Well, I had to work for a couple of days on other things, and I’m honored that some of you apparently missed me. Let me start by responding to this challenge, just because I love a gauntlet as much as the next person:
if you can find a feminist platform that supports anything that fathers rights are pushing for, then maybe we can go from there. i've stated what fathers rights groups are in favor of.
Actually, on the broadest issues, as I’ve at implied before, the fathers4justice stance really is borrowing the ideas and logic of feminism, but—and this is crucial—it does so without giving feminism credit for them.
Here’s a key excerpt from the National Organization of Women’s founding statement (1966). It is precisely a “platform” of that organization, and that organization is the primary, mainstream feminist organization in the United States:
WE REJECT the current assumptions that a man must carry the sole burden of supporting himself, his wife, and family, and that a woman is automatically entitled to lifelong support by a man upon her marriage, or that marriage, home and family are primarily woman's world and responsibility-hers to dominate-his to support. We believe that a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children and of the economic burdens of their support. We believe that proper recognition should be given to the economic and social value of homemaking and child-care. To these ends we will seek to open a reexamination of laws and mores governing marriage and divorce, for we believe that the current state of"half-equality" between the sexes discriminates against both men and women, and is the cause of much unnecessary hostility between the sexes.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find a feminist who doesn’t hold that belief. Now read your own statement: that a predominant force of political and social change over the past 30 or so years [by which I understand you to mean feminist movement] has created a flawed system in family courts that values female nurturing over male nurturing and male financial responsibility over female financial responsibility. Notice the similarity?
So I put to you AS A FACT that modern feminism did not create the system whereby women’s nurturing abilities were valued over men’s. Feminism did not create the system where males were given financial responsibility for families and women were denied jobs. What you are doing is blaming feminism for the very system that feminists have organized to dismantle for at least the last 40 years.
The system INSTEAD arose much longer ago, in the 19th century, in a system in which men deliberately monopolized to themselves all financial, legal, and political power. As I explained above, in less blunt language: custody rights were, if anything, a sop thrown at women because men didn’t really want the responsibility.*
And it is critical that by and large, men are (still) not doing child care today. Women are not bolting the door to the nursery. For the most part men choose careers over child care. And, on a daily basis, men do less than half the amount of child care than women do.
Feminists did not create this situation.
So you ask: Does any disadvantage that women as a group have justify making them a favored class in family court?
Look, the feminist position is that:
FIRST: we would truly LOVE for all things to be more equal. That’s the raison d’etre of feminism. We would love for men to do 50/50 child care in heterosexual couples, 100% in gay couples (NOW also supports equal marriage rights, for gay men and lesbians). We would love for public policy to shift to better support ALL child-rearing activities. We have risked being called communists for making such claims.
And we have made claims for better support for all care-givers publicly and repeatedly and in gender neutral language (look at the NOW platform on the workplace, which urges employers to Support all employees [not “women employees”] in their efforts to balance work and family responsibilities. In this regard, we not only meet the minimum requirements of the law but also strive toward policies that are genuinely family-friendly. (Such policies might include paid sick leave, flex-time, job sharing, child care and/or elder care benefits, family and medical leave for companies not legally obligated to provide it.)
HOWEVER: by and large women have paid a huge financial price, and continue to pay a financial price, for making a commitment to be with children.
GIVEN these realities, a simplistic insistance on absolute, 50/50 equality after a divorce is not fair to the women involved or in the best interests of the family. Here’s the argument made by the president of NOW Michigan when the issue arose in 1997. She's speaking to "converts" not to convince, so she's not providing evidence for all of her claims, but I hope you’ll read her argument sympathetically, with the knowledge that there’s 150 years of fighting a hard fight, and now having your words twisted against you by people absolutely unsympathetic to your cause.
So,THIS IS MY CLAIM: The approach of father’s rights groups is more accurately stated as “fathers for fathers” not “fathers for justice.” Feminists have ALWAYS had broad-reaching social justice as a goal, as evidenced by their desire for gay rights, fair labor practices, etc.
They have not been perfect in articulating those goals or in their methods of reaching for these broad goals. (In the US feminist organizations like NOW have a history of focusing more on issues that are primarily relevant to white, straight, married women at the expense of others, like, in fact, this one). But, the fathers’ movement seems to have only increased male power in this one area as its singular goal. It is therefore not for justice but for male power. That's why the outside world matters so much. Can show me strong evidence to the contrary? There's my gauntlet.
You said: I think you're engaging in flawed logic by saying that you dont sympathize with men in family court because there are so many ways that men seem unsympathetic and uninterested in the women's movement. This is critical - you seem to say that women are still disadvantaged and therefore the father's plight in family court is somehow not as valid as it could be if there were different circumstances OUTSIDE of the family court arena.
I began by saying that I do sympathize with men in family court. I meant that and still mean it. I have seen men absolutely in tears, genuinely so, because they were separated from their children, and I believe the pain is real.
I sympathize with everyone in family court: having spent more time than I would like to have done there, even having “won” it’s a horrible place to be. I actually don’t think it’s possible for anyone who is honest with themselves and who truly has the goal of serving the best interest of a child to come out of family court feeling good, because that level of conflict IS horrible for a child. And the longer the court session is prolonged, the deeper the conflict, the worse it is for the child, and, almost certainly, the worse any kind of 50/50 custody decision is going to be for the child.
I will concede that men are sometimes screwed in family court. Women have used feminist discourse for nefarious, self-serving purposes. Some feminists have made anti-male arguments. (Many fewer than the media representations of man-hating feminists suggests.) Sometimes it is hard to “give up” even victim turf once it’s been claimed, especially when you don’t have a lot of other turf, e.g., wealth, to claim.
And neither of us can access the details of family court cases on an individual basis, so we’re stuck with our anecdotal evidence AND the statistical features of the world outside family court. As I said before, you have not convinced me, nor provided any evidence to convince me, that the rates by which women dominate custody cases are dramatically different from the rates by which women make financial and career sacrifices for children nor the rates by which women currently do more child care, so you have not made your case adequately that the situation is more grievously unjust than the gender-based injustice that pervades the rest of the social order--which feminists, and not F4J, are seeking to change.
---FOOTNOTE------
*(But, I used the term 'difference feminists' above, with some caution; mainstream feminists were opposed to exclusive and property-based patriarchal rights to children, but they were mainly getting slammed and ridiculed by the male establishment and its female cheerleaders for seeking the vote and property rights. Often these custody rights were especially sought for by traditional women who accepted the status quo that defined women’s place as the home. These women were often virulently opposed to feminism as we tend to understand it today. They were like Republican women--or at least like the one in Kansas who was elected State Senator in the 1990s, but thinks that women should not have the right to vote. Like Phillis Schlaffley who's made a career out of arguing that women shouldn't have careers.
BTWNote also that I can distinguish between women and feminists, but I still believe that if feminist arguments were as pervasively powerful as you claim we wouldn't be running at about 15% political representation, and people like the women I just mentioned would not exist.) |
