Defiant Dads: Fathers' Rights Activists in America

2. The Origins of Fathers’ Rights Groups in the United States

The eight people belonging to the local fathers’ rights group Dads Forever are sitting in a small, windowless office in a southern city. The racially diverse group is cramped around a tiny table when they hear a voice from the adjoining hallway yelling out, “Make way for the television and the VCR.” At this request, everyone shuffles his chair slightly to the right. One member appears at the door, pushes the television into the tiny room, and then scrambles to find an electrical outlet within reach. Luckily, he finds one nestled between two large books on a nearby table. Without further delay, he presses “play,” dims the office lights, and begins the video. The topic is establishing paternity for unwed parents, and the video is full of scenes of happy couples with their children. The video’s narrator informs the audience that there are currently two ways to establish paternity: by acknowledging it voluntarily through the signing of a standardized form or via the court system through a DNA test. Remarking that financial and medical benefits can accrue to a child who knows the identity of his or her father, the narrator also warns that signing a voluntary acknowledgment form waives a father’s right to ask for a court trial to contest the paternity, once established. Even with this risk in mind, however, the narrator declares that fathers 2 The Origins of Fathers’ Rights Groups in the United States The Origins of Fathers’ Rights Groups 15 should seriously consider stepping up to the plate in order to be truly “full parents” to their children. What, exactly, do fathers do within modern families? The answer, of course, varies across racial, ethnic, and class lines. But even within these broad socioeconomic categories, a high degree of diversity exists in the attitudes, aptitudes, and behavioral styles of individual fathers. Some fathers are emotionally very close to their children, listening to their school-day struggles on a regular basis; others are not. Some fathers spend significant amounts of time playing with their children outdoors; others do not. Some fathers place primacy on the financial benefits that they can bestow upon their children; others do not. Some fathers regularly undertake household chores with their children; others do not. The important point is that whatever goes on within a family unit is usually a matter of private determination. At times choices regarding the allocation of parental responsibilities are made consciously. A husband and wife or unmarried couple may come together and verbally negotiate how child-oriented activities will be divided between them, and then commit themselves to executing that plan. More often, however, these decisions are made without a comprehensive discussion. Personal preference in terms of childraising activities, gender norms of acceptable behavior, and external, contextual pressures—job obligations, extended family responsibilities, travel commitments, and so forth—all intersect to influence fathers in their daily approach to parenting. And barring accusations of abuse or neglect, fathers are generally free to exercise their own personally designed paternal practices without state interference. All of this “freedom” changes when traditional families break down, as the paternity establishment video shown at the Dads Forever meeting at the beginning of this chapter indicates. In these cases, the government takes an active stance in deciding the roles fathers must assume in their children’s lives. Two areas of activity are of primary concern: financial support and custody, both legal (which pertains to decision-making authority) and physical (which refers to where the children live). The ways in which the state has determined a father’s responsibilities across these two domains, however, have varied over time. Most recently, major sociodemographic changes—the rising divorce rate and the rising nonmarital birthrate in the post-World War II 16 Defiant Dads era—have fundamentally altered the state’s approach to the care of children when families dissolve. Both child support and child custody laws have evolved to meet the demands of these transformative sociodemographic trends, but these legal changes have met with resistance in the form of the emergence of fathers’ rights groups across the United States. Children in Limbo: Trends in Divorce and Nonmarital Childbearing in Post-World War II America In the traditional two-parent, white, middle-class family of the midtwentieth century, American children could rely on both a mother and a father for stability within the home. The standard division...