Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Comments on Kansas Case Manager Guidelines 2012


From: angelfury@live.com
To: thompsona@kscourts.org
Subject: Comments on Case Manager Guidelines 2012
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2012 13:50:54 -0500

Comments Below Submitted with permission of Liz Kates

by

Claudine Dombrowski

Just 'another' Kansas Case Management - (non) Success Story, one family - 3 generations ruined and counting  - *ker-ching* 

www.AngelFury.org

www.AmericanMothersPoliticalParty.org

 

PARENTING COORDINATION issues - pros and cons Parenting Coordination is a Bad Idea.   Why:

Let's start with the problems with parenting coordination that every lawyer knows: inappropriate delegation of the judicial function, impediment to court access, and denial of due process. And so on...

The parenting coordinator concept encroaches on family liberty interests, bringing the government behind the closed doors of people's lives, injecting into the private realm a third party who is not in any way more capable than either of the parents are to make day-to-day decisions about their own families, values, and goals.

Parenting coordination is a made-up, make-work field that has been invented by bottom-feeding extraneous "professionals" who have literally reproduced like bacteria in the family court system.

There are no studies indicating that parenting coordinators make good decisions, improve the lives of children or parents, or improve child wellbeing. And, there is no reason to believe they would.

What qualifies a person to make personal family and childrearing decisions for other people -- what physician a child should go to, what school, other academic decisions, what extracurricular activities a child should participate in, family routines and scheduling decisions, seating decisions at the bar mitzvah or soccer game, and so forth? What qualifies a person unilaterally to interpret a court order, or "fill in the gaps" in the details of a legal document, a "parenting plan" (a violation of freedom of contract)? What qualifies a person to do "parenting coordination" to "help other persons implement" a legal contract (marital settlement agreement), as a supposed neutral?

Nothing.

What constitutes "success" at parenting coordination? Who knows. To the parenting coordinator, perhaps getting a nice fee.

To a judge, perhaps that he thinks he's eliminating work, clearing his docket, or just putting off disputes to another day, or another judge. If a judge thinks this is good for the court system, he's mistaken, because parenting coordination will make the congestion worse in the long run. While the parties are being denied immediate access to the judge, the presence of a parenting coordinator counterproductively requires that the door be left continuously open in the case, generating additional issues. The parenting coordinator's ideas introduced into the case, the minutiae that now has a forum, and the inevitable iatrogenic problems virtually guarantee that this is a short-sighted nonsolution to court congestion. Some of these issues may or may not be immediately apparent, and may even avoid detection in short-term surveys of pilot projects (assuming such studies otherwise are methodologically sound, which is unlikely.) The problems nevertheless are foreseeable. And relieving court congestion by hindering litigants' access to court (without regard to whether this is beneficial to families) is, in any event, of dubious validity as a rationale for the denial of due process.

So if relief of court congestion isn't a measure of success in parenting coordination practice, then what is? To one of the parties, that he or she now has an ally? That one of the parties is happy? Parenting coordination advocates of late have been busily setting about to create satisfaction surveys (not unlike the self-serving "evidence" that we saw upon the implementation of mandatory parenting class programs). But that a given litigant is satisfied would not be an indication of success at all unless we know with certainty that that party generally has the more meritable position. It might well be an indication of the complete breakdown of justice. Just as with the parenting class and court docket faux research, we also would have to discount these on studies based on lack of credibility because of $elf-$erving corruption, as well as unintended bias that is built in because of non-random subject selection, unwarranted optimism, self-reporting respondents' fears that negative comments could come back against them, and other methodological problems.

How about an objective measure of success, such as increased family well-being? How is this possible when people are burdened with tasks and negotiations and meddlesome reportings of the details of their days to third parties, when their time and money is consumed, pointlessly, when their privacy is intruded upon by the government like this, and when they are forced to kow-tow to the dictates of a court-appointed, decision-making autocrat in every area of their most intimate lives? It's not.

Are there better child-rearing outcomes? As compared with what? Defined how? And if not, what the heck are we supposedly doing here? Under any definition, increased child wellbeing has not been shown to flow from any of the ideas of applied therapeutic jurisprudence, i.e. trade promotion, in the family courts. (In fact, increased well-being in the population generally has not been demonstrated by any research from the burgeoning of psychological interventions and therapies over the decades.)

Just as with custody evaluators and guardians ad litem, and even to a large extent, the practice of mediation, there is no way to do any decent studies in this area. Benefit is not even apparent informally across demographic groups. Don't fall for self-serving industry articles spinning speculation. Research will never demonstrate any benefits from many of these ideas, including parenting coordination, because credible studies simply cannot be done. Even, inappropriately, after the fact. (If you don't understand why, contact me privately and I will direct you to material on social science versus science, experimental methodology, logic, and how to do critical reading and thinking and not be such a credulous patsy.)

The parenting coordination concept is an infection that causes all of the problems that custody evaluators and GALs bring into the family court system, and then some. Again, what qualifies a third-party stranger parenting coordinator to make daily family life decisions for other people? Nothing. And nothing ever will. Many of these kinds of decisions are made based on a free individual's own private life, relationships, desires, work needs, schedule, and personal values, beliefs and goals. The parenting coordinator makes decisions based on the parenting coordinator's own private agendas, preferences, motives, work needs, values, beliefs and goals -- and which party the parenting coordinator just happens to like better (which already is the unfortunate but real basis for most of custody evaluator and guardian ad litem opinings). The decision-making is based on, inter alia, intangible personality things as well tangibles such as who likes them and pays them timely and well.

Many, if not most, lawyer parenting coordinators as well as many mental health professionals, notwithstanding their ostensible "training", completely lack psychological insight. That's because it's not a function of academic training. Parenting coordination also is not "co-parenting therapy" (which rarely works anyway -- witness all the mental health professionals lobbying, writing, organizing, promoting, bucking for the authority to be mini-judges and dictators in a "parenting coordination" role.) Most mental health professionals also lack a clue regarding the repercussions in law of their ideas (a more obvious deficit, since they are probably not lawyers), yet these are people supposedly interpreting and "filling in the gaps" in legal documents!

The primary reason there is no valid "training" to be had is that there is no body of expertise, no foundation of knowledge, upon which to base any such training. It's... all just made up. Maybe they're smart? Well, not versus all possible litigants by a long shot, and no stranger will understand the daily life and routines, family members' needs and personalities, the interactions going on in someone else's household or the effects of their ideas in practice unless they actually spend considerable time in that household. Which, of course, they don't.

To go back to the court congestion problem that is moving the legislatures and courts to embrace the parenting coordination lobbyists' arguments: parenting coordination provides a forum for the arguing of minutiae that, in the absence of a parenting coordinator, the parties would have to work out, and learn to work out, on their own, or just let go. In other words, it addresses issues that wouldn't be there in the first place! It cannot prevent the litigation of issues that aren't within the purvue of the parenting coordinator to begin with, but still must be addressed by a judge. With regard to these other issues, however, when the parenting coordinator makes a bad decision, or oversteps authority, simply because this was the decision of a third party, that opens the door to the courthouse for matters that otherwise would not have had a forum, or would not have existed at all. The very presence of a parenting coordinator, like an uber-parent for the parents, itself creates opportunity for petty squabbling, encouraging it because, ironically, just like a misguided inept parent, the third party (getting paid for his time) is ready and available to intervene in all manner of disputes, thus retarding rather than encouraging growth and cooperation. Conflict is something that harms children. 

Parenting coordination creates its own conflicts. And it not only encourages new conflicts, but creates a number of other foreseeable harms.

