Father and Child Reunion:
How to Bring the Dads We Need to the Children
We Love
reviewed by J. Steven Svoboda
Warren Farrell, Father and Child Reunion: How to Bring the Dads We
Need to the Children We Love, New York, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam,
2001. www.penguinputnam.com 300 pages.
Warren Farrell is such a consistently fine writer, such a reliably
beatific and wise presence in the gender transition movement whose very
name he coined, that he is all too easy to take for granted. So strong
and critical have his contributions been over the years that it is easy
to forget that he has written "only" five books and yet has shown us how
to make a living bucking established forces as perhaps the premier
leader in the movement for genuine gender justice.
Father and Child Reunion continues Dr. Farrell's unprecedented run of
indispensable, meticulously footnoted, carefully reasoned men's movement
books. (Fair disclosure: I am named on the acknowledgements page for my
comments on an early version of the work.) Every book the man writes
becomes an instant classic, and as we usually realize much later, just
the book we all needed at that time. Just when you are sure he can't
have anything much left to say, the next one shines at least as bright
as the last.
What makes Farrell's work so unique may be his almost unequalled
level of compassion. For men, for women, for masculists and (yes) for
feminists, for pro-choice and pro-life activists. And above all, for
people, for the society that is, but even more, for the society we could
have if only we would dare to cast aside our wrongheaded ideas and
preconceived notions and pursue truth and fairness.
There are many truths which Dr. Farrell wants to tell us.
Industrialization allowed women to become specialists in nurturing,
while alienating fathers from their children (due to the requirement
that they be working away from home) in rough proportion to the number
of children they had fathered. Typical male parenting is different from
female parenting, and the synergy richly benefits the child tenfold over
just one or the other. Our laws exact punishment when the male role is
taken to an extreme, as with sexual harassment or date rape, but not for
the female role taken to an extreme, as with suffocating overprotection
or emotional incest. This is related to society's understanding of the
value of mothering and its imperfect grasp of the different yet equal
worth of fathering. This blindness has the gravest of results, making
fathers' natural style vulnerable to false accusations of child abuse,
which in turn often separate children from the dads they desperately
need. And this, he notes, is the real child abuse.
Farrell has a rare knack for analyzing even the most overly familiar
facts with a fresh ear and a clear eye. He deftly demonstrates the
unthinkability--if genders were reversed--of a prolonged suspicion of
Elian Gonzalez' father, keeping a child from his mother for many months,
when at the same time the mother's relatives who were Elian's caretakers
had recent histories of various crimes. Even more breathtaking in its
bias is the special law passed by unanimous Congressional consent to
release from prison Elizabeth Morgan, a compulsive liar who had proven
her callous disregard for her child's welfare while kidnapping her
daughter.
Dr. Farrell has always had a particular talent for crystallizing
inequities hidden in social patterns, and this has never been more in
evidence than here. If it is true that the best interest of the children
is the primary reason for overwhelmingly awarding custody to women, then
such women ought to have the obligation (not merely the option) to be
the primary parent after divorce. Moreover, feminists argue for women's
equal rights to jointly created career assets emanating from the male
financial womb, but argue against men's equal rights to jointly created
children that came from the women's childbearing womb. When fairness to
dads is competing with the tradition of motherhood, "tradition runs
thicker than equality."
How absurd and sexist it is that the ACLU and others support the
rights of a lesbian partner to parent a child which her female partner
birthed but not the rights of a male partner. And yet, Farrell shows us
how time and again a development in fathers' rights is spearheaded by a
rare woman who ends up in the typically male position.
Father and Child Reunion is strong on original thinking, as in the
analysis of factors most major movements have in common--a large number
of people experiencing economic hurt and emotional rejection at the same
time. Yet fathers' rights has all three of these and more and still has
not transformed gender politics. Why? It confronts "major countervailing
influences that no other movement has had to face":--men's propensity to
protect women, feminism's political power, men's socialization and
biology to fight to support a family economically but not to be involved
emotionally, and men's proclivity to fight to protect others but not
themselves. Farrell formulates some of the common denominators among
people who commit suicide: feeling unloved, feeling unneeded, feeling no
hope of that changing, and feeling a lack of comfort expressing those
feelings. All too often these factors converge on a father recovering
from divorce and loss of his children.
Father and Child Reunion also impresses in what has in the past been
one of Farrell's vanishingly few weak points--his practical proposals to
effect change. Here he suggests that the government must fund research
into false accusations, violations of due process and the fourteenth
amendment, and denial of fathering time, and should pay for introducing
courses in "relationship language" in our schools. Farrell proposes a
win-win requirement that women notify men regarding a pregnancy (and
that they undergo a DNA test to prove the father's identity) as soon as
they become aware of it. (This facilitates the couple's processing of
the information and decisionmaking together.) Encouraging a daughter to
ask out boys she likes even though her rejection rate will be higher may
improve her own success at finding a favorable match, is likely to
advance her skills at assertiveness and her self-confidence, and in the
long run will help the salutary process of developing comfort with both
sides of traditional gender roles.
The author renews, in its most forceful and convincing version yet,
his relentless call for research to formulate a male birth control pill.
(And he shows us why this is so critically important.) He's not afraid
to admit the gray areas that lurk in any discussion of abortion. While
it took a Warren Farrell to wryly note, "Neither pro-life nor pro-choice
advocates involve Dad in the discussion," he is also comfortable
proposing a sliding scale between freedom to abort and a certain
restriction of that freedom depending on the number of months which have
passed and perhaps other factors. We must, he believes, "replace our
right-to-life versus pro-choice abortion monologues with dialogues about
the overlapping rights of the mother, the father, and the fetus." One
thing is clear: "once a woman and a man have created a fetus, they have
equal responsibilities and equal right to determine its destiny."
As usual, Dr. Farrell unearths some priceless gems, such as the
Census Bureau's survey asking the main reason why regular child support
payments were not received, and offering only two reasons, "the father
[not "the custodial parent"] refused to pay" or "you were unable to
locate the father." His facility with the felicitous and revealing turn
of phrase is again in evidence: "Women's traditional support systems
support women being vulnerable; men's traditional support systems
support men being invulnerable." "[W]hen a man fails as a wallet, we put
him in prison; when a woman fails as a mother, we offer her social
services. We're taking a criminal approach to men, a social-services
approach to women."
Farrell's empathy skills are world class. He speaks to both men and
women, addressing the concerns of each and offering paths to
rapprochement. When a man fights his ex-wife over child custody, it
feels to her like you're fighting for her job, particularly if she had a
traditional role and you are a successful man. He explains men's usually
unarticulated or even unconscious sense that divorce represents a
sweeping away of his dream that if he produced money, he would receive
love. The way out of this forest is provided by remembering that "a
mother who denies a child its father is committing one of the most
documentable forms of child abuse."
Father and Child Reunion is a work of effortless brilliance, likely
to prove one of the most important books on any topic to have been
written in the early years of this new millennium. By focusing on the
sole issue in which (as he shows us) the value and necessity of men's
contribution absolutely cannot be denied, Dr. Farrell has penned a work
which should play to the masses even more smoothly than the relationship
communication outlined in Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say. And, for
a society whose gender malaise and confusion about parenting styles has
nearly reached critical mass, it may be just in time.
J. Steven Svoboda is a performance artist, poet, and a human rights
lawyer who is Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the
Child, which he founded in 1997.
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