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E.J., clearly you're right about Clark Rockefeller—as the evidence mounts (and boy does it seem to be mounting), it seems clearer and clearer the guy is a con artist and murderer. So yes, no sympathy there! Whatever empathy I had for him was based on the assumption that he was just a rich, eccentric dad who loved his daughter, not a murderer and liar. Thank god the child is safe. And that'll teach me not to extend my sympathies further than they're warranted!
Meanwhile, though, the intellectual issues surrounding child custody arrangements in America remain worthy of discussion ... and have nothing to do with this case.
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Meghan, I guess I just can't let this bone go. I do understand sympathy for fathers who feel shut out of relationships with their children—and actually, for anyone (man or woman) who ends up in family court, waiting for a judge to decide the fate of the family based on who knows what prejudices. It's a horrible and nailbiting experience. But Clark Rockefeller? He didn't just kidnap his daughter from the social worker; first he hit the social worker with his SUV!! And now the Boston Globe reports that the reason he didn't get custody of any sort was that he refused to document his identity. For the same reason, he never obtained a real marriage license; he lied to his wife (and presumably whoever performed the wedding) about getting one. He was a liar living under a series of fake identities; he's telling police he "doesn't remember" where he was born or to whom! Sorry, whether or not he's also a murderer, this dude doesn't deserve joint custody.
But I do agree with you that women shouldn't be entitled to the presumption of primary parental status merely because they are female. I know fathers who are more maternal than the child's mother. I know co-mothers who should get primary or equal parenting status with the biomoms. Some women think that women are by nature better parents. I'm not essentialist enough to sign up for that belief. (By the way, the parenting research hasn't been able to find any constant difference by sex that holds across cultures. "Mothers" differ from other mothers as much as they do from "fathers." The research is fascinating.)
A note: I profoundly admire some folks I know who share custody by letting the children stay in the house while the parents move in and out, in turn. (These are real people, honest.) Now that's putting the children first.
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E.J., you ask (quite sanely!) whether I "seriously" feel any sympathy for Clark Rockefeller, who, after all, stole his daughter from a social worker in broad daylight, as it were. Alas, the answer is yes, possibly. I don't honestly know. I think the guy deserves his day in court and till more is known about the situation I'll reserve making any judgments. Con men can love their children, too, after all. Anyway, my point in that first post wasn't so much any profound sympathy I felt for him—kidnapping a child, even with the best intentions, is traumatic for that child!—but that Rockefeller's amazing story made me think more about how as a culture we make decisions about custody and whether there's room for improvement with some concerted effort from all parties. You're totally right, I think, to take me to task for implying that feminism caused this; the history you cite is fascinating evidence that it didn't. (I just needed a good headline.) But I can say that I have encountered many parity-minded women who are content, in a sense, to turn a blind eye to lack of parity when it comes to divorce and child-rearing. Sure, the problem may be largely intractable; as Dahlia points out, there is often no good way to solve the problem of joint custody when you have two working parents, one of whom might need to move for work. However, I do feel that an honest and open discussion about custody and fathers' roles might lead to some interesting adjustments in how custody law works; certainly, the burgeoning dads' rights movement that Dahlia mentioned would like to see that happen. Meanwhile, I'm struck by just how many fathers out there I've talked to who feel themselves to be stuck in a position of having to accommodate past the letter of the law, in part because of fears that the laws are so much more sympathetic to mothers than fathers. They'd rather lose a lot than end up losing everything.
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Meghan,
Dahlia has noted the painful fact that there is simply no good way for divorced families to accommodate two working parents (a product of a changed economy more than of feminism, I would argue, but that's for another day). So let me take issue with blaming feminism for Clark Rockefeller's kidnapping his daughter—or rather, for treating men 's claims to fatherhood unfairly after a divorce.