Parenting coordination is expensive, even at hourly rates less than the ordinary rates charged by these professionals when they do real work. This is so because the cost is for extra work, on top of the lawyers and litigation expenses the parties still have to maintain; the parenting coordination process actually does not eliminate any of this. Rather, it adds on additional professional expenses to handle minutiae that otherwise would not be creating expense. Ultimately, it's very expensive because any expense that does not yield something of equivalent value is a waste of money. Moreover, having a parenting coordinator at the ready permits one party to spend the other's funds by unilaterally contacting and choosing to bring issues before the parenting coordinator. Generally, both parties have to pay a portion of the parenting coordinator's fees; usually these are divided 50-50, and timely payment of the parenting coordinator's fees also becomes a matter of high concern for the parenting coordinator, adding that issue into the case.

Once appointed, the parenting coordinator has absolutely no incentive to work himself or herself out of a job. The potential amount of work is open-ended and in large part able to be self-generated by the parenting coordinator. The schedule is flexible and the royalties can go on indefinitely, until the parenting coordinator is removed (but not "for cause" because this would have to be based on criteria of success that largely is unable to be established). (How nice for the parenting coordinator.)

Frequent and typical make-work by the parenting coordinator includes forcing people to include the parenting coordinator in all communications and emails, provide the parenting coordinator in advance with parents' and children's schedules and activities, meet at the whim of the parenting coordinator, provide the parenting coordinator with school documents and medical records, and the like. Churn, churn, churn, duplicate, churn...

Parenting coordination intrudes on privacy. Among other things, parenting coordination permits the state via a state-appointed agent to demand information and details about people's lives that then can be brought back into court by the opposing party, effectively becoming ongoing compelled government discovery, contrary to the Fourth Amendment.

Individuals who choose to do this "work", to become parenting coordinators, are the equivalent of paid yentas and neighborhood meddlers. They tend to be individuals who cannot make a go of practicing the profession for which they were ostensibly educated and licensed -- the incompetent, the inexperienced, the nincompoops, the untalented, the lazy and/or the burnt-out. A good number have ulterior agendas, conscious and subconscious, either political agendas, or agendas of the psychologically issued psychic vampire or petty tyrant variety. Many parenting coordinators have axes to grind and strongly held personal beliefs about how other people's lives should work, what constitutes "fairness", fathers' or mothers' rights, parental values and roles, and so forth, as well as a need to re-visit, re-live and normalize their own family-of-origin issues.

A big draw for doing parenting coordination work is, of course, that while parenting coordination promoters tout the "lower cost", meaning that they are willing to settle for lower fees per hour for this work rather than their other work, the work itself is relatively brainless. And it's unregulated and practicably unable to be regulated. There is no efficient or effective oversight. Being unregulated means that there is no recourse against the parenting coordinator for malfeasance or malpractice. For good measure, as added insurance against malfeasance, many, if not most parenting coordinators require the parties to sign various consents and waivers of liability. Some statutes and procedural rules have formalized the lack of accountability as well. (How nice for the parenting coordinator.)

If you've heard argument otherwise, that the field was chosen in order to "help" (dictate to other) people, or because they were "frustrated" as lawyers or psychologists or mediators in not being able to "help" (dictate to other) people, then given the relatively lower (albeit no-overhead) hourly fees charged for parenting coordination, ask how much unpaid voluntary work the person has done. Query why this ostensible advice-giving do-gooderism wasn't just done through their church, or a community charity agency, and offered to all-comers in their avocational spare time on a no-obligation basis, while in their regular working time, they just continue to practice the profession for which they actually were trained and licensed. That's how good samaritans and persons with kindly, charitable intent usually "help" when that's the actual motive and they already have a real profession to practice in the family court field.

The nature of the function as designed enables parenting coordinators to churn money by insisting on all manner of crap that involves them, under circumstances in which their decisions cannot be second-guessed, even by a judge. The parenting coordinator's "work" cannot conveniently be reviewed by a judge because the "proceedings" with a parenting coordinator are informal, undocumented, and outside of the court and due process. In many jurisdictions, the parenting coordination practice essentially is professed to be "confidential except when it's not." (More on this, below.) Also, there is no criteria of "success", no standard of satisfactory practice. All fuzzy. If and to the extent acts or omissions of the parenting coordinator are contested, no matter what occurs, the parenting coordinator simply can "remember" conversations and events differently from the way they really happened. If contested, the parenting coordinator also can -- and will -- employ the ready CYA alibis of "high conflict custody case" and one parent's ostensible irrationality or prevarication.

Many of the lawyers, mental health professionals, and erstwhile mediators and guardians ad litem who want to do parenting coordination have no actual experience themselves as parents, let alone as caregiving parents, let alone as single parents -- or with blended family issues, or with children with particular issues, or in "shared parenting" or divorced situations. Some do, and as noted, more often than not, they are normalizing their own issues. These advice-givers do not necessarily hail themselves from successful well-functioning families. Parenting coordinators bring to their job their personal opinions and values and speculations founded on their unknown personal backgrounds, including some of the most dysfunctional (and undisclosed) personal familial histories, and implement their personal and political agendas. They are the antithesis of "wise persons", who generally are not found among neighborhood gossips or those who relish involving themselves in the mundane details of other people's lives.

Time spent with the parenting coordinator, where not catering to the dysfunctional weak or abusive litigants who are hoping for support or a sounding board is tedious and time-consuming for the parents. The same timewasting, of course, represents a ca-ching in the bank account of the parenting coordinator, which encourages plodding and more time-wasting meetings and talkings. (Meanwhile, the litigant fantasy of having a parenting coordinator "on the case" as an ally will end quickly when the selected parenting coordinator in this crapshoot aligns with the other parent.)

Parents are placed at the whim of all kinds of arbitrary demands made by the parenting coordinator, including for the payment for their time, which is largely in the control of the parenting coordinator and possibly the other party. (This applies, to a great extent, as well, to various court-appointed therapists and GALs). Given the presence of the parenting coordinator, and the payment incentive, every decision, no matter how petty or absurd, is open for endless discussion and rumination. In addition to being time-consuming, this is a delight for stalker-harasser abusive types, as well as those who just won't let go of the other party.

The parenting coordinator can think up all kinds of activities to do and with which to require the parents to comply: pseudo-therapy (unregulated of course by the licensing boards because it's "not really" therapy, and it's "not really" law); "communications counseling"; "coaching"; reading of materials; various "educational" homework assignments; meetings with one or the other of the parties, meetings together, meetings with various combinations of others; demands for disclosure, frequently in writing, of private thoughts, emotions, and information; consultations and strategy sessions with the children's guardian ad litem and parents' court-ordered or parenting coordinator-ordered therapists; meetings with the children's physicians and teachers; meetings with anyone at all; ordering of a parent into supervised visitation or therapeutic visitation; recommending to the court therapies of all kinds with yet more of the helping professionals -- almost anything. Confidentiality? That's a pipe dream. It's only "confidential" when that suits the parenting coordinator, and there's a court issue. But under the pretext of having to gather information, the PC has authority to yammer to pretty much everyone in the community. And if a parent doesn't comply, there are sanctions, imposed both by the parenting coordinator and the court for "noncompliance".

Does this not strike you as an outrageous and unconstitutional denigration of the First Amendment freedom of speech and association, Fourth and Fifth Amendment privacy rights, and the fundamental parental rights of perfectly fit parents, as to whom the state would be unable to file a dependency action and remove their children to foster care? Free, competent individuals are entitled voluntarily to subject themselves to private judges and arbitrators, of course. But why would any informed and reasonably intelligent individual who is not under duress and coercion, ever agree to living with one who cannot be appealed, discharged, or limited to issues brought before him? Answer: they wouldn't. Either these litigants were not properly informed (in any number of ways), or they indeed were under inappropriate coercion of some kind that rendered their consent essentially involuntary.

How-to techniques for would-be parenting coordinators in this newly invented "profession" consist of almost anything the parenting coordinator might dream up, sprinkled with suggestions and teachings borrowed from law, psychology, mediation and other practices, as well as fantasies from other imaginative self-styled professional parenting coordinators in the recent explosion of manuals, books and trade-promotion "trainings". (Until enough fools sign on for this cock-'n-bull to fill a workweek, for the ambitious, there's still money that can be earned professing to be a mavin).

