I am glad, SS, that you say you can see some benefits of feminism (& would actually like to hear which ones you do see).
I see feminist arguments for custody payments as mostly a necessary, compromised response to the bigger social ill of the serious poverty of single mothers and children (in ths US), which I will demonstrate below. This compromise position results from the unlikelihood of instituting more socialist-feminist policies (such as in Sweden, see below) that would more equitably mitigate this problem--policies which many feminists still quixotically fight for (unlike groups like fathers4justice which, so far as I can see, are strictly pro-father and not pro-economic justice. Is there any evidence to counter that view?).
I therefore accept that a percentage of men in divorce/custody cases are upset with this situation, and genuinely hurt by this situation, and I sympathize with their pain. I have not, and do not, deny that their pain or hurt is real.
I believe that women are not simple "victims" and I have a problem with that term, as you apparently do when it is applied to women. I believe women have "agency" in our culture. I.e., women do act in many areas of social life, although their actions are still circumscribed by gender and often by other factors (race, class, perceived orientation, perceived ugliness, etc.). "Victim" is an inappropriate status to ascribe to women, men, or any adult person. Feminists should avoid using or implying it, even as they work to improve women's position in the world.
By the same logic, while I believe men are privileged in most areas of social life, I recognize that they are not utterly free agents in our society either--and many men circumscribed by the same forces just listed for women, so it is inappropriate to use the term "oppressors" as a blanket term for men as individuals.
I accept that feminist individuals or groups may at times unfairly demonize men as oppressors and at times cling to victim status, and I believe this is counterproductive, hurtful behavior when it happens. HOWEVER: I do not accept that this happens as frequently as it is portrayed in the media, or, seemingly, by men's rights groups, nor do I accept that it is a fair characterization of most feminists.
While I do not believe women are "victims" in a simple sense of the word, they do experience oppression, particularly in terms of poverty. This is key, because you still argue NOW doesnt fight for equality. It fights for the financial gain of women, as if 1) women are working from a position of relative wealth and as if 2) women’s poverty is not implicated with childhood poverty.
Unlike your position so far, NOW and most feminists see the poverty of women as real and as deeply harmful to children and to our society as a whole, so they do believe that women’s poverty must be countered. Although feminists almost universally believe that divorce is necessary to a free society and to women’s freedom, divorce has been more impoverishing to women and to children, and this is a problem.
You do not seem to believe women are impoverished. So, first, let me address the stat you do provide about women and wealth. First, from the site you cited re: women’s control over 51.3% of the wealth "But in fact, women represent more than 50% of the poor. Two thirds of the 60 million women working outside the home have no pension plan and those who do have benefits receive half the benefits of their male counterparts."
[If the above link doesn't work, try cut/pasting in the following URL: http://www.pbs.org/ttc/society/philanthropy.html]
Second, after glancing around at several resources, it seems that that 51.3% figure from the Fed. Reserve Board results from the domestic purse-strings responsibility of many women in "traditional" marriages (mentioned by Haus), and—more especially—from the relative longevity of women in stable, long-term married relationships: those married women are likely to end up widowed, and remain so for 20 years or more, during which time they control the wealth of their deceased husbands. (One site explained that wealthy elderly women are 5 times more likely than men to be widowed.) The statistic thus has little relevance for this situation. But note: divorced, separated, and never married women remain at a high risk of poverty in old age, much more so than men.
[If the above link doesn't work try cut/pasting:
http://www.cbpp.org/1-27-00socsec.htm]
More directly, from the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, "Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2004, 28.4 percent of households headed by single women were poor, while 13.5 percent of households headed by single men and 5.5 percent of married-couple households lived in poverty. In 2004, both black and Hispanic female-headed households had poverty rates just under 40 percent." At least partly as a result of this poverty, children represent 25 percent of the total population, but 35 percent of the poor population.
[If the above link does not work, try cut/pasting:
http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/#4]
To claim, as you seem to, that women "only" want their children as a way to get at men’s money, apparently to hoard it all to themselves, is, to be blunt, misogynist bullshit. In fact, you say: The result of most custody fights gives mothers more money and MORE access to welfare services.--also implies that women are getting wealthy from custody and TANF payments.
Despite your claims to the contrary, the United States has done the least of all the major economic powers in the world to ameliorate women’s poverty. From a policy briefing from the Joint Center for Poverty Research, a joint project at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University :
[If the above link doesn't work, try cut/pasting: http://www.jcpr.org/research_summaries/vol1_num1.html]
* The United States has the highest poverty rate and the highest ratio of women's to men's poverty among eight modern nations reviewed in a Joint Center for Poverty Research paper, Gender Inequality in Poverty in Affluent Nations: The Role of Single Motherhood and the State. Karen Christopher, Paula England, Katherin Ross, Tim Smeeding, and Sara McLanahan used the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to analyze eight Western, industrialized nations: the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The analysis pertained to nonelderly adults. Results indicate that both the greater prevalence of single mothers in the U.S. and their higher poverty rates relative to other groups are causes of the relatively high sex gap in poverty found in the U.S. The authors examined the effect of household composition (e.g., what proportion of the population is single, and what proportion of women are single mothers) and state tax and transfer policies on the inequality between women's and men's poverty. They conclude that both family structure and relatively low state transfers that do little to redistribute income between men and women contribute to the high sex gap in poverty in the U.S. relative to the other nations studied.
* [In] the U.S., …the poverty ratio of single women to men is 1.93; single women in the U.S. are almost 100% more likely to live in poverty as are single men. In Sweden, single mothers have a poverty rate of 3% compared with their counterparts in the U.S., who have the highest rate of poverty cross-nationally at 47%.
