Dispatches from the Long War on Fathers

In which, once again, feminists do what they accuse others of doing

A scene from the father movie Kramer vs. Kramer.

“Even today most people will refuse to believe that one of feminism’s main aims is, and always was, to give women the power to rid their families of men.”—William Collins, The Empathy Gap (2019)

“‘The person who is least likely to abuse a child is a married father,’ notes Canadian Senator Anne Cools. ‘The person who is most likely is a single, unmarried mother.’” — quoted in Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family (2007)

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Reaction in North America has so far been muted to what is being hailed as a significant victory for anti-father groups in Britain.

As reported by The Guardian newspaper in almost giddily triumphant prose, “The family courts will no longer work on the presumption that having contact with both parents is in the best interests of a child.”

Only time will tell how the new law, not yet formalized, will impact the family courts, where discrimination against fathers is already rampant. The government announcement is, at the very least, staggeringly symbolic of a new phase in the anti-father onslaught, with judges now to be directed, so it seems, to exclude fathers from their children’s lives in as many cases as the mothers wish. A simple accusation will suffice. The Guardian declares that,

“The move has been heralded as ‘groundbreaking’ by family lawyers and campaigners who have long argued that the ‘pro-contact culture’ in the family courts places the rights of abusive fathers over the safety and wellbeing of children.”

Claire Throssell, bereaved mother and campaigner for the legal change, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer

Naturally, not a single non-feminist advocate for fathers or children is quoted in the article, the wording of which doesn’t even attempt to hide its misandrist bias. The article alleges that “Abusers have long used the family courts as a way of retaining control over their ex-partners, while women who raise domestic abuse in the courts have often been subject to counter allegations that they are attempting to ‘alienate’ the child from the father.”

The article does not admit the well-documented fact that mothers are the most frequent perpetrators of child abuse and child homicide (see, for example, p. 65, perpetrators of child fatalities). Neither does the article acknowledge that women do indeed lie about abuse , precisely as a means to sway custody outcomes in their favor. Moreover, women do alienate children from their fathers, often with the assistance of family court orders. Alienation is a recognized form of child abuse.

Feminists quoted in the article admit that this is merely an important “first step” in their long march to total father-exclusion.

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It is a truism that feminists seek to destroy the father-led family and have long worked to do so through anti-father propaganda, legal chicanery, and evidence-free allegations of abuse.

Those who have not read feminists’ own words on this subject may have difficulty appreciating the depth of their desire to deny fathers any legally- or socially-recognized familial role.

Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex (1971) provides a compelling example. Written at the height of the Second Wave of feminism, and published three years before the author’s death by suicide, it was a popular female-supremacist treatise. In it, Davis rhapsodized about goddess worship and female power in the ancient world, detailing a time when societies allegedly recognized and revered women as the superior sex.

In these societies, according to mythographer Robert Graves, “Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch” (quoted p. 121). In thrall to women, men were peripheral, their roles as fathers non-existent: “[The woman] took lovers, but for her pleasure,” writes Davis, “not to provide her children with a father, a commodity early woman saw no need for” (p. 121). In this matriarchal sexual utopia, “Sexual morals were a matter of personal conscience, not of law” (p. 116), and the sole familial bond was between the mother and her offspring.

A chapter on “Mother-Right” made the case for a return to such a system, explaining that fathers contribute nothing good to their children’s lives. “The father is not at all necessary for a child’s happiness and development” (p. 117). Even children allegedly know this to be so: “In nearly every child’s experience, it is the mother, not the father, who loves all the children equally, stands by them without regard to their worth or lack of it, and forgives without reservation” (p. 118).

The father’s irrelevance is rooted, Davis explained, in men’s inability to love. “Maternal love was not only the first kind of love. For many millennia it was the only kind” (p. 119). Man has merely “learned to appreciate and be grateful for woman’s love, even though he was not emotionally equipped to return it in kind” (p. 119). She quoted Freudian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik to support her view that when men speak of love, they are actually speaking of a mere ‘scrotal frenzy’” (p. 119).

This rhapsody to female power and assertion of male uselessness continues for hundreds of pages in Davis’s ludicrous yet impressively-detailed book. Many feminists at this period made similar claims, attacking fatherhood and calling for the destruction of the patriarchal family. Author and activist Kate Millett, for example, argued in Sexual Politics (1970) that women’s oppression could not be ended without a transformation of “patriarchy’s chief institution […] the family” (p. 33).

In the same year, feminist radical Shulamith Firestone excoriated the patriarchal nuclear family as the “most rigid class/caste system in existence” (The Dialectic of Sex, p. 15). Two years earlier, would-be killer Valerie Solanas had expressed the sentiment crudely in her SCUM Manifesto: “The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit” (p. 45).

These were not simply sad cranks penning screeds in cat-piss-scented rooms (though many of them were mentally ill). They were acknowledged leaders of a movement that would, within a few decades, shape and control the core institutions of western civilization.

