What My Mom Had to Say About Divorce / Custody Courts

[LukeSkywalker]

About five years ago my mother and I and some of her friends were talking about custody courts, and I remember us talking about the fact that fathers usually do not get custody of their children after a divorce.

And then my mother told me that in the 1970's, it was even worse than that, and it was almost unheard of for a father to get custody of his children after a divorce.

Maybe this was just in Michigan, I don't know, but I find it believable because Maus claims that in the 1970's, feminism was at it's high water mark. But it seems so much like it's at it's high water mark right now.

[AKUUS]

www.stanford.edu/group/psylawseminar/Child%20Custody%20in%20the%20USA%20(Page%201%20of%205).htm

Custody Decision Making in Historical Context
In Roman, and later in English common law, children were viewed as the property of the father, who had a legal obligation to protect, support and educate his children. Fathers had the right as well to sell their children, and to enter them into enforced labor. In divorce, until the mid-nineteenth century, fathers had a near absolute right to custody, regardless of circumstances. Several major historical trends converged to weaken this paternal presumption in the late 1800's, including society's increasing focus on children's welfare, and the effects of the industrial revolution. As fathers increasingly sought work beyond the farm or village, mothers remained at home as primary caretakers. The resultant division of family responsibilities into wage earner and child nurturer influenced subsequent custody decisions. The paternal preference was gradually replaced by a maternal preference, based on the "tender years" presumption. The tender years doctrine (intended to apply to children under age 6) was originally invoked to determine temporary custody arrangements in English law, giving mothers custody of infants only until they were ready to be returned to the father. But by the 1920's, the maternal preference for custody in English and American law, regardless of the child's age, became as firmly fixed as the earlier paternal preference, and was encoded in statute in all 48 states. The assumption that mothers were better suited to nurture and raise children received an intellectual underpinning in the 1930's from Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which focused exclusively on the mother-child relationship, and ignored the role of the father in the child's development. The resulting idealization of motherhood was often reflected in custody decision-making, as in this 1938 Missouri judicial opinion: "There is but a twilight zone between a mother's love and the atmosphere of heaven."
The maternal presumption for custody remained firm for many decades in the United States, challenged only after the divorce rate began its dramatic rise in the 1960's. Spurred on by fathers' claims of sex discrimination in custody decisions, constitutional concerns for equal protection, the feminist movement, and the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, most states had substituted the standard of the "best interests of the child" for the tender years presumption by the mid 1970's. For the first time in history, custody decision-making was to be rooted in a consideration of the child's needs and interests, rather than based simply on the gender of the parent...

[bachelor tom]

Good piece Akuus.

Another factor might be the cult of Victorian femininity, which elevated the status of women on the moral/ethical plane. Some would argue that modern feminism is simply a transformation of the 19th C idealization of Western females in the Anglosphere.

[bobx23456]

Originally Posted by AKUUS

For the first time in history, custody decision-making was to be rooted in a consideration of the child's needs and interests, rather than based simply on the gender of the parent...

That was their lie, but it was a lie. In response to reasonable damands from fathers for equal rights (anohter lie of femnists) the feminazi and their agents of Satan in black robes of hell invented "best interest of the child" as a sham to pretend that their "for the mother" bigotry was something other than the blatant anti-men sexism which it has always been and still is.

The truth is that courts have never considered the interests of a child. Courts limit themselves, by their legal rules, to considering only what is presented to them by litigants. Since children are barred from the court and are not allowed to be represented by counsel in court, their interests are never presented to the agent of Satan in black robes of hell and by law the child's interests are never even considered at all.


Feminist definition: "Best interest of the child" -->
1. Whatever custody decision mom wants.
2. Whatever gets mom the highest payments for "child support."
3. That which hurts dad the most.
4. Any damn thing the mother wants and to hell with the father and child. BlessingsBob