Women Are Not Going To Be Equal Outside The Home Until Men Are Equal In It.
If 'Feminism' is all about equality, why do they oppose it?
Karen DeCrow, who passed away in 2014, was president of the National Organization for Women from 1974 – 1977. This was a turbulent period in which she helped lead campaigns for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and against sex discrimination in education and sports. She was an ardent supporter of shared parenting during that time and after.
She was a writer, a lawyer, and a tireless campaigner for women’s rights. In 1979, she wrote a letter to the New York Times in which she said that “women will not gain power in the workplace until they cede power in the nursery.” DeCrow also championed men’s rights as fathers, arguing for a “rebuttable presumption” of shared custody after divorce.
DeCrow worked with the Fathers’ Rights Association of New York State and joined the Children’s Rights Council board, a pro-joint custody group. Before she passed, she was on the Leading Women for Shared Parenting board. Ironically, one of her fellow Leading Women for Shared Parenting board members was her old nemesis Phyllis Schlafly, whom DeCrow frequently debated on college campuses in the 1980s and 1990s.
Divorce and sole child custody are generally bad for mothers and children. DeCrow never shied away from taking a position that mothers should give up their role as the sole caregivers and hand part of it to fathers, freeing them to gain absolute equality in the workplace. This position made sense in the 1970s and still makes sense today.
DeCrow framed her position on equal parenting as a feminist one. She argued men who are more involved in parenting are essential if women are to achieve equality in other pursuits. Many feminists have endorsed this idea regarding equal parental leave or shared responsibility for housework and child care; Gloria Steinem once said, “women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.” But few feminists were, and still are, unwilling to be an ally with fathers or feud with mothers who, out of spite, demand sole custody.
Unfortunately, Karen DeCrow was the last NOW president to hold such sensible and reasonable views. I have yet to find any feminist organization supporting an equal parenting bill. Most have opposed them in each state they are presented. To this day, NOW opposes shared parenting because it’s somehow “forced” on mothers.
Little has changed since DeCrow led NOW. Mothers would still do better in every way if parenting, post-divorce, were equally shared between them and fathers. Feminist organizations’ invariable opposition to shared parenting is suspect.
The next time an angry feminist points to a dictionary and accuses you of not understanding what feminism even means, ask these questions; if feminists believe so fervently in equality, why do they oppose shared parenting? How will women ever be equal outside the home if men are not equal in it?
Opposing shared parenting means opposing equality.
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Twitter: @claytoncraddock
Women Are Not Going To Be Equal Outside The Home Until Men Are Equal In It.
According to Shakespeare, in the case of Capulet v Montague both young lovers lost their lives, in separate incidents each later ruled as suicides. But what really killed them both was the fact that each of their extended families upheld longstanding traditions of disapproving of each other.
And so it is today. In what passes as 'family law' in the courts, the entire undertaking is firmly anchored in the almost meaningless definition of a 'family' as one set of parents and their children. Playing one parent's 'rights' against the other's in an attempt to arrive at a ruling in law is purely theatrical, while behind the scenes the real contest is between two extended families, and determined by which one has the more ample resources to enforce their disapproval of the other and make it stick.
Especially in the case of younger parents, but not by any means limited to them, it is generally not the contesting parent who is financing a crusade to destroy the other parent's credibility regarding their fitness to raise a child, it is the grandparents, or whatever estate or venture or even criminal organization finances them. Which side prevails is a matter of which has the greater resources to invest. The law itself is just a means to that end, not in the hands of judges, but of private attorneys acting as indifferent mercenaries. Backroom deals are what lawyers do all day, and the more powerful one always wins before anything is ever brought before the bench.
For every measure there is a countermeasure. Pass all the 'shared custody' laws you like, but in the finest American tradition of liberty and justice for all who can afford it, you may then sit back and watch as, case by case, the wealthier or more influential or better-connected extended family deploys whatever workarounds they can afford, to destroy the other.
I once had a 'joint custody' ruling in hand, signed in each other's presence by both our daughter's parents. It turned out to be not worth the paper it was printed on. The mother in the case had the connections to bribe my own attorney to tamper with the language in the document when I sought to have a second state take over both jurisdiction and enforcement, and I simply didn't catch it. (Because I trusted my lawyer to act in good faith toward my case.) Until she took our child out of the second state and back to the first, and I was soon afterward almost laughed out of a new attorney's office when she pointed out to me the very subtle but imminently binding little stunt my former lawyer had pulled with the phrasing of a single sentence.
The mother comes from a long line, a very large extended family, of money-launderers and petty influence-peddlers who regard it as everyday procedure to exert their will by means of connections and bribes and threats, and knowing people who know people. My own people not only have no concept of such behavior but refuse, with prejudice, to accept the fact that this is how the world really works, and so I and my parents (stupidly) assumed that all parties official and otherwise were acting in good faith.
When is anything EVER settled in a law case by both parties acting in good faith? Why should anyone assume that 'rebuttable presumption' is anything but just another obstacle presented to the deployment of every bad-faith tactic available, to the one party that knows how and has the resources?