Parenting coordination "training" materials comprise mostly stuff plucked from the asses of their inventors.

Doubt me? Read some of it. Parenting coordination methodology includes such things as ordering people how to talk with each other ("use my template"), ordering parents in what method they may or must talk with each other ("email only, and you must copy me"), and even uttering orders to parents regarding when or whether they must or may not meet and/or communicate with each other, with the parenting coordinator, with the court or their own lawyer, and with other people such as extended family, all in astonishing violation of fundamental constitutional rights. To facilitate all of this, parenting coordination orders, agreements, "voluntary" consents, "understandings" and intake forms generally require the parents to sign away all manner of these constitutional rights -- in what is, essentially, a busybody's lucrative wetdream.

As previously noted, having a parenting coordinator on a case keeps the case continuously open and invites it to explode into endless issue-making, rather than being finally resolved, and in doing so, actually creates more, not fewer, problems for both the litigants and the courts. Sometimes a case does appear to resolve, but all too often that is only because the financially or emotionally weaker party, or the party unfavored by the parenting coordinator, just gives up in defeat, beaten away by the constant undercurrent threat of litigation, the harassment, and the need to avoid continuing costs.

(If judges' goals here are to get people to just shut up and go away, we could eliminate all of the docket problems in the civil courts and achieve equally fine results just by closing the courts altogether.)

Parenting coordination, the latest of the therapeutic jurisprudential ideas, is dangerous, and not merely because of the distortion it makes in the judicial system and of due process. In recent years there has been a burgeoning of child abuse and deaths stemming from child custody disputes in which abusive individuals get custody and visitation rights, correlating with the rise of joint custody theory and the intrusion into the family courts of therapeutic jurisprudence. Unqualified strangers can and will make bad decisions that simply cannot timely be brought to court, cannot effectively be reviewed by the court, or which are prohibitively expensive to bring to court. Parenting coordinators have missed domestic violence. Conversely, in one Florida appellate case, a parenting coordinator wrongly claimed that domestic violence had occured when it hadn't, prompting an emergency change of custody. Parenting coordinators have assumed facts that are not true. They have perceived emergencies or situations incorrectly. They have mischaracterized events and made egregious judgmental mistakes. They have lied outright. See the cases. The concept is dangerous because parenting coordinators are not and practicably cannot be subject to any effective oversight. Each case is different, there are no studies, there is no body of knowlege, there is no methodology, there are no licenses, there are and can be no effective regulations, there are no actual practice parameters other than aspirational sound-goods, such as "be neutral", there are no definitions of a successful outcome, and it's all vague nonsense or worse.

Depending on the vagaries of the practice from time to time in this or that jurisdiction, parenting coordinators effectively have license to wield heavy authority and extremely biased power, opining back to and influencing judges, bringing issues into the public domain that do not belong there and which were not brought into the case by either party, siding with one party unfairly (even developing personal relationships with one of the parties), and recommending or just ordering the parents to hire the parenting coordinator's own cronies for therapies and guardianships and evaluations. It's a recipe for more corruption and an insult to the rule of law.

Parenting coordinators can -- and do -- violate the terms of parties' contractual agreements as well as the law. Lobbyists for statutory implementation of this role have argued, speciously, that oversight does indeed exist because, well, "if the parties are not happy, they can always go back to court". But real life doesn't work that way, and it especially does not work that way under these circumstances. "If you don't like it, then take it to court" is a dare that can be thrown out cavalierly, because the parenting coordinator role permits these court appointees to hold over the head of objecting parties the power -- baselessly presumed to be executed in good faith -- to obtain the ear of the judge first, and to poison the well. They also hold more credibility before before the judge than those lunatic, bitter, embattled, unreasonable, "high-conflict", personality-disordered parents. They can and do function as shadow witnesses ex parte, to provide the judge (directly as well as indirectly through guardians ad litem, other witnesses, and even via support to one of the parties) with information, evidence and innuendo. Their inexpert opinions can and frequently will label one of the parties as the recalcitrant, the wrongdoer, the deadbeat, the crazy, or the "uncooperative" one.

So "take it to the judge" does not work, particularly post-decree, when a party may be short of time or funds, or may no longer even have a lawyer. And it does not work because in many courts, days or weeks, or months may go by before a party can get a hearing. And it does not work because an objecting party has to overcome not only the parenting coordinator but also the opposing party -- being out-voted from the git-go, two against one, a problem also inherent in the family court guardian ad litem role, but potentially even worse in this instance because the parenting coordinator solicits support from the guardian ad litem, the appointed therapists, and the rest of the courthouse cronies. And it does not work because "going back to court" means risking the irritation of the judge who appointed the parenting coordinator in the first place precisely because he didn't want to hear about it. There is no oversight.

Difficult to remove in any event once appointed, the parenting coordinator is even more difficult to remove when he or she is biased (and that's a better than even bet, given the nature of ongoing informal relationships with people, especially where there is money at stake, and especially given who is drawn to this line of work). Bias should be one of the grounds that immediately would mandate removal of a parenting coordinator, but it also means that the parenting coordinator will be vested in preserving his own aura of competence and neutrality (as well as current and future income stream), all the while being validated by the party with whom he is aligned. Moreover, how does a party prove "bias" when the ubiquitous explanation is that the "disgruntled" party who didn't get his or her way always makes this claim of "bias".

There is no way to tell in advance who might be a "good" or "helpful" parenting coordinator. Families differ, circumstances differ, and personalities differ. To parties disputing this, or buying into a sell-job from some mental health professional, mediator, or burnt-out lawyer, I would ask: how great were you in deciding in advance who to marry, or with whom to have a child. What makes you believe that the third party who wants this easy work will be a second voice on "your" side?

In the inane insistence that "both" parents "participate" in making decisions regarding the child, in order to avoid stalemate, parenting coordination is the tool for unworkable custody and timeshare arrangements, notably joint custody, which removes from BOTH parents the right to function with authority and automony. A big flaw in the concept of joint custody is that, instead of having at least one functional parent, the joint custody child now has two ineffective half-parents who may not function except in tandem, and ironically they are typically the kind of parents least able to pull this off. With a parenting coordinator or guardian ad litem added into the mix, the child does not even have that, because instead of two half-parents sharing an undivided fundamental parental liberty interest, the child has half-parents who report to a parenting boss. It's involvement by the state in the complete absence of any actual threat to the child that ordinarily would justify state intrusion like this.

One should counter: if a third party stranger, based upon no established field of expertise whatsoever, is supposedly qualified to make and facilitate decisions impacting other people's family lives, something that is not even usually encouraged in clinical therapy, then why is not the better solution just to assign that authority to one of the parents? The spheres of decision-making authority can be allocated too. It would be easier, cheaper, quicker, and done. And at least then the child would have one real and functional authoritative parent, something that IS demonstrably evidenced in the research to be necessary for child security and well-being.

While the rhetoric is rampant that parents are less likely or unlikely to consider their children before themselves in their decision-making when they are embattled in divorce and post-divorce issues, no research actually substantiates this concocted rationale.

The rationale first was invented by psych trade groups to lobby state legislatures for guardians ad litem in family law cases, and later was used to justify in part the appointment of custody evaluators. It's become yet another family court system truism without a shred of foundation. The anecdotal claims (if you even get that much, get any anecdotes) of individuals who have a political or profit motive, peddling their services to the market, are just not credible, especially as to historic primary caregivers. No one is as interested in or vested in their own children's happiness and wellbeing as the child's own parent, or, if you must, as between two parents, than the one who already has shown higher attachment and commitment.