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Elizabeth Davis’s encomium to the mother as “the origin of all culture, of every virtue, of every nobler aspect of existence” (p. 119)—with men as, at best, occasional vehicles for female pleasure—is reflected less acerbically but no less emphatically in many popular representations today. We find it in the romping ABBA-tribute musical Mamma Mia (2008), in which three men, prior suitors to matriarch Donna and each a potential father to Donna’s daughter Sophie, are summoned by Sophie to her wedding in the hope that she will recognize her father when she sees him.

Meryl Streep in the movie Mamma Mia, with the three men willing to be stand-in fathers to her daughter

At the comic climax of the movie, with each man in attendance to assert his paternity in front of the assembled wedding guests, Sophie’s mother admits that she doesn’t know (and doesn’t care, it seems) which man made her pregnant. Yes, she slept with all three over a period of a few days, and never told any of them about the pregnancy.

The men accept this disappointing news without protest. “Being a third of your dad is great by me,” declares one, and the others concur. All three will do their surrogate part to love Sophie, staking no claim and expressing no further interest in their actual paternity. This is how good men should be, the movie suggests. After all, Sophie doesn’t truly need a father (and neither did her mother need a husband); a previous outburst (“I don’t want my children growing up not knowing who their father is!”) is quickly forgotten.

The men return to their comic roles as past—or continuing, as in Sam’s case—lovers of Donna, offering sexual and affectional tribute (“You were the first girl I ever loved”) with no legal or personal claim on her child. Here is Davis’s matriarchal fantasy in the form of a much-loved modern musical.

It need hardly be said that there would never be a movie, comic or otherwise, in which a normal daughter did not feel a deep need to know which of three women was her real mother. It is also impossible to imagine any—fictional or otherwise—mother being willing to share a claim to motherhood with two other women. Only fatherhood is regularly treated with such jocularity and indifference.

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Against such father-dismissive and, indeed, father-eliminationist voices, many lone men and organizations of men have fought to assert the reality of paternal love.

These are the men who slept in their cars for months because they had spent every penny and more fighting to see their kids. These men defended themselves in court, often for years, against baseless claims of violence or “coercive control.” They paid exorbitant child support, facing prison time if they fell behind. They endured their ex-wives’ contempt and avarice, and saw them allowed to break the law with impunity. They experienced overwhelming stress and sadness.

I know a Colorado man who lived for two years without hot water in his house because his spare money paid his lawyer and his (remarried) ex-wife so that he could be granted one overnight visit every second weekend with his two young daughters, whom he hadn’t seen unsupervised for five years. I knew an Ontario man, a collector of antique guns, who was ejected from his home and barred from re-entering (except for one half hour to gather belongings under police supervision) because his wife claimed gun-induced terror, despite none being operational. I knew a California man who committed suicide after he was unable to reconnect with his adult daughter, alienated through divorce. His most bitter memory had been being barred from the funeral of the grand-daughter he had never met.

Nearly everyone now knows at least one man like this. The machinery of the judicial kidnapping of their children and their court-ordered exclusion, helplessness, immiseration, criminalization, and incarceration has been magisterially detailed by Stephen Baskerville.

Many fathers’ groups have lobbied for decades to secure fathers’ legal right to be involved with their children, amassing peer-revied data showing that children do better with both parents present: they are less likely to experience mental illness and juvenile delinquency, less likely to commit crimes or join gangs, more likely to finish school, less likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, and less likely to commit suicide or self-harm. Against fierce opposition, such organizations have achieved significant success in the United States in helping to shepherd statutes through state legislatures that encourage judges to award shared custody to parents after divorce.

They have done this in spite of the mythic power of motherhood in our culture, which feminists have ably exploited.

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It is a popular belief that until quite recently, children were legally considered the “property” of their fathers, with mothers left powerless and bereft. Some of feminists’ boundless animus may even be justified by that belief.

In Sexual Politics, Millett alleged that throughout history, fathers had “nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children” (p. 33). Professor of theology Mary Daly attacked fathers’ alleged totalitarian power, claiming that the image of God as a heavenly father sanctified men’s malign possession of women and children: “If God is male; then the male is God” (p. 19).

Many took as gospel-truth feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s assertion in the Declaration of Sentiments (written at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848) that, amidst various other crimes, men exercised a cruel power over their wives in divorce, denying them custody of their children. Stanton wrote that Man “has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in cases of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.”

But it is not so.

As attorney Tom James demonstrates in his must-read The History of Custody Law (2014), assertions about fathers’ historical paternity rights, though almost universally believed, are simply untrue. For centuries, mothers have had the upper hand in child custody.

American courts never recognized a father’s paternity right as primary. In fact, some of the earliest American court decisions regarding child custody were resolved in the mother’s favor (see p. 127). Father’s rights language predominated only in cases of dispute between parents and non-parents, when custody suits were pursued in the name of the father.

In cases between a separating father and mother, courts always weighed issues related to the “best interests” of the child. In theory, as James explains, courts pursued a “general preference for the spouse who was not at fault for the breakdown of the marriage” (p. 115), yet in cases involving young children, courts almost always preferred to award custody to the mother.