(Sweden is one of the few countries in the world with a primarily feminist, socialist social welfare policy, by the way. Research it, and I think you’d find about the closest thing to what feminist groups have called for as national policy in the U.S.)
Now, as to women and divorce, specifically. The following statistics are taken from the US Census Bureau, 2003, P60-225(but referring to 2001, the most recent data available):
[If the above link doesn't work, try cut/pasting:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p60-225.pdf]
* Although the poverty rate of custodial mothers fell from 36.8 percent in 1993 to 25.0 percent in 2001, it was still significantly higher than the rate of custodial fathers, 14.7 percent.
* "The proportion of custodial parents receiving every payment they were due increased from 36.9% to 46.2% between 1993 and 1997, and the 2001 proportion remained unchanged at 44.8% Among these parents, the average amount received was $5,800 and did not differ significantly between mothers and fathers."
*A large majority (85.3%) of the 6.9 million custodial parents due child support payments in 2001 had arrangements for joint custody or visitation privileges with the noncustodial parents, and approximately 3/4 (77.1%) of these parents received some support payments. Of the custodial parents due child support but who did not have visitation arrangements, about half (55.8%) received any payment.
The 10% figure of men defaulting on payments is low. Some of these men are, no doubt, poor, but I have read some fairly convincing arguments saying that men are at least as likely to exaggerate their inability to pay for reasons of poverty as women are to obstruct visitation.
Now, notice how your verb structures in the following also suggest that feminists are the only actors in society and that men are passive victims, without actually providing any evidence for this stance:
from the point that the tender years doctrine was dismissed [by whom? Judicial system (male dominated)=passive construction] as a reason for determining custody, the feminist movement has prevented [active construction] society from moving away from those values by creating a system [active verb, feminists again] that sustains that bias. In the 1960s, the tender years doctrine began to be removed [passive construction, again avoiding reference to male-dominated judicial/legislative bodies] from laws. However, because of feminist politics, its outcome remains [again, this construction avoids any assignment of agency to men in society]. So it can be said that feminism didnt create the current situation in that mothers were often given custody beginning in the late 19th century, but it can also be said that feminism revived this bias and legislated it [again, now feminists are, without the agency of men, legislating, despite having much less money and no direct political power] into sustainability.
Thus I will continue to assert that the picture you paint is of women’s groups acting like a secret cabal that’s actually more powerful than the judiciary and political officeholders who have set precedents and made these policies, which are about 85% male. And you seem to believe that these male-dominated establishments have been strangely much more attentive to women’s interests, despite women’s lack of wealth and power, than to male interests. I dispute this claim, as I believe would this source based on the House Ways and Means Green Book on Child Support Enforcement
[If the above link doesn't work, try cut/pasting:
http://www.policyalmanac.org/social_welfare/archive/child_support_01.shtml]
The policies you decry in the above paragraph arose in the 1970s when it was realized that single-parent families were now resulting primarily from divorce and unmarried women, and not from widowhood. Only about 18% of women were receiving child-support payments, and their children were suffering.
But policymakers did not react out of altruism or feminist sensibility; they reacted because many of these children were ending up on welfare rolls, and they had tired of any real, sustained "war on poverty." They did see men, who still come out of divorce more financially sound than women, as a source for gaining that money, and one that did not rely on taxation. They discovered that for every $1 spent on seeking custodial support, it saved $4 of taxpayer expense. So they went after it.
Women and children are impoverished at higher rates in this country than men are. Personally, I’d like to see high taxes on the wealthy and generous payments to child-carers regardless of who they are. I’d like to see less emphasis on finding the guilty father, which has its roots in colonial times, not feminist politics (Michael Grossberg’s book I think covers this history).
All of this intensified with the "end of welfare as we know it." Partly they could kick the mostly women and children off TANF lines--as a result of strict time limitations on welfare--by really going after men. I’m not saying that women and even feminist groups have not supported this, but NOW and most feminist groups were ADAMANTLY opposed to and shocked by and felt betrayed and demoralized by the Clinton administration's draconian approach to the poor. They genuinely resisted, but were also faced with potentially huge problems of massive increases in women's and children's poverty. And it's about this time that groups like both Promise Keepers and Fathers4Justice gained prominance, both, for different reasons and with differing goals, blaming feminists for all social evils.
So: I’m saying that 85% male politicians devised these strategies to avoid taxation, while seeking to paint themselves as knights in shining armor saving women in distress even as they harmed women and children. But to say feminist politics "created" this situation is sloppy argumentation, at best.
At worst, when you use feminist politics as a scapegoat for your arguments, refuse to acknowledge that divorced men bear any responsibility for the current situation, and yet borrow feminist ideas, tactics and policies without crediting them, it does matter. It is not just hypocritical, it is misogynist.
Now, as you apparently aren't bothered by completely alienating potential feminist allies, consider this: the "victimized" way you've framed your arguments is likely to contribute to the mainstream, non-feminist perception that men should suck it up and just pay their way. To these readers, f4j and other father's rights groups are likely to appear so self-centered that they can see no one else's pain as in a league with their own--not abused women, not impoverished children. This perception of self-centeredness contributes to the suspicion that many of these men simply resent having to support the children they have fathered. The risk you run, for your own cause, is that the implicit self-centeredness and immaturity deeply undercut the central point that these fathers have been unjustly denied parenting opportunities. Non-feminist readers are likely to be convinced that the system is basically working.
I am also interested in your answer to the question about abortion and I would like to discuss your argument that the amount of parenting before a divorce does not matter, but I’ll leave off for now as I have gone on quite long enough. |