Parenting coordination stands as proof positive that something is very, very wrong with the substantive direction of child custody law in recent years. As more and more mental health professionals stream into the court system, get involved in bar associations, and encourage lawyers to mix it up in "multidisciplinary" organizations, the substantive laws are getting worse. The problems consequently are getting worse. The solutions for the iatrogenic problems caused by these therapeutic interventions are more and more of them. That's dysfunctional. That cure is "hair of the dog that bit you" and goodgod, the "science" of the psychological experts is about as valid. There's a better solution. You should know what that is by now. Just Say No.

Comments Submitted with permission of Liz Kates

by

Claudine Dombrowski

Just 'another' Kansas Case Management - (non) Success Story, one family - 3 generations ruined and counting - *ker-ching*

www.AngelFury.org

www.AmericanMothersPoliticalParty.org

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Patriarchy, Feminism, Fathers Rights and Feminism. Equality? Divorce and Child Custody -Why we are where we are now - and how we got there.

A very important history lesson for Every Woman, man and “offspring”. Reproduced with permission The Liz Library

MALE-BASHING?
It's a misguided notion that speaking out against "fathers' rights" is anti-male gender bias.

Prior to the 1960s, women rarely could get out of marriages in which they were abused or just plain miserable.  In order to obtain a divorce, they had to prove "fault." Some of the first speakers against the fault-based laws, and against the difficulty women had in leaving marriages in which they were unhappy were feminists.  Before much changed, however, mens' rights groups discovered that the words and ideas of feminism could in fact cleverly be turned around and used against women, and for the advantage of men.

Thus it began...

The pattern of women's making gains on one hand without realizing that something else has been taken from them on the other has been one of the pervasive problems for feminist activism.

One of the reasons it's been able to happen is that women by and large simply have been newbies in the political process. Women have not even yet become astute about the impact of compromised agendas, or visionary about how compromises and nice-sounding rhetoric will "pan out" in practice and down the road.

Additionally, women's information networks move slow -- much slower than the existing old boy networks, which are highly organized, both formally and informally.  Consider how the father's rights activism has permeated the internet over the past few years, making noise. creating new organizations, and establishing "names" and "credentials" for itself far out of proportion to the numbers of men actually involved.

Changes Without Progress.

What has happened over the last thirty years in family law legislation has been, in the main, for women, a series of gains on the one hand coupled with reversals on the other, all of which have occurred without fanfare or critical media commentary or, outside of very limited feminist legal scholarship circles, much of any feminist awareness.  Why.

First, as more and more women moved into the workforce during the 70s (as much the result of economic factors as any success of the feminist movement), anti-mother, pro-career rhetoric was picked up strongly by the media.

The media liked the career-woman theme because, well, frankly, it was trendy.  Different. Free sex, bra-burning, the E.R.A... gender-neutrality was stylish.  Titillating.

During this period, as they gained recognition of workplace inequities, women went from leery to terrified of showing much overt interest in family and children, lest they lose hard-won and still-unsecured employment and lifestyle choices, and women's "place" be redefined again for them as *only* wives and mothers.

The woman versus woman nonsense (careerist versus homemaker) largely was (and still is) misunderstood. It is just a variation on the old popular theme (slut versus madonna) which, by labelling women, seeks to limit and control them. When we are not whole, and denied a part of ourselves, or the ability to be true to ourselves, we have lost power. And when those who have accordant interests nevertheless believe that reality is otherwise, then they are not a powerful and united group. Not recognizing this, however, many students of 70s feminism, in attempting to avoid being limited as "girls," and "housewives," bought into the woman-dividing in its insideous 70s variation. [liznote #1]

Then as now, both women and men, including feminists, fell (and still fall) for this simplistic either-or characterizing of "kinds of women."

And falling for this, as far too many self-identified feminists in fact did through the 70s and into the 80s, and out of misplaced fear that continuing interest in their families would harm women's rights progress on other fronts, all major feminist and women's organizations have, until very recently, sorely neglected the family law arena. They focused instead on the peripheral impacting domestic violence and abortion rights areas, as well as a gender-neutral ("we can do it just like-- just as good as -- men") focus on employment rights.

Never mind that most women DO get married and have children. The intense fear of defining ALL women as wives and mothers created an arguable paramount priority. Whether justifiable or merely excusable, it was a short-sighted priority. (After all these years, we still don't have decent child care options, do we. Or an economic workplace reflecting that it itself exists FOR the benefit of individuals and families, the enhancement of life, and the good and functioning of society generally, and not vice versa.)

Lack of a holistic feminist policy and vision.

Family law has been the area of most academic feminist ignorance and least feminist activism, largely due to the fact that motherhood and older women's lives never have been and *still* are not the subjects naturally of most interest to young, scholarly college women. Family issues also have not seemed terribly pressing to women who do not choose to marry men and have children -- and many of these women disproportioniately are feminist activists, precisely because traditional patriarchal notions of women's roles offer nothing for them.

Added to this, of course, is that, good intentions aside, there are some things that a person just has to live to actually understand.  Like what one's children mean and really involve in time, effort and emotional investment.

While cultural womanhood freely embraces, or at least gives lipservice to notions of "sisterhood," an ageless and roleless and safe term right out of childhood, note, the culture's often schizophrenic, negative and limiting woman-labelling has, perhaps, prevented an empathetic identification of all grown women with "motherhood." (Contrast the readily embraced, frequently metaphorized, and always respected notions of "fatherhood.")

But perhaps the biggest reason the importance of family laws to women's lives has not been conveyed successfully to the feminist front-lines has been that women with children, and especially women on welfare, are overall the most isolated, poorest and least-connected group in the society, and the group that has the least time for activism.

The "Feminization of Poverty."

What happens to women and children after divorce? They struggle, and struggle mightily! The question is: why haven't decades and decades of broadening career and educational opportunities yet assured women of economic viability? Well, yes, there's the discrimination in the workplace, overt and covert, in all the ways and all the kinds we know about.  But the real answer is simply that women STILL bear and care for the children in this world.  This is not "equal," it's not "gender-neutral," and it never will be. [See liznotes on primary parenting and the effects of pregnancy.]

Both men and women each get the same 24 hours in a day, but by and large, women with children have to allocate their time between two jobs.  NO ONE can be in two places at the same time, doing two incompatible things at the same time, both caring for children and a household AND earning a living.  A list of economic studies [#2] compiled by Lynn Hecht Shafran illustrates how this pans out post-divorce, once the support system of marriage is no longer in place (it's not debatable.)

The following is from an article by Harriet Newman Cohen, author of The Divorce Book for Men and Women,Avon Books l994, and a partner in the matrimonial law firm of Cohen Hennessy & Bienstock, in New York City:

"Fourteen years have elapsed since the equitable distribution law was passed in New York (on June l9, l980) and even more since similar "reforms" were passed, including no-fault divorce on demand in parts of the country.

"No more "alimony drones," the phrase to describe the bum rap women suffered in the seventies and earlier, when alimony was all a woman could get in courts that were not statutorily empowered to divide up property.

"With the "new laws," women traded long-term, even lifetime, alimony for anticipated property distribution and the promised dignity that would accompany it...

"We start with assumptions [about]... the relative worth of each party. She... is supported, dependent, and a receiver at his sufferance. These views are frequently held by him, her, the lawyers, and the courts -- throwbacks to another era. They are reinforced by society. After all, the government has refused to enact laws entitling homemakers to Social Security and IRA contributions based on their homemaking services.

"And people still ask mothers, "Do you work?" It smarts. Outside the house in "gainful" employment, do they mean? The principles of equal partnership characterized by different work assignments in a marriage have not caught hold...

"... The equitable distribution laws that were supposed to reform family law premised that women who had been out of the paid work force to raise children and be homemakers -- or simply out of the work force because that was the partners' deal -- could be recycled (i.e. reeducated, retrained, and deployed into a higher-paying job) in short order.

