#Welcome to the Brocialist Review.

'The Invention Of Child Support' by Drew Hansen covers the history of Child Support, and also accidentally uncovers the history of working class struggle, the history of the shift toward female bias in the legal system in general, and if you look closely enough *squints insanely* you'll find a precursor explanation and fraudulent legal basis for the role of contemporary Feminism as an anti-socialist, pro-capitalist, anti-egalitarian movement.

Thesis:

The author begins with a thesis that American Discourse on Child Support can be viewed historically and presently as:

"First, child support enforcement is an anti-dependency measure. Politicians want to enforce child support orders because they are worried that the country is spending too much money on welfare and because they think that increasing child support collections will lower poverty rates among single mothers. Second, nonpayment of child support is a serious crime that should be punished by the criminal law. Americans today conceptualize child support in terms of preventing dependency and in terms of punishing those who "cause" dependency."

He calls this a dependency-punishment framework and shows us that this sidesteps a need or desire for a system that takes care of all children regardless of economic status, at the expense of Men.

The Catalyst:

  • Child Labor went from acceptable in the early 19th century to a moral wrong sanctioned in 14 States by the 1840s. Middle Class families wanted their children in schools. Poor Families who used Child Labor to survive no longer could."

"Beginning in the nineteenth century, this view of children as economic assets began to give way to a more romantic, idealized view of childhood among the middle and upper classes."

"...The rise in the divorce rate, the emergence of maternal preference in child custody, and the new value placed on childrearing combined to make it difficult for single mothers to support their children without relying on local poor-relief."

  • The "Poor Laws" were ineffective, overburdened, and evil. These laws essentially provided public funding for wealthy individuals to exploit forced labor in brutal conditions, allowing for the imprisonment of able-bodied Men who refused to work and a deficit of public spending that destroyed society. Women could often receive board as a servant in a wealthy household but the increasing volume of single mothers exceeded this more sympathetic position.
  • I don't even have time to go into the Industrial Revolution, except to focus here on how it transformed people into worker bees. In this situation, as in practically everything, it was worse for Men.
  • Slavery, The Civil War. The attitudes of a slavery society have persisted to 2021 where slavery is still legal either through prisons or exported labor. The mass death of Men in the Civil War was the equivalent of about 8 million men dying today. The United States has a violent and storied anti-labor history, and this is deeply connected to the history of feminism as a patronage ideology to justify this male disposability.
  • The judicial ruling class believes in the english system of law, class privileges, and the idea of 'natural duty'. This is vital.
  • Men pushed into poverty by industrial capitalists, who were faced with the 'choice' of trying to 'support' their family by leaving them to live in poor houses, a bad or failing marriage, cheating, or a society that deeply wanted to enslave, punish or kill them could simply leave.

"As population growth overwhelmed the colonial poor-relief system, towns could not keep up with individual cases of desertion."

"The growth of large cities gave men who wanted to leave their families many places where they could go with relative anonymity. At the same time, the expansion of the shipping and manufacturing industries made it easier for men to take their labor power from one place to another. By early in the nineteenth century, wife desertion was starting to emerge as a major social problem."

  • Divorce was not materially possible for the working poor, see: elitist, for-profit legal system.

"But for many wage-earning men, family desertion served as a cheap, nonlegal divorce."

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The Invention Of Child Support (and Alimony)

"The pace of the rise in divorce varied by region, but by 1850 there was a clearly observable national trend toward marital breakdown. Women often successfully sued for divorce in the nineteenth century by charging their husbands with fault in causing the divorce. The most common grounds for divorce among women in the nineteenth century were desertion or cruelty on the part of their husbands."

This trend of gaining legal favor with accusations of abuse never ended and is now a fully for-profit industry.

"American courts in the nineteenth century addressed the problem of dependency among single mothers and their children by creating a legally enforceable child support duty. A legal child support obligation was unknown to English law, a fact that was repeatedly noted by courts and commentators skeptical of the new duty. But for the courts that supported the new doctrine (which was the majority view by the end of the century), the danger of dependency among single mothers-seen both as poverty and as dependency on the state--was enough to justify their departure from precedent. Courts early in the nineteenth century referred to concerns about dependency in the first American child support decisions. From mid-century to 1900, American courts consolidated the child support obligation, reasoning in a discourse of fault and punishment as they addressed dependency among single mothers."

In other words, although there was no legal basis for enforcing the payment of child support and it even violated the rights of Men to enforce it - *Child Support was ultimately enforced to avoid having the State pay for welfare.* Instead, Men would pay for this new social safety net themselves. The money often would not go to single mothers, it would often go poorhouse capitalists and wealthy "philanthropists" who could now sue the Fathers in recompense for taking care of their families.

"However, courts usually placed an additional burden on single mother plaintiffs that they did not place on third-party plaintiffs. Single mothers who wanted to recover for child support had to prove not only that their husband had failed to provide for the children, but also that the husband was at fault for causing the divorce. If the wife was at fault, she could not recover child support."

In a landmark case, Eitel v. Walter,

"I think a more humane doctrine, prevails here, and that the father is held liable for necessaries, or, in other words, the law will imply a contract on his part, if he refuses or neglects to perform his natural duty to his offspring." ' Those who questioned the new doctrine were astounded at the readiness of most American courts to promote it.66 Even James Schouler, the author of a renowned treatise on domestic relations, who accepted the new child support doctrine, admitted that it was "to be justified rather by public policy than the well-understood liabilities of the father, as defined by Blackstone."

