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![Anne P. Mitchell, Esq., Founder of F.R.E.E.[tm]](../gif/apmbook.gif)
Hello; my name is Anne Mitchell. I am both a fathers' rights advocate, and a practicing fathers' rights attorney.
One cannot have a meaningful dialogue about the rights of one sex, without also discussing the rights of the other, as they are almost always closely intertwined.
Nowhere is this point more devestatingly driven home than in the area of family law, where our children serve as the fulcrum upon which the competing interests of man and woman are balanced.
My message today, however, is based not just on my advocacy for fathers, but on my experiences in another role: as a divorced single mother. Some of you may have already heard some of what I am going to say today; I would ask only that you bear with me, and in exchange I promise to keep it short.
I am here to tell you today two things which you will rarely hear women admit to: First, that the process of divorce, and going through the family law system, can be one of the single most empowering experiences a woman can go through. For the most part, women come to know that they will get the kids, and men will pay for the pleasure.
Second, the vocal feminist front, in its current incarnation, has no desire for there to be even a semblance of equality in this system, and is in fact coercing today's woman out of the workforce and back into the nursery.
Out of financial independence, and back into financial dependence - on men.
This is all being done in the name of the maternal bond, which, the tradition holds, is a special and somehow magical connection that transcends mere relationship. It is, somehow, an inseverable umbilicus - something not to be tampered or interfered with - something sacred. It is
However a bond is not just a special sort of magical relationship. Even where that exists, a parent-child bond is at minimum an enormous responsibility. Therefore, to place on a mother's shoulders the mantle of a unique and inevitable mother-child bond is to also place on a mother's wrists the shackles of responsability for that bond, and that child.
Of course, this can only mean that women must be primary caretakers, which in turn means that men must be their financial benefactors
Or, put more simply: women get the kids, men get to pay.
One would think, given the countless contemporary women who have proven that women are in fact capable of sustaining a career as well as having children, that to define women back into dependency on the very actors who have for generations oppressed them, namely men and the state, would be nothing short of heresy.
But consider these figures released just last month by the Federal Bureau of Census, from the 1992 Child Support Supplement to the Federal Current Population Survey. The picture they paint is one of a blatant maternal bias, and great inequity in our system and society. Moreover, they evidence a high degree of concern for maternal entitlement, with little for the needs of the children for involvement with both parents, and none whatsoever for the status of the fathers, even when the fathers are the custodial parent!
This study reveals ...
And it gets worse.
Where is the public outcry against deadbeat moms?
There is no outcry, because this is about the maternal subsidy, not about supporting the children.
Some feminist authors are quite open about pushing for a maternal subsidy. In a book of essays ironically entitled America's Working Women, one author suggests that one way of looking at the incidence of women on welfare is that "welfare could be the salary women receive for raising children."
Margaret Brinig and June Carbone, in Rethinking Marriage, espouse a theory of fault-based spousal support (thus making it available even to women who have no children) which nevertheless finds the man subsidizing the woman irrespective of who is at fault, except in those situtions where the woman earns more than the man. Where the man is at fault the award to the woman should maintain the standard of living she enjoyed during the marriage, "even if it is a hardhip on him." Where she is at fault, she must be compensated for lost career opportunities. And where neither of them is at fault, Brinig and Carbone come to the inexplicable conclusion that the woman should be subsidized so as to "encourage her self sufficiency."
And of course aggressive feminist lobbying has no doubt played a part in the new awareness in the state and federal legislatures as to the plight of the single mother. Hence the new and improved child support formulas, and modern theories of spousal support.
However, by trying to throw money at the problem, they are encouraging the single mother to stay subordinated in maternal bondage, rather than helping her to make a place for herself in the world, and to be autonomous and self-supporting.
Unfortunately, many men have also bought into the myth of the maternal bond. Studies show that at least a third of all fathers ask for less custody than they really want, even though they feel as strongly about custody as do mothers. Why do men routinely ask for less time with their children then they really want, leaving the majority of custody to the mother? Because they too have come to believe in the tradition of the sacred mother-child bond, and thus they believe that they are incapable of providing that somehow unique form of nurturing required by their children. Hence, these fathers conclude that the children belong with their mother - indeed, are better off with their mother - instead of their inept and unnurturing father selves.
Is it any wonder that these fathers doubt their capacity to nurture their children, given that this is the message provided to them at every turn? It is the subtext of the maternal bond doctrine, as well as an implicit assumption upon which is based the message that "good" fathers are those who provide a maternal subsidy so that their children may remain with their mothers.
And thus the myth of the Maternal Bond is perpetuated. And the women get the children. And the men get to pay. And it was good. For nobody.
For generations, women have fought for the right to make choices about the paths they will take, and to throw off the mantle of oppression that relegated women to the kitchen and the nursery, and into unceasing dependence on men.
Slowly, but surely, men have started to come around.
But now a new breed of maternalists have come forward to take their place.
By championing these mothercare ideals, women themselves, many of them feminists of note, are in fact helping to force into maternal bondage those mothers who might genuinely prefer not to be the primary caretaker parent but for the strong stigma attached to such decisions. This stigma is perpetuated not only by the maternal custody preference, but by feminist literature and ideology which casts mothers as the repository of all that is nurturing, and the fathers with whom these mothers might otherwise wish to share custody as the antithesis of that ideal.
Thus women are once again finding themselves forced to choose between a career, and full-time motherhood. But this choice is a nonchoice, both because it is coerced and not a choice made by free will,and because it binds women back into the very dependency on men from which they fought for so long to be free. We are now damning women for their choices, and enslaving them with their virtues.
Only by freeing women of their maternal bonds, and allowing them to provide for their chidren in their own way, according to their own balance of career and caretaking, will they be able to become truly independent and self-sufficient. And only then will women be able to avoid post-divorce poverty,and achieve true economic freedom.
And then, and only then, will we be able to bring about true equality in our family law system, for then it will no longer be "the woman gets the kids, the man gets to pay", but "the kids get two parents, each of whom can pay for themselves."
The Fathers' Rights and Equality Exchange
(415) 853-6877