Defiant Dads

A balanced examination of fathers' rights groups that explores why they object to the current child support and child custody systems and what their political agenda would mean for their members' children or children's mothers.

Crowley has written an important, theoretically rich book that empirically examines the fathers' rights movement and engages a wide range of scholarship, including scholarship on family law and policy, feminism, social movements, and ideology and public policy. In examining the movement, she finds important positive aspects, such as its emphasis on responsible fatherhood, but she also notes the pervasive antifeminist and neoconservative-influenced antistatism of the movement. These are barriers to the movement's growth and effectiveness. Crowley importantly notes the problems with completely neutral approaches to issues of equality, particularly in the context of the movement's call for 50-50 arrangements in child custody and child support. This, of course, ignores the difficulties and burdens that mothers still face in the workforce, especially with continued child care expectations and employment discrimination. As a result, Crowley is rightly skeptical of the policy agenda of the movement for ignoring these continuing realities. Also interesting is the insight that the movement is still a genuine grassroots movement, having avoided the professionalization and elite dominance common to so many contemporary social movements. Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Jocelyn Elise Crowley is Associate Professor of Public Policy in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is the author of The Politics of Child Support in America .