The male legal ownership of children is essential to patriarchy. Women are supposed to breed, bear, and/or socialize father-owned “legitimate” children within a father-absent and mother-blaming family. The fact that fathers are often absent, or abusive when present (incestuous, infanticidal, infantile), doesn’t change what patriarchy is about—literally, “the rule of the fathers.”

I have explored this paradox in each of my books: in Women and Madness in 1972 and in Women, Money and Power in 1976. In 1978, 1 did so more mythopoetically, in About Men. Long before Robert Bly, I saw men as father-wounded sons who therefore grow up to scapegoat women for their fathers’ many failings. In About Men I said: How sad that men would base an entire civilization on the principle of paternity, upon male legal ownership of and presumed responsibility for children, and then never really get to know their sons or their daughters very well; never really participate, for whatever reason, in parenting, in daily, intimate fathering.

True rebellion against a father frightens sons terribly. Sons have just barely begun to overthrow their original parents, their mothers. So I was concerned with displacements of male-male rage and grief onto safe targets, onto weaker men, onto children, onto women.

I viewed male uterus envy as probably the major psychological force behind the patriarchal creation myths (God as a father-creator of humanity) and behind the consequent secular myths that held man as medical expert to be superior to woman as mother. (My Rx for men was not male separatist drum-beating sessions but feminist consciousness and activism.)

So I was not surprised when I first encountered fathers’ rights activists in the late 1970s, claiming male maternal superiority and blaming women for fathers’ failures. Eventually, I wrote about them in “Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody” in 1986. The collective message presented by “fathers’ rights” groups is a chilling one: that children belong to men (sperm donors, surrogate contract fathers, live-in boyfriends, legal husbands) when men want them, but not when men don’t. Exactly who and what is the organized men’s rights/fathers’ rights movement?

It is patriarchy itself: the church, the state, and private enterprise, as it herds women into sex-typed, lesser lives; it is our own families, sacrificing our female members and defending our male members, even when they’re known to have seriously wronged women and children. It is the profound and unending hostility women encounter—on street corners, on dates, at work; it is the exclusion of women from paid or well-paid jobs. The fathers’ rights movement is the men’s auxiliary to this larger men’s movement.

The fathers’ rights movement in America grew out of the male feminist movement and the antifeminist new Right. What the men’s rights movement has done during the past 20 years is to repackage long-standing ideas about father-rights, sometimes in a progressive voice, other times in a reactionary one.

“Left-wing” (or feminist) fathers’ rights activists claim that fathers have an equal right to children because men can mother also. They say that “Mother is a verb, not a noun” and “A man can be a better mother than a woman can.”

“Right-wing” (or patriarchal) fathers’ rights activists claim that children need a father-dominated family. They also claim that God is the “father” of all children and that He appointed earthly fathers as His children’s custodians.

Both kinds of fathers’ rights activists share certain perspectives and strategies. They claim that as men they are savagely “discriminated” against by lawyers, judges, and ex-wives in custody matters; that as men they are economically enslaved and controlled by greedy and parasitic ex-wives who prevent them from seeing their children. And they argue that men’s parenting—whether on a “mothering” or a patriarchal fathering model—is sufficient and often superior to women’s parenting.

There is no comparable movement for mothers’ rights—that is, for custody, child support, alimony, marital property, increased levels of welfare, “free” legal counsel upon divorce, and so forth. But there should be because, despite men’s movement cries of “unfair,” it is in fact mothers’ and children’s interests that are routinely sacrificed on men’s behalf.

The organized fathers’ rights movement

1) campaigns against abortion rights, and sometimes

against female birth control;

2) counsels men to kidnap children, either legally or

illegally, and to default on alimony, health, and

child-support payments;

3) lobbies against state-initiated actions against

“deadbeat dads” and for programs that replace

women’s rights to a lawyer and a court hearing

with mandatory mediation favoring joint legal custody;

4) lobbies the media and state legislatures to dismiss

allegations that fathers commit incest (as lies

fabricated by vindictive wives and manipulated children),

manipulates anecdotes and social science

data (e.g., about “battered husbands”), and

demands—and commands—“equal time” in public

and media discussions;

5) fails to lobby for health, education, and welfare—

a family allowance appropriate to human needs

and dignity.

As I began to work actively on behalf of women who were targets of this growing movement, I was surprised when liberal middle class feminists began to support fathers’ rights—in the mistaken hope that if we allowed men even more rights than they already had they’d become more responsible and nurturant, at least to their own children; or if we counseled women to give up custody of children that they (and other women) would choose to devote themselves to feminist pursuits instead. In 1979, in With Child: A Diary of Motherhood, I wrote about chosen motherhood as a feminist and spiritual pursuit; however, many feminists were not interested in motherhood as an unmarried heterosexual impoverished woman’s right.

Feminists have no difficulty uniting around the issue of women’s reproductive rights and health. We all understand that the opposition to women’s right to control our own bodies maintains men’s power. But the issues of “fatherhood” and male parenting have proved to be far more complex and divisive. I have found that my pro-woman position embarrasses and threatens the kind of perfectly good liberal feminist who is not as concerned with a woman’s right to choose motherhood when our right to abortion is in such jeopardy; who ardently believes in the ideal of male (heterosexual) parenting and joint custody and in the reality of lesbian adoption, and the rights of the lesbian co-mother and adoptive couple over and against the rights of the lesbian biological mother or the non-lesbian, impoverished birth mother; the kind of feminist who views the right to have an abortion or to “choose” noncustodial motherhood as somehow morally and politically superior choices than the right to retain custody of

the child you chose to have.