"Before that dubious premise could even be tested, short-term spousal support -- about five years even for a long-term marriage -- became the norm. "No-fault" states also became "no support" states. Yet studies showed that a five-year turnaround period... was not enough. Routinely, his standard of living went up, and hers and the children's went down. A new phrase was born: the feminization of poverty... "

--Family Advocate Summer l994, American Bar Association

Over the last twenty or thirty years, in many respects, divorce laws have become more and more punitive and dangerous for women.

In the beginning.

Women used to have difficulty getting out of marriages. Traditionally, in patriarchal societies, even today around the world, and in our culture until the last century, women simply had no effective way to get divorced. Divorce largely was a male prerogative. In the rare instances in which women had this legal option, often they effectively were kept in marriage by economic disabilities that prevented them from having any real choice to go it alone.

Even after some of the economic barriers to women's obtaining divorces began to dissolve, in order to gain the permission of the state to dissolve what only "until death do us part," egregious fault had to be proved.  By the 20th century, however, for those women who in fact WERE in the most abusive of marriages, that fault could be proven -- and proving it meant custody of the children and some award of support (which wasn't always paid, but at least the need for it was recognized.)  In addition, in all those marriages in which MEN wanted out, women had a "bargaining chip" in the fault laws: they could refuse a divorce unless they received a fair property settlement and alimony.

This is not to say that there weren't BIG problems of other kinds with fault-based divorce, or with many of the other divorce and family laws preceding the current era. [See, e.g. the comments by U. S. Civil Rights Commission in connection with its support for the failed Equal Rights Amendment.]

One problem with fault-based divorce was that while men would just leave marriages without obtaining a divorce, economic pragmatics effectively prevented women from "abandoning" their marriages in this way. Lest they be found themselves to have "abandoned" their marriage for unwarranted reasons, and in the absence of being able to prove "fault" based on other grounds, "non-abandoned" women frequently found themselves stuck in miserable situations. Those who were in the worst situations, however, ultimately couldget their divorces. And where men were the ones found to be "at fault," or who wanted out of their marriages in order to remarry, the fault-based laws did offer some protections for the "not-at-fault" spouse in the way of bargaining power. The men found to be "at fault" paid. But those women who just could not adequately prove the degree of fault required, or who had less than exemplary marital track records themselves were in trouble. Proving what few or no third parties may have observed behind the closed doors of a marital home (or a paramour's bedroom) was not always feasible. Physical abuse did not always amount (legally) to "mental cruelty." And so feminists from suffragette days onward campaigned for reforms to enable women to more easily get a divorce when they needed or desired one.

Ironically, though, while feminists had long sought reforms that would enable women to end marriages that were untenable, as the divorce laws began to loosen and as substantive economic and procedural reforms began to achieve more parity and safety for women, by the time the no-fault divorce laws were enacted, they actually were enacted for, and in ways that benefitted, not women, but men.

Although many women still believe that "no-fault" somehow was the end result of women's long-sought-after marriage dissolution rights, "no-fault" ultimately was the way men counter-moved to evade their worsening "held hostage" situation of having to make property settlements and pay alimony (and the more fault the more alimony) as divorce became more easily and safely obtainable by women. The "no-fault" language was presented as the logical extension of "making divorce easier to obtain," and it was cleverly and timely coupled with a distorted application of 70s feminist rhetoric about women's "independence" and supporting themselves. "Fault" as a basis for equitable remedy in connection with a divorce was abandoned right along with "fault" as a ground for divorce.

Once the no-fault divorce laws, coupled with gender-equality/neutrality rhetoric took hold in the late 70s and early 80s, the bad news for women was that in all but seven states in the country, most of the marital property was titled solely in husband's names -- and they walked out with it upon divorce.

In addition, with the discarding of fault as the basis for equitable remedy in divorce, "no-fault" presumptions actually came down hardest on, and yielded the worst outcomes for precisely those women who suffered the most during their marriages to abusive, nonsupporting, or dysfunctional men! One step forward, two steps back. [liznote #3]

"Equitable Distribution" and "Equality."

Once the problems with "no-fault" divorce (as it had been fashioned) started to become apparent, another wave of "divorce reform" via "corrective" legislation started rolling along, and it came about largely in the way of something known as "equitable distribution."  But that wasn't all. It is no accident that timing-wise, it followed in the 80s right on the heels of women's greater entry into the workforce in the 70s, and feminists' clamoring for equality. Mens-rights forces coopted the idea of equality, and turned it back into their favor, using the the same "equitable" language. To this day, many persons -- judges and scholars included -- have difficulty distinguishing between the terms "equitable," and "equal."

The claim was made by men and bought by many women, including (or even particularly) many self-described feminist women, that inasmuch as men and women now were "equal partners," and inasmuch as women would be getting an "equitable distribution" upon divorce, women should no longer "childishly" depend on being "supported."

The women who fell for this, a good percentage of them optimistic young women, often childless, in academia, and also women lawyers, many married to successful and supportive men, and also "overachiever" types desperate to be seen to be as fully as capable as their male peers, unfortunately pretty much represented the "consensus" of women's voices heard from on these issues. They were the only women who HAD a "voice" and a platform from which to be heard. (This problem remains pervasive today in connection with women's issues in areas outside of domestic violence activism and abortion rights.)

The mens-rights interests succeeded in coupling most of the equitable distribution laws with anti-alimony laws.

The (faulty or fraudulent, you pick) thinking was: why should women be supported if they are "equal?" Divide the accumulated marital "partnership" property, and then henceforth, the former husband and wife would have "equal opportunity" to work and support themselves. [liznote #4]

But fifty-year-old women, who had spent all of their married lives moving where their husbands had moved, entertaining his clients or working for his business, or simply picking up all of life's other chores and child-rearing to enable him to work, found themselves being told that they could "rehabilitate" themselves, and that they had "equal opportunity" to work.

Such thinking ignores that in commencing the economic race ten, twenty or thirty years behind out of the starting gate, there simply is never going to be any kind of catch-up. There's no catch-up in salary levels or overall career achievement, there's no catch-up in pension plan vesting, and there's no catch-up in post-marriage asset accumulation. Equitable distribution standing alone is a particularly noxious remedy where, for one reason or another, at the time of the divorce, there isn't much marital property to be "equitably divided," and the couple's biggest maritally-developed asset, the result of the joint efforts of both, is the husband's future earning power. And it's a double-whammy when women, already operating under THIS impairment, also have children to continue to care for.

For young women, with one or several infants and young children, not only have fewer marital assets accumulated or pension plans vested, but also it's just not reasonable to expect that an individual with children to care for -- even a mother with the very same education, experience and ability as her former husband -- will be able to earn equivalently to her ex-husband.

Without even getting into the employment sector barriers which still exist, it's flat-out not possible to both care for children and work in outside employment at the same time. Either childcare or financial care is needed. Even with babies warehoused for inappropriate and unhealthy amounts of time in third party care, the cost of such care leaves mothers with little or no earnings remaining after taxes and other expenses of employment. Even with optimal child care, mother's employment is hampered by contraints on travel, distance, hours, overtime, emergency flexibility, sick children, breastfeeding requirements, daytime errands, and the weight of "buck-stops-here" responsibility for little others' lives.

The rise of joint custody theory and politics.

By the time the flaws in equitable distribution/no-alimony schemes became apparent in the late 70s and 80s, divorce reform was humming long at breakneck speed, along with an increase in divorces, breeding its own systemic problems to be addressed (such as more courts.) A more sophisticated political wave and a counter-wave rose at the same time, posing as an ostensible "fix."

To mend some of the holes left by the first equitable distribution laws, in the 80s, feminist activists helped get recognition for women's contributions to mens' schooling and careers, and helped strengthen "rehabilitative alimony" laws, and child support laws. As these bills came into legislatures, however, they threatened to take from men their beloved possessions.

While feminists worked to enact laws that would help women retain their share of some of the economic security they had "in partnership" helped accumulate, along came joint custody theory and joint custody laws -- once again, using feminists' own words about equality against them, and in a weird way, rendering children yet another possession for equitable division.

