"A Monopoly on their Children" - Misandric Parenting in 1939

FULL TEXT: One of the most monstrously unfair thing in the world is the way women treat their husbands about their children. They demand that their husbands shall slave to support their children and deny themselves ease and luxury in order that their children may go to high-priced colleges, and have expensive cars and clothes, but that ends their conception of a father’s relationship to his children. He is just a biological and financial necessity and, having served his purpose, he goes into the scrapheap like any other useless piece of junk. They don’t even think of his having any right to a part of the children, or any feeling about them.

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How women ever got the idea that mothers alone love their children and that fathers have no more affection for their offspring than an alley cat has for his, no one knows, but that they do hold to this theory is amply proven by the ruthlessness with which they separate their children from their fathers when they happen to want to divorce their husbands.

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Thousands of wives leave the husbands for no reason at all except that they have lost their taste for them. They have got tired of the husbands, or are bored by them, or their husbands have little ways that have got on their nerves. So the break up their homes, pick up the children and his away to the divorce court. “Of course, I can’t give up my children, I’d die if I were parted from them,” they say. But they give no thought to the father whose heart they are breaking when they rob him of his children who are dearer than life to him.

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They don't think of how his arms ache for the feel of a little child cuddling against his breast, or of how desolate the home-going is of nights with no little face watching for him at the window and no little feet scampering across the tile floor to meet him. They don't think of what it means to him to know that his own flesh and blood are growing up strangers to him, that he will have no part in his children's development, no hand in shaping their lives, no pride in their achievements, no love from them to comfort his old age.

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In all the range of crime there is none blacker or cruder than separating a father from his children and yet women do it every day without a pang of compunction because they consider that they have a monopoly of their children. They are not even fair about it because they know the father can't fight for his children for he has no home in which to keep them, nobody to take care of them.

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Mothers will rise up en masse and deny the allegation, but it is true that many of them are so jealous of their children's affection for their father that they, unconsciously perhaps, try to come between them and alienate them from each other. Many mothers never even let their children and their fathers get acquainted with each other. They never let the father take the child off by himself even for a ball game, or to go for a walk in the park where they could really talk and get to know each other. Mother is always along. She is the dominant figure, with father an also-ran who is of no importance to the child.

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Mother is so determined that her children shall love her best and regard her as the source of all their pleasures that she does father the great injustice of making him appear a hard and grinding tyrant, or a tightwad, or a killjoy who doesn’t make any effort to make the children happy. Mother doesn’t teach the children to go at once to their father for what they want in the sure belief that if he can possibly grant their requests he will do so.

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She represents herself as the intermediary who persuades him into gratifying the children's wishes. "I'll see if I can't persuade your father to let you go.” “I’ll try to get your father to give it to you,” et cetera, et cetera. And so poor father gets none of the reward and love and gratitude from his children that he has earned by his endless sacrifices for them.

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Worse still, many mothers teach their children to hate and fear their fathers by holding them up to the children as a god of wrath and vengeance. They make Father punish the little sinner and their role is that of comforter, which is giving Father a rotten deal. “Just wait until your father comes home and he will give you a thrashing for breaking the window.” “I’ll tell your father when he comes home how much trouble you have been all day,” is the slogan with which many a mother kills all love and confluence between her children and their father.

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Fathers work just as hard for their children as mothers do. They make just as many sacrifices, and it is a pity that they are so often balked of their just reward by their wives. – DOROTHY DIX.

[Dorothy Dix, “Fathers Have Right to Love of Children; Dorothy Dix Says That Jealousy Endangers Home Life,” syndicated, The Fresno Bee (Ca.), Feb. 20, 1936, 7-A]

 

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[1305-9/10/21]

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