“Honor Thy Father”: Czech Men’s Organizations’ Fight over Custody

This article shows how we can use the sociology of emotions approach in combination with theories of masculinity and opportunity structures to explain the development of Czech fathers’ rights organizations and why they originally tended to be aggressive and engage in sometimes violent protest actions rather than act like professionalized NGOs. While much has been written about post-communist women’s movements, much less has been written about post-communist men’s groups. Having inherited a conservative legal system, joint custody arrangements were rarely granted until recently, making the opportunity structures rather closed to the conservative men. In addition, their pre-modern extremely conservative and anti-feminist views made it impossible to cooperate with women’s groups and also made it difficult to get public or EU funding. These activists were mostly middle-class professionals, who supported “traditional” family values. Following theories of the sociology of emotions, we argue that when getting divorced, the conservative fathers lost their role as the head of the household along with their homes and custody rights, which led to a loss of status and an increasingly marginalized masculinity. This, in turn, filled them with anger and resentiment, thus inducing them to engage in confrontational activities. When the system began opening up and shared custody became more common, the activists became more professionalized, less confrontational and focusing on opposing general liberal gender values.