The (faulty or fraudulent, you pick) thinking was: If women are entitled to seek equality in the workforce, well, then men are entitled to seek it in custody laws. Equity and the interests of the children be damned. Never mind that women who had achieved some personal semblance of "equality" in the workforce had in fact taken considerable initiative to do so, gaining the education and experience, and putting in the requisite time and effort toward that career. In the home, men, on the whole had done nothing much different from what they always had done, with only minor increases in male parenting time with children, largely in the area of recreational time.

Affirmative action? This is hardly the time for it. It's not the time for it, even if "affirmative action" in the workplace were analogous to a theory of "affirmative action" by one divorcing mother to benefit one husband. And it's hardly analogous given that children are not property to be divvied up and experimented with like just so many entry-level jobs or freshman class openings.

One of the specious arguments goes: this will free up mothers' time, enabling them to work, and improving the quality of their life!  Ridiculous. If an alternate custody arrangement were beneficial to a particular mother, she hardly would need to have it mandated by law. Half-time children don't free up full-time career needs: few employers pay full time salaries plus benefits for part time work. Or offer jobs of one week on, one week off. Nor are women's lives in the throes of divorce and afterward likely to be improved by adding economic pressure and visitation packing and schlepping onto everything else they have to do, not to mention "negotiating" childcare minutiae with a hostile ex.

The ideas about "equal parenting" and "fathers are parents too," etc. are about men's wants, not "equality" vis a vis women, and *certainly* not about children' needs! It's all about men, who, having taken advantage of women's different reproductive and child-rearing role during marriage, and having made no effort during marriage to take on an equalizing *greater* share of the housework, suddenly, upon divorce, realizing that it would be cheaper to replace the mother altogether with the second wife (or the girlfriend, or the housekeeper, or grandma.)

Joint custody is a backlash response to the increased enforcement of men's post-divorce financial obligations. The primary political goal is the reduction (or elimination altogether) of the payment of child support. Of secondary appeal is the promise it holds out for two separate autonomous and ostensibly "equal" households, minimizing the need for contact and cooperation with the ex-wife.

Joint custody also appeals to those individuals who seek to regain the means to continue to control the family members they once controlled. In practice, it frequently devolves post-order and over time into a time-share arrangement that differs little from traditional sole custody with visitation (but differs a lot in the amount of the child support order.) Where this does NOT happen, that's because the male-option-granting joint custody order is sought and used as a means for a later second bite at the custody determination apple. Joint custody (in both forms, legal and physical) is a legally-engineered decision-delayer, and a stepping-stone for use by the nonprimary parent in marriage to later seek and obtain full custody. IF he wants to. He's free to come and go, start another family, move or not, always paying less child support than he otherwise would have paid. Well what about his wanting to "parent" his child? Where this isn't about something a bit squeamish and mawkish, chances are very good it's all about replacing the fungible woman/mother/caregiver with one he prefers, and maybe even "saving" some money in the process.

The parent seeking joint custody is almost always that parent who would not be the custodial choice on an up-front either-or determination. After a few years, however, and perhaps a new wife, and coupled with the decreased financial support and ostensible "increased involvement" that accompanies "shared parenting" schemes, it sets up men as the advantaged party in a later custody redetermination de novo (another side benefit.) The need for a redetermination down the road is virtually guaranteed, when, as should have been predicted, joint custody is found to be unworkable over the long haul. [See Nick's comments on this issue.]

Unwed father's rights.

At first, after the enactment of no-fault divorce, and perhaps with the increased social rhetoric of equality making unhappy marriages even less tolerable, where once they would have remained, miserable "for the sake of the kids" -- especially since fault-ground divorce was a long, drawn-out process anyway -- more and more women began filing for divorce in the earliest years of their marriages. As they did, however, and with small children, it became clear that instead of the egalitarian partnership that those who had pushed for the original family law reforms had sought to create, the original no-fault changes themselves had created new inequities. While Band-aid revision after Band-aid revision was enacted in every state, and with each correction in the laws, along came a new set of "unforeseen" hurdles and counterproductive consequences, all moving toward putting women back in their traditional place.

In response to women's legal and social ability to leave marriage, and to the correction after correction in the laws impeding them, and to the simultaneous trend of women marrying later or shunning marriage altogether (coinciding with women's increased entry into the employment sector), the men's rights, and religious right anti-abortion forces became more agitated and threatened, and more and more vocal. Anti-abortion, anti-divorce, anti-welfare and "pro-family/fathers" sentiment grew throughout the capitalistic, merger-and-acquistion 80s. While this trend was observed, all of ts manifestations and repercussions were not. This had an interesting effect.

Women's groups happily (and shortsightedly) bought into the anti-welfare pro-child support movement initiated by those whose actual primary interest was in reducing government spending and replenishing welfare coffers, and whose secondary interest was in re-restricting women's freedom to "break up" families by reimposing the old economic disabilities that had for centuries forced women to get into marriages and remain married.

In joining in the movement seeking increases in child support guidelines and stronger enforcement neasures, women missed the concurrent fathers-rights countermotion. Once again couched in the rhetoric of equality, father's rights groups used some of the very same arguments to achieve a surge of support for father's rights, including the revolutionary UNWED father's rights, all under the same guise of "parental responsibility." Even many feminists embraced "equal parental responsibility" rhetoric along with the post-hippy-era California notion of "joint custody," which ironically, set up the perfect ploy toward an ultimate agenda of doing away with child support altogether!!

Pushing for "child support" post-divorce as "parental responsibility" appealed to feminists for several reasons. First, it eliminated the need to argue roles and choices in marriage, and all those distasteful issues of women's economic dependence -- a continuing factor notwithstanding two decades of second wave feminism and women's entry into the workforce. Second, it provided a way to enable financial support for mothers that did not carry the negative connotations of "alimony." It looked "neutral" and unassailable as a theory. It would be fair, and predictable, and not subject to the vagaries of who had the better lawyer, or a judge's discretionary biases.

But there is no "responsibility" without concurrent "rights." And there's the kicker.

All the focus on child support (child support being "owed" to the child and all), kept the scholar's focus away from examining issues of marriage, contract, and support that might in fact be owed to a *woman* who has, at great and usually lifetime cost to herself far in excess of the mere loss of current income, provided a man with the child or children to which he lays equal claim.

Collecting "child support," and talking about "parental responsibility" felt much more palatable to those women who had bought into being shamed at the idea of receiving support for themselves (that alimony drone argument.) And it came packaged in the gender-neutral surface appeal, if one did not dig deeper, of the "equality words." As could have been predicted, the "parental responsibility" rhetoric was swiftly plucked up by the anti-woman forces straight from the child support arena and plunked down into the child custody arena, where many bought it.

The "parental responsibility-child support" bandwagon also lent itself wonderfully to louder and louder finger-pointing cries of unwed welfare mother "irresponsibility." While the FRs were quick to seize upon the usage "deadbeat dad" as unfairly painting all divorced men in a ngative light (a specious claim to begin with), neither they nor the government nor the media have had any compunction against blaming nearly all of the society's problems on "feminism" and "single motherhood."

Even as the financial detriments still facing women post-divorce were becoming apparent, the stage was being set for widespead propaganda against single mothers generally, previously married or not, responsibe or not. Feminists missed the big picture, and continued to carry the child support ball, originally thrown by the anti-welfare set, of pushing for more and more (and more and more draconian) "child support enforcement." They pushed for it without thinking about or making any cognitive distinction between child support for previously married women (an idea arising out of marriage contract and divorce law theory and substituting for what probably should have been alimony in the first place) and child support "for the children" of never-married women (an idea with no basis in jurisprudential logic, supported by those interested solely in reducing government spending, and believed in by those who never understood that "for the child" was a subrogation fiction.)

