discouraged from earning money, and so they were fully dependent on their husbands. If the marriage broke down, the woman was left without a source of income, and no assets, so she would have to be provided for from her husband’s estate or his future earnings. I would still say that a woman of a certain age who has never worked, because she comes from a generation that was discouraged from working, is owed a living by the man to whom she was married, even if he dumps her. If she dumps him, though, it’s hard to give moral justification to her getting a share of the assets, when she hasn’t worked for them. Then it becomes her problem and her choice.

I cannot say that women of my generation and younger are owed a living when they are dumped, except to a certain extent when their earning potential has been disrupted severely by child-rearing. The fact is that giving up work to become dependent on a man is, nowadays, a life choice that carries, like many other life choices, a great deal of inherent risk.

There is no insurance policy that can be taken out on this one. One of the risks is possible poverty or the loss or curtailment of a woman’s lifestyle when her husband decides he doesn’t want her anymore, and more so, when she decides that she really can’t bear him a minute longer. Women today are not faced with a stark and cruel choice between financial dependence on their father or brother, and financial dependence on their husband.

It’s a choice between financial independence and financial dependence on the man they marry. The sharing of assets and income may sound all fine and dandy in Cana courses and in legislation, but most women find, when their marriage crumbles, that reality is another thing altogether.

Usually, the one who has worked for the money and earned it feels that he owns it and that he has a greater right to it, and I can’t say that I don’t sympathise with this view because I do.

If more married women worked, then they would understand it too: they wouldn’t want their stay-at-home husband treating their earnings like his own.