tant human relationships, cooking, looking after Billy, lost his job.
Nurseries court. spending too his son.
California but tionship in your life'. by radically determine and the film has Hollywood film.
pointing but she the lawyer's pecting Billy major ability as a mother. final female, and her husband.
The high beginning of the and I'm now appealing to anybody may well try again too.
into a nicer person.
and have a modern, SIster Rave CHI I0I Is it any surprise that most acandor We know that Billy's fall was an accident, and that he lost his job because he was much time with This hardly measures up against being 'a failure at the single most important relaThe film claims to be about custody and childcare but it is really about marriage and the family. It would be hopelessly idealistic to expect the film to present some solution to the problem of childcare that goes outside framework of the family. It is a Very But it is nonetheless disapthat nurseries don't even get a mention, and that exwait twenty minutes at a friend's house is a indictment of Ted's The only solution to the whole dilemma is to get married battering and stay married. The film ends with Margaret, divorced with two children, trying again with Joanna reenters the flat that she left so definitively at the film, once more referring to it as home, possibility that Ted and Joanna After all, the experience of being a mother has turned Ted and they could both keep their jobs, and share child care and cooking, liberated kind of nuclear family instead.
The Other Bookshop Housing for people or for profits?
Stagel, £2.50
Southall 23 April 1979 — The Report of the Unofficial Committee of Enquiry National Council for Civil Liberties, f2.20 32d on Ne. Ter. O1-226 057 THE film Kramer vs Kramer claims to be about 'real feelings' and 'real emotions'. They may be real, but the situation is highly unusual.
In the film Joanna Kramer walks out on her happy, well-oiled middle class home, and leaves poor over-worked hubby to take care of their child. In the real world it is more often men who leave home, abandoning wives with the children. One in nine families only have one parent, and seven out of eight of these parents are women.
Moreover, in the real world, most people are not middle class with plenty of money. Working class women struggle to bring up children in cramped conditions, on tiny sums of money. Jobs for mums are few and far between, school hours are not linked to normal working hours, and there are no 24-hour nurseries.
often. women in this position payment of maintenance is the norm, and, although the courts can impose stringent penalties, the procedures are long drawn out and alienating. And many women find the idea of pursuing their exhusbands for money downright frightening if the marriage ended due to violence and And if you don't fight for the maintenance money then you can be refused social security payments!
In the Kramers' world the judge was biased in favour of the mother when the custody case came to court. But this is not reality. If men contest custody cases with any fervour they very often win — especially if they have remarried but their ex-wife has not.
If it can be shown that the mother's sexuality is not 'normal' (promiscuous, lesbian), or that her ideas are 'dangerous' (ultrafeminist, Marxist), or that she's not 'balanced' (takes the occaOf course in general women do win custody of the kids when a marriage breaks down, and why not? Throughout womens' lives they are told that having kids is the one thing that will make them feel really fulfilled, it's what women were made for and it's their one route to becoming real people Until women have a really equal role to play in society, and are not seen as primarily wives and mothers, then to change legal practice so that they can more easily be denied custody of their children is just to weight the scales even more heavily against women.
The implicit view peddled by the producers of Kramer vs Kramer is that the bias of legal practice in favour of the mother is unfair to men: It implies this through promoting a further assumption, that Joanna Kramer lost her right to be a mother because she chose not to be a mother for 18 months. In other words, women. stay at home with your boring husbands in your claustrophobic lives, because if you put yourself first, and cease to be a mother for a minute, you lose all right to be a mother at all.
Socialist Challenge are dependent on both distasteful and humiliating • and 15 May 1980 Page 15 csooter21
Socialist Challenge
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maintenance payments from their ex-husbands. The sums fixed by the courts are usually low— it's only Britt Ekland and Bianca Jagger who get millions for leaving their ex-husbands alone. Non-
sional valium, then the father has an open and shut case. Custody