A brief history of custody law: Until 1851, men were childrens' presumptive guardians and custodians. In that year, a lone American judge first broke with precedent to articulate a new custody standard—"the best interest of the child"—which he used to justify giving custody of the child to a mother. It signalled the beginning of the end of a world in which children were family laborers—either a source of income who could be contracted out to other families, or part of the family's earnings unit. With that first mother-custody decision came a series of outraged diatribes about the imminent downfall of civilization if fathers were no longer in charge of the family. But the judge was articulating a new standard of child custody that fit the Victorian era's new ideology of woman-as-nurturer, as caregiver, as naturally domestic and giving and good. It also drew on a new vision of children as malleable angels in need of love, rather than as wild beasties in need of discipline. (I've got a chapter on this shift from father- to mother-custody in my book What Is Marriage For?)
For the next century, the radical idea that women not only could have custody of the children but should presumptively have custody gradually took over. I've waited a day to post on this as I try to find the stats, but my impression has been that feminism stopped that trend. With the idea of gender parity in child-rearing has come the idea that men should and could have custody as well. Family lawyers and observers of family law have told me that the trend has gone the other way, and that when men sue for custody they have an equal chance at getting it. The stats are hard to find, since they're state by state, and even court by court, rather than nationwide; if I can find a source I will post it here.
But the deeper problem here is one I discovered in reporting on custody battles about a decade ago: Emotionally healthy parents who are putting the children first do not end up fighting over custody in court. When there's a custody battle, it's often because the family dynamics were already ugly and messy and volatile. The family is then disposed according to an individual judge's view of what children need. It's a wildly dysfunctional and distressing system, and I have no idea how it could be done better.
Meanwhile, Meghan, do you seriously feel any sympathy for a man who attacked a social worker with his SUV and kidnapped his daughter, and who appears to be a con man who lied about his identity?? I realize that news reports can be unreliable—flash! Jon-Benet's parents are NOT guilty!—but unless Rockefeller had evidence that the mother is physically abusive to the child (and I haven't heard any claims that she was), how can he possibly justify such behavior? That sure wasn't in the best interest of the child.
EJ
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Meghan, the Clark Rockefeller story really is deeply weird, and getting weirder by the day. Now we hear allegations that he’s tied to some murder in California. Jump back Lifetime. You can’t make this stuff up. You’re also right that there is something disturbing about the lingering preference for mothers in disputed custody cases, and also right that there is a bubbling, hissing fathers’ rights movement that contends fathers routinely get screwed in custody cases. But it seems to me that the other thing at work here—far more unfair than general sexism in the family court system—is the patent absurdity of family court oversight when one parent needs to move out of town. Suddenly, everything that is already nuts about family court gets exponentially worse, as judges are forced to make decisions that have the noncustodial parent relegated to a handful of visits a year and small kids consigned to a lifetime of trans-Atlantic flights. These “move” cases are invariably lose-lose-lose propositions for everyone, especially the kids, but they are also a byproduct of second-wave feminism. Because now moms need to work. And dads need to work. And after the divorce, the odds are decent that someone will therefore have to relocate to someplace far away in order to do that. Suddenly the noncustodial parent—having done nothing wrong whatsoever—goes from seeing the kids every other weekend to seeing them for a week at Christmas. Even the worst child abusers don't suffer that fate. I’d be bitter, too.