While all this was occurring, young women were busily resolving to have their families anyway, but in a new feminist-inspired and "responsible" planned way: to prepare for them first with educational and economic achievement and then, once careers were set, if no compatible partner came along, to just "go it alone."Young women who still planned on marriage were encouraged with the idea that if they only "established" themselves in a career first, they could avoid economic dependency in marriage when babies came along. [liznote: probably not.] Focusing on this notion, though, ended up delaying marriage and motherhood for educated women generally, and thwarted the likelihood of marriage for some women -- but pointing this out has been seen as subversive fear-mongering.

Murphy Brown, et al. instead became the better, and trendy but fleeting feminist answer. It won't be permitted to succeed as a solution.

Economically and socially viable unwed motherhood is the ultimate in women's independence -- complete autonomy over their own bodies, lives and families, IF they wish it. Not that most women would ever really want lives without partners, but recognizing that reality does not appear in the anti-feminist position for a number of reasons.

Women's merely having the OPTION to bear and rear children and go life alone without men would grant women the complete and unfettered marital bargaining power that nature's biology originally gave them, as well as a powerful chip to play in achieving full equal social gender status, notwithstanding motherhood.

It's a threatening prospect, particularly to men who have had women leave them, or who have doubts about their own self-worth, abilities and desirability. And so it only added more fuel to the backlash fires.

The response to "Murphy Brown" was that mens-rights groups (using the rubrik of gender equality) successfully started to advocate for the ultimate control over adult women's bodies and lives: fathers' rights completely outside of marriage, and with no obligations at all to the *mothers* of their children. The push to seek child support from unmarried fathers provided the perfect tit-for-tat "equitable" argument, and guaranteed an easy ride for this absolute nonsense.

Some scholars, e.g. Martha Fineman, have recognized that "unwed father's rights," never before widely acknowledged in the history of the world, and an idea that that largely has cropped up in the United States only in the last 15-20 years, is essentially the imposition back again on women of the marriage laws, a definition of the family as man-woman-child, and a way for the government to get around women's thinking that they are free to conduct their lives, bear children, or use their own bodies as they will outside of the constraints of marriage or men's approval and collaboration.

However, THIS imposition of "family" laws on women's sexual and reproductive independence comes without ANY history or promise of relationship or obligation of the fathers to the mothers of the children. All of the detriments without even a semblance of benefit.

If marriage ever was *anything* remotely partnership in the abstract social theory, it was the bargain by which a woman shared her reproductive investments, her children, and unrecupable time and effort from her life in return for a supportive partner. But patriarchal notions and social, economic and political disabilities traditionally imposed on women in order to force them to enter and remain in marriage as the ONLY viable route open to them, cheapened women's worth and reduced their "bargaining power" and expectations in return for what they had to "trade." An "agreement" made under duress and disability is hardly an equal partnership arrangement.

Patriarchy 's promise to the loyal troops and patriots and believers and followers, is that the behavior from them that will be rewarded with a "chick in every pot" is effort for and in support of the sovereign, not devotion to a woman. Women are not life partners, but possessions and spoils. It's a system of maintaining sovereign authority. Male sovereign authority.

In supporting notions of child support obligations and "equal parental responsibility" OUTSIDE of marriage, OUTSIDE of a contracted-for relationship and "deal," women have been DISabling their bargaining power and their hopes for appropriate laws and equal power IN marriage, IN partnership with men, and as mothers. Since most women will be mothers during their lifetimes, this has the domino effect of disempowering all women generally in all other spheres of life.

The upshot is that in the family laws, women have taken one or two steps forward, and then one or two steps back. Women have made, on balance, NO gains at all in rectifying gender inequity in marriage and divorce.

And if women have no equality in marriage and in their personal lives, then they have no equality in the workforce, either. "Equal pay" is an illusion when there's an unequal personal price that has to be traded for it. [See liznote on gender neutral inequality.]

The Father's Rights Movement.

"Men's rights" began as germ of an idea born of feminism's equality notions, and feminism's pointing out the real ways in which patriarchy has harmed and also controls men. But don't kid yourself that that's what it's really about. Words are easy to use. And when it comes down to politics, very few persons are interested in social theories that don't make a good rationale for laws that appear to address for them their immediate personal desires and disappointments.

"Father's rights" is a synonym for "mens rights," since ultimately, everything -- from the success of the economic systems in place to the religions to the politics -- boils down to patriarchal control of the efforts and fruit of women's bodies and lives.

The groups that are fighting women's efforts on anti-domestic violence laws are "fathers' rights" groups. The groups that are against laws protecting children from child abuse are "fathers' rights" groups. The groups that seek to prevent women from obtaining divorces, or to continue marital controls and rights over them even if they do via shared or father custody, and child support and alimony manipulation are "father's rights" groups.

Listen closely: whether they couch their ideas in terms of religion or liberalism, and regardless of whether they disagree on a particular route or rhetoric, e.g. "joint custody" versus "father custody," listen for the theme in common. Whether it's about the "Father in Heaven," or the "Founding Fathers," or "parenting fathers," there's one paramount interest that's shared, and it isn't about women's -- or children's -- best interests. [See liznotes on the father's rights movement.]

Oh you'll hear a lot about "children's rights," too. When all other arguments are shown up as specious, they have no choice but to fall onto that one. But it's not about children at all. At least not in the sense of being a hands-on caregiver. It's about doing what's good for men and controlling women.

Odd, isn't it, that when the mothers of men's children are under their control, fathers aren't complaining about not being the caregiver. [See liznotes on joint custody, and in response to Wade Horn's position on "fatherlessness." Also see a divorced father's opinion.]

Whether it's a group which has coopted the rhetoric of gender-neutrality and equality, or whether it's a group that makes no bones about being dead-set against feminism, it's one and the same thing: these are still the old boy networks, and with their recruits and their literal armies of grunt foot-soldiers, they still have the connections, wealth, power, political acumen and propaganda machines to decimate women's rights if feminists -- if women -- don't wake up soon.

The propaganda often *sounds* innocuous. Who could be against "equal rights?"

Who would agree that they are not an "independent" or "self-sufficient" woman?

The rhetoric of gender bias has been turned against women, and sadly, it's been bought, hook, line and sinker by more than a few.

(And I'm talking to some of you women lawyers out there, too, who are so indoctrinated in male ways of perceiving the world -- and some, still so hung up on male approval -- that you don't use the brains and training you should have to see what's right in front of your nose!)

Every time women have made a gain in the family laws, whether married, divorced or single, if they had children, the fathers-rights backlash has responded. Proportionately, women have got poorer and poorer financially, and more and more constrained in their freedom, while fathers-rights groups have got enacted laws and amendments to laws that more and more will keep the mother of/and any child of theirs within their control, given that they now cannot do that through preventing divorce. (Although, note, divorce prevention rhetoric appears to be the next bandwagon song, and from there it will be only a short step to "really doing something" with "teeth in it.")

It would appear that the (only) way for any woman to keep her life completely outside the dictates of a man would be for the woman grow to adulthood, not marry, and to not have children at all. But this appearance is deceptive, too. In not supporting mothers IN motherhood and marriage, women who want none of it at all remain at risk and in numbers far too small and powerless to ensure their own options.

Under a pure patriarchy, even the option to remain childless is denied women. Hand-in-hand with the unwed father's rights movement, more and more men, and not for religious, but for political reasons, also have been demanding the end to abortion rights and demanding the right to "input" over the abortion decision, along with demanding that unwed fathers get a veto power over a woman's giving her baby up for adoption. It's no mere "oversight" that insurance companies generally don't cover women's contraceptive health care, but have rushed right in to offer the new "viagra."

The men's clamoring notwithstanding, remaining unmarried and childless is not any solution for most women on a more basic ground. They like men, they want to be married with a partner, and they want to have children and families that include a lifetime partner!  In the last decade, there has been plenty of documentation of childless women in their thirties and forties and up questioning their having had to accept child-free/family-free lives as the price of "equality" and freedom -- a price that men have never had to pay.

