Child Custody, Ideologies and Employment

The legal system produces and reproduces ideologies that reinforce the oppression of women. Two such ideologies are the ideology of motherhood and the ideology of equality. Modern child custody law, with its gender neutral focus on the best interests of the child, illustrates how these ideologies influence judges and how judges, in turn, reproduce them. Custody cases reported during the 1980s show that many employed mothers fall, to their detriment, between these two ideologies: they fail to satisfy judges as to their mothering capabilities because they are employed outside the home, but they fail to meet the expectations of the ideology of equality with respect to economic stability when their employment lifestyles are compared to those of fathers. Women are particularly disadvantaged by the ideology of equality, because fathers are now assumed to have parenting ability equal to that of mothers and to contribute equally to parenting when mothers are employed outside the home. This radically devalues the significance of the primary nurturing undertaken by most mothers and diverts attention away from structural inequalities which shape the lives of employed women.