That female-preferred custody decisions predate feminisms involvement in family courts by decades and that in fact, during feminism's second wave the court system adjusted itself to become MORE (not less) equal toward fathers than it had been in the previous decades?
"But by the 1920's, the maternal preference for custody in English and American law, regardless of the child's age, became as firmly fixed as the earlier paternal preference, and was encoded in statute in all 48 states. The assumption that mothers were better suited to nurture and raise children received an intellectual underpinning in the 1930's from Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which focused exclusively on the mother-child relationship, and ignored the role of the father in the child's development. The resulting idealization of motherhood was often reflected in custody decision-making, as in this 1938 Missouri judicial opinion: "There is but a twilight zone between a mother's love and the atmosphere of heaven."
The maternal presumption for custody remained firm for many decades in the United States, challenged only after the divorce rate began its dramatic rise in the 1960's. Spurred on by fathers' claims of s*x discrimination in custody decisions, constitutional concerns for equal protection, the feminist movement, and the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, most states had substituted the standard of the "best interests of the child" for the tender years presumption by the mid 1970's. For the first time in history, custody decision-making was to be rooted in a consideration of the child's needs and interests, rather than based simply on the gender of the parent."
http://www.stanford.edu/group/psylawseminar/Child Custody in the USA (Page 1 of 5).htm
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