History
The fathers’ rights movement in the US emerged with the founding of Divorce Racket Busters in California in 1960 to protest California's divorce laws, which they claimed discriminated against men in alimony, child support settlements and in a presumption of maternal custody. The group expanded into other states, changing its name to Divorce Reform in 1961. With the increase in divorce rates in the 1960s and 1970s, more local grassroots men’s organizations grew up devoted to divorce reform, and by the 1980s, there were a total of more than 200 fathers’ rights groups active in almost every state. These groups focused their actions on what they viewed as gender discrimination in family law, by engaging in political activities such as lobbying state legislatures, filing class action suits, picketing courthouses, and monitoring judges’ decisions through “court watches”. The 1990s saw the emergence of new and larger organizations such as National Fatherhood Initiative and the American Fathers Coalition. Several unsuccessful efforts were made to found a national organization to which local organizations could belong. As a result the movement remains mainly a loose coalition of local groups.
Read more about this topic: Fathers' Rights Movement In The USA
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“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
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“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
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