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Has anyone been following the amazing story of Clark Rockefeller, the divorced father who kidnapped his daughter last week when she was visiting from England with her mother? There are many incredible elements to the story, including the fact that Rockefeller may not be who he said he was; the FBI has said he doesn't have a Social Security number. But what I found most striking are the quotes from friends of Rockefeller's saying how much he loved his daughter and how much he missed her after his divorce. Weirdly enough, I know someone who knew Rockefeller; this person had talked to me not long ago about how heartbroken Rockefeller was to have been separated from his daughter by divorce. (Rockefeller's wife, who works for McKinsey, had moved to England, making it hard for him to see their daughter.) While I certainly don't approve of kidnapping in any form, and there may have been good reasons for the wife to want to keep her daughter away from her father, I confess the whole saga has got me feeling a lot of empathy for all the divorced fathers out there who find themselves suddenly distanced from their children with very little power to change the fact. Fascinatingly, the comments sections on the Rockefeller story on news sites are full of post from divorced fathers who sympathize with Rockefeller. When you think seriously about it, the way custody laws are set up is inescapably unfair. As it stands, there's a hypocrisy at the heart of the second-wave feminist movement: It demands that men be equal partners in child-raising, but when push comes to shove and a marriage dissolves it also implicitly claims that women are the true parents and men are not. While the letter of the law gives men certain rights, divorce lawyers are often shameless about using the threat of claiming there was child abuse to get fathers to back off from fighting for more custody rights. Over the past few months, by total chance, I've talked to a couple of newly divorced fathers, including old college friends, who have suddenly seen their children swept away from them. They were dedicated fathers; they now pay child support, and yet their right to see their children is severely circumscribed. I know there's no perfect solution; but couldn't we come up with one that's better than this? If women really want equality in child-rearing, don't we have to acknowledge that this extends even to divorce?
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Well, what confused me is that Tien does not describe her marriage as a bad marriage, or her predicament as particular. "Don't misunderstand. I would not, could not disparage my marriage," she writes, after spending 500 words describing her husband as a drivelling idiot. And then: "Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is a Moderately Bad Man." And then she has a scene in which she and her friends are standing around and one of them announces she is getting divorced, and none of them expresses shock or pity. Instead, their faces show "could it be?—yearning?" Now the fact is, in our class and generation of women, and presumably Tien's, far fewer marriages actually do end in divorce. (Ten percent is the lowest statistic I've seen.) So maybe this is all about fantasy, and thus harmless. The flip side of this argument is Roiphe's—that in our child-centric culture when a woman with a child does actually get divorced, she suffers a fair amount of scorn and stigma. So the surprise for me was that even in couples with decent marriages—or who seem to have decent marriages—women spend a lot of time hating their husbands and fantasizing about divorce but not actually pursuing one.
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Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a nonexistent raging conflict between stay-at-home and working mothers. It turns out they speak for precisely nine women at each end of the bell curve—the nine women who stay at home and hate working moms, and the nine women who work and hate stay-at-home moms.
But the huge bulge on the bell curve that is the mass of part-time, flex-time, volunteer, work-from-home, struggling-along, working-it-out, too-busy-to-care moms nevertheless watch in awe as the caricatures play out in fiction and in the media. We can’t get enough of those mommy-wars stories!
Even casting this current discussion as a choice between “I contemplate divorce every day" and “my husband and I never fight" highlights the problem: Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes? I find myself wondering whether women need to take this sort of outrageously simple position (“I hate my kids” “I loathe my husband”) in order to get published, or if we like to read about complicated subjects rendered in cartoonish ways?
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Well, I suppose that through a certain feminist lens everything looks like progress (From Anna Karenina to Ellen Tien). There was a time when any literary heroine who attempted some escape from the confines of a dull, loveless marriage wound up dead or alone or trapped in a dull, loveless marriage anyway. Then came the silent sufferers of the John Cheever era. And now we have our raging house bitches, freed by the pen. And I suppose there's a certain justice in that. Men don't do it because it still seems petty or pathetic or somehow beneath them to trash their wives in print (i.e., Philip Weiss' condescension). With women, the act still carries an outrageous glamour. (Katie Roiphe wrote a recent essay in New York about how happy she was about her divorce. Claire Bloom's memoir about her marriage to Philip Roth, among others, is a classic, and Roth only sought revenge obliquely, through a fictional Eve.) But I guess I don't see the liberation or happiness at the end of this road. Freedom from housework, freedom from the sole responsibilities of child-rearing, freedom from semi-arranged marriages. I'm with you. But freedom from intimacy? Freedom from love? And then what?
