Friday, May 16, 2008
Women often are supplying the muscle behind the fathers' rights movement.
Jul 6, 2000 | When Anne Mitchell talks about her life, it sounds like the kind of "plucky woman succeeds against all odds" story that could get made into an inspirational movie for Lifetime, the women's cable TV channel. At the age of 22, our heroine flees an abusive marriage with a small child in tow. She works in a series of jobs, from selling wholesale pharmaceuticals to managing a dentist's office, while receiving little or no child support. She also goes to college, graduates summa cum laude and gets accepted into Stanford Law School. Upon getting her law degree, she chooses to forgo obscenely lucrative job offers in order to go into family law and become a crusader for those victimized by the system.
There's only one catch: Mitchell's crusade is on behalf of fathers.
Indeed, even the way Mitchell (now 42 and the happily married mother of a 2-year-old boy) tells her own story may be startling to those used to the Lifetime formula. While she says that she was a battered wife, she refuses to cast herself as a victim and her first husband as a villain; in her view, he was a troubled young man with a drinking problem who has since done a great deal to turn his life around. She is careful to point out that she gave up child support voluntarily, because at the time she was doing much better than her ex-husband -- who was remarried with two kids and a third on the way, and had been laid off from his job. Mitchell also stresses that her ex is a loving father who has always had a strong relationship with their daughter, and that she has always encouraged this relationship.
"Many people have asked me, 'Why are you, a divorced mother, an advocate for fathers' rights?'" says Mitchell. "The only answer I can give is that I feel the system is unfair to fathers, and I want to correct it."
Mitchell says she became aware of these issues while completing her degree in legal studies at SUNY Buffalo in the late 1980s, mainly from a woman lawyer working in domestic relations. In 1990, while studying law at Stanford, Mitchell started a group called FREE (Fathers' Rights and Equality Exchange), devoted to providing information and support for noncustodial fathers.
As quirky as her personal and professional trajectory may seem, Mitchell is not the only woman leading the charge for fathers' rights. Her sisters-in-arms run the gamut from veterans of the women's movement to second wives who give a new twist to the feminist slogan "The personal is political." Together with the men of the burgeoning movement, they battle a legal system that they believe not only favors mothers in custody disputes but promotes a winner-take-all approach in which one parent, usually the father, is left with limited access to the children and virtually no say in how they are raised.
Their gender throws people for a loop -- and may make them especially effective advocates for their cause. There is indeed a certain shocking incongruity in hearing women vow to change a cultural mind-set that they say values fathers primarily for their financial contributions to their children and focuses on irresponsible "runaway dads" rather than disenfranchised "throwaway dads" who are cut off from their children through no fault of their own.
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