For the sake of the children: motherhood and care in child custody disputes, 1980-2000

Abstract

Based on the analysis of files in which the custody of the children of couples who had gone through separation or divorce was disputed, this article shows that, although judicial authorities rarely granted the fathers' requests for custody of their children, their demands opened a process of close scrutiny of the women, which involved both their sexual morality and their capacity to care for their children, updating the image of the child in “material and moral danger”. The need to financially sustain their households while providing a safe home for their children was often an impossible imperative to fulfill. Instead, fathers presented themselves as guarantors of the children's material and moral well-being, which, they claimed, their ex-partners could not sustain. Looking at separated or divorced women allows to foreground not only the inequalities and conflicts that permeate family life, but also the limitations imposed by certain material living conditions on the ability to develop forms of care that other actors, in this case their ex-partners, presented as a basic condition for the well-being of the children.