Custody: The Secret History of Mothers by Lara Vigel – Why Women Still Have to Fight for Their Children | History books

TNot surprisingly, his book on child custody is filled with pain. The pain of mothers separated from their children, of children wailing for their mothers, of adults who never got over the trauma of their youth, of young people forced to live out the struggles of their elders. Lara Vigel casts her net across history, fiction, reports, and memoirs, and while her research is undoubtedly impressive and her candor moving, she sometimes struggles to create a narrative that can bring all these tales of pain together.

The book begins with a woman throwing herself fully clothed into a river, then walking anxiously, swimming again, and walking again. This is the French novelist Georges Sand, who is extremely anxious as she waits to go to court to fight for the right to custody of her children. But the story shifts almost immediately to Feigle’s custody battle, then flashes back to the early 1800s, when Caroline Norton’s children are taken by their father in a carriage in the rain.

Norton was the extraordinary woman who seemed able to turn the pain of a breakup into progress. Thanks to her courageous campaign, women gained basic rights to their property and children. Her story can be read as a harbinger of hope, but it is also filled with tragedy, including the death of one of her sons during their forced separation.

And given the way Norton’s story is framed here, it becomes impossible to hold onto any sense of progress. We move quickly from nineteenth-century London to the vortex of Sand’s domestic life, and we see how the prejudice toward independent women who worked against Norton in England also existed in France. From there we move to the United States, where poor Elizabeth Packard, who disagreed with her husband’s religious views, was forced to stay away from her children and into a mental asylum. Then we moved to 2008, where we saw Britney Spears imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital without her beloved children.

Feigel meets Edna O’Brien for an interview and finds her “eyes hollow with pain after a sleepless night.” O’Brien eventually won custody of her children, but during their conversation, the two mother-writers admitted the pain of their struggle so honestly that it overcame them. “We cry, both of us, talking about the promises we made that we couldn’t keep; the promises that were taken away and that we believed enough to keep… What do you do when you have a toddler crying in bed and unable to sleep?”

The book could have ended there, in a shared moment that seems to sum up what happens when the irresistible forces of women’s liberation confront the immutable objects of children’s needs, parental reactions, lawyers’ arguments, and the wrath of ex-husbands. Instead, we move back to the United States, and learn about Alice Walker’s experiences trying to share the care of her daughter with her husband after their divorce. The daughter, Rebecca Walker, deeply resented this arrangement, and Feigl saw it as evidence of “the freezing of dreams of liberal progress in the 1960s.”

At this point, it becomes terribly clear to the reader that there is little sense of forward movement in these stories. In the conclusion, Weigel shows through contemporary courtrooms and documents how children are still subjected to unnecessary pain by parents and lawyers. Here, new voices and characters come to life, each demanding sympathy and outrage, but the presentation feels too rushed to do justice to their compelling tales.

Feigl tries to end the book on an optimistic note: “Maybe we can imagine a version of modernity that is not confounded by motherhood, where liberation and care can coexist; perhaps we can imagine a version of the legal system that gives children real power.” Given the stories she told, this hope seems weak and fragile indeed.