Note the agonizing from feminists on both sides of this issue. As with the "mommy-track" issue, those who fear the loss of gains in the employment sector, and the loss of lifestyle choices, immediately suspect, and not without some credible evidence, that the media brouhahas over these kinds of reports are moved, at least in part, by the ulteriorly motivated, backlash propaganda attempting to turn back the clock on women's choices. Other women, often those who have come to some awakening upon their actually having children, but with full feminist goals and sympathies nevertheless intact, are conflicted as to how to deal with these issues and the division in the feminist community over it. These latter women (I submit these are mostwomen) would welcome the opportunity to be able to *choose* to take a relatively small period of their lives in which to focus on and care for the children they *do* have, without suffering life-long economic punishment and repercussions as a result.

Redux.

Since permanent singlehood just isn't a viable choice for most women, feminist efforts in the 70s and 80s did try to recharacterize marriage and alternative relationships as a "partnership."

A great deal of lipservice (and you'll hear it from some younger and childless women) still is given to the notion of the "new man," i.e. men's "sharing" of homemaking and parenting. It's very fashionable for young, childless couples, as well as professional-type young couples with one young child to babble about their equal arrangements. Lots and lots of media coverage and movies about those Mr. Moms reinforce it. The grand ideas didn't get implemented in any widespread practice; only the rhetoric did. The arrangement just doesn't work in real lives. And the rhetoric will never become the reality. [See liznotes primary parentingarticle.] It's had its opportunity, and we're well past that now. (Even in the "egalitarian" Scandinavian countries that have given men fully-paid childcare leaves, men rarely take them -- when they have, it's frequently been used as a vacation -- and Norway had to go so far as passing legislation in 1998 requiring men to take childcare leaves against their will!)

It's also about words that easily are misunderstood and coopted for distorted ideas by the male-power contingent, e.g. Warren Farrell et al. Gender-neutral participation arguments are misleading when most families have, if any children, more than one. "We share everything" sounds just so easy to the newly coupled and childless, or the equal professionals, in love, in commitment, and with one child and plenty of money. Almost all of them are in for a rude awakening.

The reality is: men's "equal participation" in either homemaking or childcare during marriage is a myth. Save for the exception which proves the rule and the isolated case, it hasn't happened, and in the main, it never will.

Many women over the past couple of decades, even feminists and scholars have indeed bought into notions of "equal partnership" that a little thinking could have foreseen would actually result in women's both bearing and rearing children for men, and providing half or more of the family support -- two steps back to *doubly* servicing men! Doing two jobs to his one. That's not equality! [The Whirlpool Foundation Study 5/10/95 found that in 45% of intact households, women provided half to all of the income.]

Women going it utterly alone? The fathers-rights answer has been the attack on welfare, the attack on jobs programs, and to slander single motherhood as the cause of crime and immorality.

A compromise alternative? Nonmarital "egalitarian" partnerships with no protections and no guarantees?

Unwed father's rights. All the burdens without even the semblance of benefits or relationship history that was marriage.

Father's rights is about control of women, and it comes in many flavors ...whatever it takes to make sure that women will never have the option of living a life in which they are permitted to use their own uteruses and keep the children they grew in them without first obtaining the blessing of, or submitting their lives and freedom to live them as they choose to some measure of control by a man.

When I talk against the "fathers' rights" groups, immediately I am accused of "daddy-bashing." Nonsense. "Father's Rights" isn't the counterpart to some "Mother's Rights" organization -- how many of these as feminist groups have you EVER even heard of (!) (WHERE are they!!?)

It's clever propaganda.

"You're a feminist -- or a lawyer, or an educated individual, or a fair person. You wouldn't be against something that stood for equality, would you?"

"You wouldn't advocate for fairness for mothers but not fathers, would you?"

You wouldn't be in favor of a group that called itself "Anti-woman's Rights" now WOULD you? C'mon. Smarten up.

liz


liznote 1. Notice that now, in the 90s, that women have made gains in the employment arena and have turned some focus back to family considerations, the media has begun a campaign of blasting working women.  It's always been the most fun to pit women against each other, and define women as one-dimensional subhumans. RETURN TO TEXT

liznote 2. THE ECONOMIC STUDIES RETURN TO TEXT

The Advisory Committee on Women in the Courts, "Report on the Financial Impact of Divorce in Rhode Island" (November l991)

Baker, Barbara, "Family Equity at Issue: A Study of the economic Consequences of Divorce on Women and Children," Alaska Bar Association, Alaska Women's Commission (l987)

Bell, Rosalyn B., "Alimony and the Financially Dependent Spouse in Montgomery County, Maryland," 22 Family Law Quarterly 225 (Fall l988)

Brett, Leslie J., Sharon T. Shepela & Janet Kniffen, "Women and CHildren Beware: The Economic Conseqences of Divorce in Connecticut" (Summer l990)

Garrison, Marsha, "Good Intentions Gone Awry: The Impact of New York's Equitable Distribution Law on Divorce Outcomes," 57 Brooklyn Law Review 621 (1991)

Gerval, Jean M. & Carelle Muellner Stein, "Spousal Support in Minnesota: Where Are We Going?" 6 Minnesota Family Law Journal 29 (1993)

Hammer, Heather, "The Economic Impact of Divorce in Hawaii," Preliminary Report to the Hawaii Supreme Court Committee on Gender and Other Fairness (December l993)

McGraw, Robert E., Gloria J. Sterin & Joseph M. Davis, "A Case Study in Divorce Law Reform and Its Aftermath," 20 Journal of Family Law 443 (l982) [Ohio]

McLindon, James B., "Separate But Unequal: The Economic Consequences of Divorce for Women and Chidlren," 21 Family Law Quarterly 351 (l990)

Rowe, Barbara R. & Alice M. Morrow, "The Economic Consequences of Divorce in Oregon after Ten or More Years of Marriage," 24 Williamette Law Review 463 (l988)

Rowe, Barbara R. & Jean M. MLown, "Economics of Divorce and Remarriage for Rural Utah Families," 16 Journal of Contemporary Law 301 (l990)

Weitzman, Lenore, The Divorce Revolution (l985) [California]

Wishik, Heather R. "Economics of Divorce: An Exploratory Study," 20 Family Law Quarterly 79 (l986) [Vermont]

-- compiled by Attorney Lynn Hecht Shafran, director of the National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts, a project of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in cooperation with the National Association of Women Judge. RETURN TO TEXT

liznote 3. To a great extent, this is still true. One factor evidencing lawyers' attempts in the face of equitable distribution to achieve some measure of compensation and justice for their clients can be seen in the creeping back in of "fault" through the "back door" -- tort actions connected with separation and dissolution proceedings.

Also read: Mason, Mary Ann. _The Equality Trap_ Simon and Shuster, New York, 1988.

Fineman, Martha. _The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies_ Rutledge, New York (1995).

Fineman, Martha. _The Illusion of Equality: the Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform_ Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1991.) RETURN TO TEXT

liznote 4. Meanwhile, the federal bankruptcy laws were amended to protect from discharge debts arising for "spousal support," equitable *property distribution* laws were omitted from coverage. And, notwithstanding recent *new* changes in the bankruptcy laws, this remains largely the case. The result, almost axiomatic: he files for bankruptcy post-divorce! No property, no alimony, nothing... The right hand giveth and the left hand taketh away...] RETURN TO TEXT

liznote 5. WOMEN: THE NEW PROVIDERS, an extensive study released May 10, l995 by Louis Harris and Associates, Families and Work Institute, funded by the Whirlpool Foundation, indicates:

In 45% of two-parent households, women provide half or more than half of the household income; in single parent households, women provide more than half to all of the income 82% of the time.

In 88% of households, women are charged with the responsibility for family care (childcare and housework, family social life, elder care...)

If mothers were able to choose freely:

--51% would not work at paid employment, spending their time instead caring for family and doing volunteer work

--33% would work part-time

--15% would choose to work full-time