Backlash Against Feminism: Custody and Access Reform Debates of the Late 20th Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the images of feminism and women’s groups in family law reform debates, particularly in the 1998 presentations of fathers’ rights advocates and related participants in Canada’s public consultations on child custody and access. These images are placed in the context of an increasingly sophisticated “backlash” literature that critiques feminist engagement with law and public policy. The article suggests that the fathers’ rights discourse invokes a caricature of feminism and identifies several mechanisms through which the discrediting of feminism occurred in the 1998 hearings. Feminism is also portrayed as a threat to dominant images of family, including the heterosexual norm. These portrayals of feminism and women’s groups in turn influence the law reform process due to the way in which “legitimate” knowledge is constructed. The article concludes with a discussion of why feminist voices are susceptible to discrediting and offers some suggestions for reasserting feminist analysis in areas that are critical to women.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.073 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".