I grant that the issue is exceedingly complex and does not lend itself to simplistic solutions. Yet, as I see it, once feminists began fighting for equal pay and for the right to abortion, the backlash was on. If women wanted the right to leave men or take men’s jobs away from them, then men, and the women who support them, would simply repossess women’s children as well as women’s bodies. While feminists, to our credit, may want to be “fair” to men, patriarchs are anything but “fair” to women.

Since I examined this new auxiliary backlash in Mothers on Trial, first published in 1986, more than 5,000 mothers have called or written. “I’m in your book,” they say. “It’s as if you know my story personally.” Fathers’ rights activists, both men and women, do not call or write. Instead, they picket my lectures and threaten lawsuits. In media debates, they literally shout at me, trying to drown out what I have to say. “Why don’t you admit it?” they demand. “Ex-wives destroy men economically. They deprive fathers of visitation and brainwash the children against them. Fathers should have rights to alimony and child support. Joint custody should be mandatory. Why do you refuse to see it our way? We’ve already convinced legislators and lawyers, judges and social workers, psychiatrists and journalists—and many feminists—that what we’re saying is true.”

Indeed they have. I know about their convictions from firsthand experience. I’ve been sued by fathers’ rights activists and threatened with imprisonment; I’ve received my feminist share of obscene phone calls and death threats. After one particularly harrowing encounter with fathers rights activists in Canada, I found a dead animal at my door. Early in 1986, for the first time in U.S. history, the FBI convened a grand jury on an ostensibly domestic matter: to question me about the whereabouts of a -runaway mother and her two “allegedly” sexually abused children. They had reason to believe I’d helped her. Friends: 1986 was not my favorite year. But in part because of the intense reaction to my work, I’ve come to think of myself as an abolitionist opposed to female slavery. I’ve learned to take myself seriously—not only because others support my views, but because they oppose them.

What is different about the face of this backlash is that some feminists support it. They argue that the best way to achieve women’s liberation is through a “gender-neutral”

approach—by treating women and men, mothers and fathers, as if they were the same; i.e., all white men and as such, deserving of equality. But men and women, mothers and fathers, are not equal under patriarchy. And the “gender-neutral” approach often backfires.

In Mothers on Trial, I challenged the myth that fit mothers always win custody—indeed, I found that when fathers fight they win custody 70 % of the time, even when they have been absentee or violent fathers. Since then, other studies have demonstrated that when men fight they win custody anywhere from 50% to 80% percent of the time—whether or not they have been involved in child care or the economic support of the family.

Although 80% to 85% of custodial parents are mothers, fathers who fight win custody not because mothers are unfit or because fathers have performed any housework or child care, but because mothers are held to a much higher standard of parenting.

In custody battles, mothers are routinely punished for having a career or job (she’s a “selfish absentee mother”) or for staying home on welfare (she’s a “lazy parasite”); for committing heterosexual adultery or for living with a man out of wedlock (she’s “setting an immoral example”) or for remarrying (she’s trying to “erase the real dad”) or for failing to provide a male role model (she’s a “bitter, man-hating lesbian”).

Divorcing fathers increasingly use the threat of a custody battle as an economic bargaining chip. And it works. He gets the house, the car, and the boat; she gets the kids and, if she’s lucky, minimal child support. When fathers persist, a high percentage win custody because judges tend to view the higher male income and the father-dominated family as in the “best interests of the child.” Many judges also assume that the father who fights for custody is rare and should therefore be rewarded for loving his children, or that something is wrong with the mother.

What may be “wrong” with the mother is that she and her children are being systematically impoverished, psychologically and legally harassed, and physically battered by the very father who is fighting for custody. However, mothers are often custodially punished for leaving a violent husband (she’s “economically depriving her kids and violating her marriage vows”) or for staying (she “married him so I hold her responsible for what he did”). Some people, including psychiatrists, lawyers, and judges, deal with male domestic violence by concluding that women have either provoked or exaggerated it.

Co-parenting or “male mothering” is an ideal of some feminist theorists, who therefore support joint custody of children as the preferred arrangement after divorce. However, this is liberal theoretics, not scientific fact—and leaders of the joint custody movement such as Dr. Judith Wallerstein are now saying just this. Inviting men to have more involvement in childcare, through a joint custody arrangement, will not necessarily produce more “mothering,” but perhaps more patriarchal “fathering.” The “disconnected” men who have been socialized to reproduce sexism are the very men whom feminists have been calling upon to participate “equally” in child care. Dr. Miriam Johnson, in Strong Mothers, Weak Wives, concludes that fathers—not mothers—control and dominate gender stereotyping. She asks: Would not such men “carry their dominating tendencies” into the nursery? Do we really want such men involved in mothering?

I am absolutely in favor of getting men off the battlefields and into the kitchen; and absolutely in favor of male tenderness, intimacy, accountability. However, I am arguing that the call for “gender neutrality” in custodial determination is a mistake. A deeper and closer look at the way “gender neutrality” works in actual custody cases shows that, rather than achieving equality, it may enhance male, patriarchal power and the primacy of sperm.

The patriarchal ideal of fatherhood is sacred. As such, it usually protects each father from the consequences of his actions. The ideal of motherhood is sacred, too, but no human mother can live up to it, so it serves to expose all mothers as imperfect. Therefore, all mothers are custodially vulnerable because they are women; all fathers, including incestuous, violent, absent, passive, or “helper” fathers, can win custody, not because mothers are “unfit” or because fathers are truly equal partners, but because fathers are men.

The equal treatment of “unequals” is unjust. In real patriarchy, the paternal demand for “equal” custodial rights, and the law that values legal paternity or male economic superiority over biological motherhood and/or over women’s primary care of children, degrades and violates both mothers and children.