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Ann and Meghan, when I tried to come up with male journalists and essayists who run down their wives last night, Norman Mailer kept popping into my head. Wrong era (and maybe wrong kind of misogyny). The men's companion volume to The Bitch in the House, as I recall, was mild and mewling by comparison. Do women bitch more because they're bitchier or because they have more to bitch about? I like Ann's image of Iron Women wives clubbing their plankton husbands, but I wonder if those are mostly literary poses. Another thought: Writers like Ellen Tien are practicing self-deprecation run amok and misdirected to include not only themselves but the men near and dear to them. When I wrote recently about parents who dissect their family lives in print, the writers I interviewed unfailingly told me that they themselves, and their failings, were the real subject. The Bitch writers seem to depart from this model all too readily. Maybe that's because they extend their unflinching self-analysis to their husbands and marriages. Their men's pores and warts are as coldly exposed as their own, but maybe somehow that seems OK, because the whole thing originates in self-critique, even if it ends up somewhere else entirely.
Hanna, I don't know about you, but I feel like among the married women I know, contemplating divorce is a huge fault line. For some women, it's like prodding a sore tooth—both irritating and somehow comforting. And for other women, it's just not part of their universe—not today or yesterday or 10 years from now. Tien implies there's no real understanding among women across this divide, because she can imagine only one side of it. Is that right? I hope not, but I'm not sure.
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I want to take advantage of what Maureen Dowd dubs the celebrity divorce moment (Christie Brinkley, Madonna) to talk about how this great American pastime figures for the rest of us. When David and I did the Slate V feature in which we spent a day no more than 15 feet apart, I got one overwhelming response from women: How could you do that? I could never do that! That would be torture! For a while I wondered whether people were exaggerating their horror. After all, how hard could it be to spend a mere 24 hours tethered to the man you married? Annoying, maybe, but torture? And then I came across a story in O called "Divorce Dreams." New York Times reporter Ellen Tien begins the story with a portrait of her bumbling fool of a husband, who lies, always says exactly the wrong thing, scratches his armpit at a parent-teacher conference and then "absently smells his fingers." These anecdotes are not recounted in Lucy-and-Ricky good cheer. The story's first sentence is: "I contemplate divorce every day." Three paragraphs in, I was shocked that someone would write this way under her own byline about her living husband, and not her ex. But apparently I am an idiot. The premise is that women of certain class, flush with financial independence, yoga-toned arms and infinite choices, all yearn for divorce every day. The other ones, who say things like, "My husband and I never fight," or "My husband is my best friend" are either willfully deluded or liars. "Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce." So, help me out here, ladies. Is this true? Am I living in a fantasy land? Or is Ellen Tien as bitchy as she seems?
Read the rest of the XX Factor conversation about divorce and the way men and women treat one another in print.
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Also appropos of prominent women and the men who love them, or leave them, or both: The Wall Street Journal had a revealing piece this week about how more men not only are taking alimony from their higher-earning ex-wives but are willing to admit it. Exhibit A is a former soap opera star who is not embarrassed to say he gets $9,000 a month from the TV producer he was married to. Also featured are men who argue that they've moved for their wives' jobs, dialed back their hours for the sake of the kids, and made all those other concessions that women have gotten pretty used to. The ex-wives who are quoted tend to resent the payments; the former wife of the former soap star said she used to spit on the check before she mailed it. (She does not say why she stopped.) But perhaps the most striking detail was a figure from the U.S. Labor Department showing that 33 percent of wives earn more than their mates, a percentage that has been rising steadily. I have to confess, one-third is a higher figure than I would have guessed. It reminds us that we need to recalibrate our thinking: Guys whose wives are more powerful, or more public, or simply better-paid are not outliers—they are part of the norm.
Less upbeat, the WSJ had a related story on a study by a Washington & Lee University law school professor who found that women MBAs are more likely to be divorced than their male counterparts. The prof, Robin Fretwell Wilson, posits that high-powered women (who tend to marry equally driven men) aren't able to give their hubbies the attention and TLC these men may still expect them to bring home, along with their paychecks. A somewhat dreary reminder that it's not always women who expect to have it all.