Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody

by Julia Fletcher
 
In 1986, the Staff Attorney for the National Center on Women and Family Law reviewed Dr. Chesler’s book, Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody. 
 
Attorney Schulman wrote:
“Chesler eloquently – and finally – breaks the wall of silence and discrimination surrounding the custody battles that women and their advocates have been facing. This book is a work of art. The combination of scholarship, poetry, politics, history, psychology, and legal analysis is stunning. Mothers on Trial is required reading…”
 
Here is part of Dr. Paula Caplan’s review in Psychology Today Magazine, February 1986:
“There is a widespread belief that when marriages break up and child custody is in dispute, mothers nearly always win, fathers very rarely. And given another popular notion – that of the deeply loving New Father who is willing to take on child rearing and housekeeping responsibilities on his own – this state of affairs has come to be perceived as singularly unfair. Phyllis Chesler’s mammoth new work, Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody, demolishes these claims, demonstrating on the contrary that, when fathers choose to sue for child custody, they very often get it. Due to the epidemic of family abandonment by fathers, judges tend to be impressed by fathers who fight for custody; and the frequent brainwashing of children by fathers is simply considered proof of the father’s wish for intimacy with his children.”

According to Dr. Chesler, the 25th anniversary edition of Mothers on Trial will be published this summer with 8 new chapters. She must know that our family court system hasn’t changed much in the past twenty-five years.

She must also know that “custody disputes” are ending more and more tragically with each new day as dangerous fathers succeed in gaining unsupervised access to their children. Given that hundreds of thousands of  cases of child abuse and fatalities could have been avoided over the last twenty-five years, Dr. Chesler must hate to say, “I told you so.” 

Like spring bulbs erupting from a cold winter ground, books and articles and lectures surface with each new year as authors, attorneys and advocates herald the need for family court reform. How we respond now to the call for family court audits, oversight and accountability will determine how many more – or how many less – reasons there will be for saying, “I told you so.” twenty-five years from now. 

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