A father could be denied custody even for offences that were not of his making, such as being unable to financially support his family (p. 129). A father’s having expressed doubt about a child’s paternity “was regarded as paternal misconduct so egregious and vile as to justify stripping him of custody—apparently even if he had valid reasons for his doubts” (p. 129). One father was denied custody merely because “he had made the assertion, in his petition, that as a father he had a superior right to custody of his children” (p. 130).

Many states enacted “tender years” statutes in the 19^th century, which formalized what had already been the guiding assumption. Tender years doctrine held that

“Maternal sole custody was in the best interests of children of tender years, i.e., young sons [usually of 10 years or less], children of any age who were in poor health, and, in some states, daughters of any age. For older children, courts generally regarded the child’s preference as controlling. In some states, paternal custody was assumed to be in the best interests of an older, healthy male child of married parents, provided he had not expressed a preference to reside with the mother” (p. 121).

It is evident from this definition that there were many cases in which a mother was assumed to be the most appropriate parent. There were far fewer in which the father was assumed to be.

Even when the mother was the one at fault for the breakdown of the marriage—as, for example, if she had committed adultery—many courts overlooked the marital indiscretion (p. 138) and “regularly denied fathers custody of their young children on the basis that caring for young children was the exclusive province of mothers” (p. 143).

Such maternal preference was only strengthened by the rise of the nineteenth-century feminist movement, which under cover of remedying women’s legal disadvantages actively sought female legal “primacy” (p. 152). Stanton and other feminist leaders worked to enshrine married women’s rights in law, including their right to their children (see pp. 153-55). The tender years doctrine remained in effect for most of the twentieth century, and even once formally revoked, continued to be the main influence in custody decisions, even in cases where the mother was shown to be both abusive and immoral.

So much for the father’s “ownership” of his children.

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There was a relatively brief period in the 1970s and early 1980s when some feminist activists supported the removal of maternal preference, advocating gender neutrality in divorce proceedings.

Most feminist advocates at that time saw the maternal preference as a cultural restriction that put a brake on women’s professional opportunities. Moreover, father involvement was thought by some feminists to be necessary to socialist-style parenting. Radical feminist Robin Morgan, for example, advocated a “communal family, where children are raised by men as well as women, and by more than one pair; where parenthood is perhaps a biological fact but not a property-defined relationship” (Going Too Far, p. 105).

Movies such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in which Ted learns what it means to be Billie’s father after his wife leaves him, gave expression to the ideology of gender equality. In the movie’s pivotal courtroom scene, the once-insensitive and career-obsessed but now empathetic and self-aware Ted acknowledges that women should not be discriminated against in their search for professional fulfillment. But by the same logic, he insists, men should not be discriminated against in their quest to be involved fathers. “I’d like to know what law it is that says a woman is a better parent simply by virtue of her sex,” he states. Then he speaks directly to his ex-wife about his love for Billie: “We built a life together. If you destroy that, it may be irreparable. Don’t do that, Joanna. Don’t do it again.”

Partly feminist-compliant, partly feminist-critical (“How much courage does it take to walk out on your kid?” Ted asks early on), the movie delivered a fairy-tale ending in which the bias of the family court judge, who awards sole custody to Joanna, is countered by Joanna herself, who realizes just in time that her son needs his father. “I came here to take my son home, and I realize he already is home,” she tells Ted. Even as it championed fathers’ rights, the movie pulled its punches about the lengths to which women would be enabled to go in their quest for maternal freedom.

Ultimately, parenting equality did not long remain in favor with feminists, likely because of the enormous financial incentives that came with sole custody. Before the end of the century, mothers’ rights had come roaring back into custody discussions. Feminists once again portrayed fathers as at best expendable and often toxic. Academic articles such as Joanna L. Radbord’s “Equality and the Law of Custody and Access” (2004) routinely claimed that fathers seek custody to control and abuse—or simply to reduce their child support payments (as if not wishing to pay their ex-wives to take away their children is evidence of malignancy).

National women’s groups in America (including the National Organization for Women) have been vehement opponents of bills to encourage shared parenting, claiming that a presumption of father involvement empowers male abusers. Such advocates reject any implication that women owe anything to the fathers of their children (Radbord is incensed that a woman might be prevented from moving out of state by a father’s petition), and refuse to acknowledge the sincerity of fathers’ parenting aspirations.

The demand for maternal preference and the move to deny a father’s right to see his children at all, as in the British government’s recent decision, have come inexorably to the fore.

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Perhaps it is good to know that there never was a prior period in which fathers in the Anglophone world had uncontested or even secure claim to their own children. We have been too ready to endorse feminist fantasies, whether with shame or wistfulness.

Fathers’ rights have always been partial and tenuous, always subject to the sway of mother-right. Where we’ve come to now, in an admittedly Sisyphean battle for shared parenting as the norm in at least some jurisdictions, is a remarkable achievement attesting to father advocates’ unwavering dedication and love.

In the face of predictable exaggerations and misrepresentations by well-funded feminist organizations and the corrupt legal establishments they control, fathers’ rights will always have to be vigorously defended. The British decision will not be the last word on the matter.