Mrs Lambert, I salute you

She stayed at home and looked after the children while he went out and made millions. He took off for Monaco with the wife of a close friend, and is currently living in a flat in Bangkok with an even younger woman, described as a "Thai beauty". It was, in other words, a very traditional marriage, except for one thing: Shan Lambert, the ex-wife in last week's much-publicised divorce case, went to court and won a half share of Harry Lambert's £20m fortune.

Well, it's nice to see family values being updated by the courts in such a progressive manner. Money matters to the caring capitalists who now run this country, and it certainly means power. Women have never had sufficient access to either, so from that point of view we should be cheering Mrs Lambert on. At the same time, headlines such as "Divorcée's £10m victory for homemakers" do not fit easily into a feminist agenda, and quite a few people may have concluded that her original settlement of £7.5m was pretty generous.

Does that make her greedy? Presumably no more than her former husband, who wanted to keep his mitts on £12.5m. The figures are a distraction from the principles involved, which are about financial equality between men and women, and have far-reaching implications for anyone contemplating a divorce. On Thursday Mrs Lambert took her case to the Appeal Court, arguing that although she and her husband had played different roles, she had been an equal partner in both marriage and business and was entitled to a 50-50 split.

In an historic decision, the judges agreed, dismissing Mr Lambert's condescending description of his ex-wife's contribution as "revolving around children and microwave". He also said she was "more or less ornamental", which makes her sound like a goldfish; if one of the lessons of this case is that sexist remarks are expensive these days, then that is a jolly good thing.

The judges challenged the notion that the contribution of a "breadwinner" is greater than a "homemaker", neither of them job descriptions that many of us would apply to ourselves. But their decision has rightly been welcomed as establishing the rights of non-working wives, even if few spouses have quite such valuable assets to fight over. The court also rejected the idea that the partners in an unhappy marriage should be marked on their respective performance.

Sadly, in a culture where we still tend to equate the end of a marriage with failure, that is exactly what happens, with former partners quarrelling over everything from money to who spent most time putting out the rubbish. Now that serial relationships are common, we should stop thinking in these destructive terms. Divorce lawyers suggested last week that Mrs Lambert's case might render such unseemly squabbles pointless in future.

More important – and this is where the judgment strikes me as genuinely subversive – it strikes a blow at the assumption that men are entitled, as a general rule, to more money than women. This is not something you hear spoken aloud any more, as it was in the old days when women's wages were dismissed as "pin money". But there is no doubt that some people still feel that way, and will find Mrs Lambert's victory disturbing as a result.

Women's work is consistently under-valued in the home – where many of the things we do are still not regarded as work at all – and in offices, shops and factories. If this were not the case, we would by now have achieved equal pay, that sine qua non of the women's movement which seems as far off in 2002 as it did in the Seventies. I am tired of hearing excuses for this disgraceful state of affairs, all of them pathetic and designed to suggest that women secretly yearn to work in poorly paid occupations or spoil their own career prospects by selfishly taking time off to have babies.

I will admit that Mrs Lambert, with her £1.6m home set in 30 acres of parkland, is at first sight an unlikely feminist heroine. But while the law is still letting down working women, I don't think we should complain when judges belatedly recognise the contribution of wives who choose to stay at home. Another of the great feminist slogans, remember, was "wages for housework". That is precisely what Mrs Lambert achieved last week, even if the amounts involved are beyond most women's wildest dreams.