Writer, critic, novelist and cultural historian Lara Feigel is also a divorcee. I note this fact only as it is extremely relevant to her latest book, which was birthed amid the Formica chairs and deadening delays of family court, the battlefield where she and her former husband met to carve out the fate of their two children.
Using her own experiences as a springboard, Feigel tells the story of seven women from the 1800s up to the present day, whose travails provide a comprehensive and heartbreaking history of how child custody has been mishandled through the centuries.
It begins with Caroline Norton, a 19th-century English author and social reformer, who left her controlling husband in 1836. George Norton was “a dim-witted Tory on the make” and no match for his brilliant wife, but that didn’t stop him gaining custody of their children and of her income, thanks to the repressively patriarchal laws of the period. Then we visit French writer George Sand, who managed to gain custody of her children in three separate court cases, and American Elizabeth Packard, who was wrongly condemned to an insane asylum by her domineering Calvinist husband in 1860. This chapter features a “guest appearance” from the 21st century’s Britney Spears, proving that for all our supposed progress, the area of custody is one which hasn’t yet developed resembling a fair system.
Even when custody is not decided by a court, the effects on the child are profound, as in the case of Rebecca Walker, the child of renowned author Alice Walker and Jewish-American lawyer Mel Levanthal, who moved between her parents at two-year intervals.
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German author Frieda Lawrence, the lover and eventual wife of DH Lawrence, dared to wish for a happier life away from her first husband, who subsequently used her absence from their children as a punishment. Indeed, the most telling quote in this whole sorry history is from Ireland’s Edna O’Brien, whose husband Ernest Gebler is accused of using their two boys as an instrument of torture: “What is a child between injured parents? Only a weapon.”
Feigel argues succinctly that until we move away from the adversarial “winner” mentality of family court, children will always be the losers, which is the saddest thing of all.
