Private Troubles, Private Solutions: Poverty Among Divorced Women and the Politics of Support Enforcement and Child Custody Determination

In this paper, recent feminist analyses of the feminization of poverty thesis and proposals for a particular kind of child custody determination—the primary caregiver presumption—will be examined. The question of women's subordination in the context of child custody outcomes is of fundamental importance to the issue of financial support for raising children, and women's economic position in general. Yet the complexity and dialectical nature of this relationship is not fully appreciated in most analyses. As a result, recent progress in the area of family law reform may inadvertently entrench traditional assumptions about the role of women and men, perpetuating the myth of the male breadwinner, family-wage model.