\Blackstone wrote the book that became the basis for Americans porting over English Law (huge mistake imo, the english viewed class privilege as unquestionable authority))

By the mid-nineteenth century the father was almost always blamed for marital failure. This 'blame' emerged not from reality, possibly from sexism, but definitely because the courts wanted fathers to be the social safety net and reduce the burden on the state and on the wealthy who exploited them ruthlessly.

"Once the child support duty had been legally established, many of the early child support claims were brought by individuals who had provided food, board, or clothing to impoverished single mothers and their children and wanted to recover their outlays from the present or former husband.°

In Reynolds v. Sweetser,9" for example, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts authorized John Reynolds's bid for recovery from Stephen Sweetser when Sweetser's wife and child had left him after he had physically abused them. The court reasoned that Reynolds could recover because Sweetser had "made no suitable provision, either at his own home or elsewhere, for the mother and child" and had "utterly failed... to relieve [his child] from the absolute destitution to which by his neglect and misconduct it had been exposed."92 The keys to this decision are "absolute destitution" and the father's "neglect and misconduct": The wife and child were destitute because of an abusive husband and father; the court was quick to authorize recovery for the generous individual who came to their aid."

This didn't remove women from poorhouses however, it only made them reliant on them. No mention whatsoever of how safe a child in a stranger's household who views them as being in their debt. The only thing the legal system cared about was protecting the rich through enabling forced labor. The author provides other early court precedents for demanding support not just of Father's but of any any Man involved with the woman.

What was the "public policy" that justified the invention of a child support duty in nineteenth-century America? Some insights are provided by the two earliest American child support cases: Stanton v. Willson,6' decided by the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1808, and Van Valkinburgh v.Watson,69 decided by the New York Supreme Court of Judicature in 1816.A desire to guard against dependency-in the dual sense of wanting to prevent poverty and wanting to prevent unnecessary drains on the public treasury-undergirded both of these opinions. In Stanton, the Connecticut Supreme Court allowed Eunice Stanton to recover from her ex-husband on behalf of her deceased second husband, Joshua, for the support that Joshua had provided to Eunice's children from her first marriage. Two of Eunice's children had been awarded to her by a custody decree, and the third had fled from her ex-husband because of fears of personal violence. In a discursive opinion that bothered little with citation, the court authorized recovery for the support of the two children covered by the custody decree on the grounds of the unsupported statement that "[p]arents are bound by law to maintain, protect, and educate their legitimate children, during their infancy, or nonage." The court allowed recovery for support of the third child because " [t]he infant cast on the world must seek protection and safety where it can be found; and where, with more propriety can it apply, than to the next friend, nearest relative, and such as are most interested in its safety and happiness?"

This is why no amount of reasoning or moral imperative seems to impact the Child Support system. It's why you find male rape victims paying out to their female rapists, it's why you find 'Common law' boyfriends paying child support on their wives children from another marriage, it's why female child molesters and abusers go unquestioned and enabled until it kills or harms the children, it's why nations have banned paternity tests unless under strict judicial approval: it was always an amoral demand for Men to be enslaved to a Capitalist system by reducing the burden of Capital's failures. Feminist justification for this would only come a century later, by the most privileged female generation in history.

The Criminalization Of Non-Payment or Resistance

Eventually new laws were passed as the poor laws continued to fail and be a burden on the State.

When the colonial poor-relief system broke down in the nineteenth century, however, reformers started to look for ways other than the poor laws to force fathers to support their children. In the 1870s and 1880s,many states passed desertion and nonsupport statutes that criminalized refusal to support one's children. These statutes added the punitive power of the criminal law to the dependency focus of the civil child support obligation, punishing those fathers who caused single mothers and children to become dependent on state aid. The statutes also showcased the fiscally conservative aspect of child support in the nineteenth century: They were intended primarily as a way to save public resources, not as measures intended to enhance child welfare.

Let's be real, a lot of children were abused in this system. Child Support and Alimony are Anti-Socialist, Anti-Welfare first, Capitalist second, poor families a distant third, Father's welfare never.

"The new laws, like the poor laws, were only triggered by absolute destitution. But unlike the poor laws, they allowed for transfers of child support payments to poor single mothers themselves. An 1886 compilation of American statutes noted that eleven states had made it a penal offense for a father to abandon or refuse to support his minor children.' By enacting these laws, American states made nonpayment of child support a serious crime, punishable by a criminal penalty."

A note, this is about the 'American Invention' but it was very quickly being adopted elsewhere, as in this comment by /u/problem_redditor.

Courts interpreted the laws as creating criminal sanctions for those who caused dependency. The aim of the laws was one typically associated with the welfare state-the prevention of dependency. But the form of the laws was based on a criminal justice model-the punishment of offenders against public peace.

These early family courts assumed and invented a legal statute of child support and punishment that didn't exist. This process of calling on sympathy for women at the expense of men, at the expense of the rights and due process of men, on behalf of wealthy concern trolls, became the basis for the future Family Court and it's profiteers.

The new nonsupport statutes displayed their criminal, punitive intentions in both their statutory language and the courts' interpretation of them. The early desertion and nonsupport statutes made the criminal nature of the offense clear. The New Jersey statute, enacted in 1884, punished nonsupporting fathers with imprisonment and hard labor "in the same manner as other prisoners committed to such jail or workhouse are put and kept at hard labor." The typical criminal penalties imposed for nonsupport were fines,14 imprisonment," or both."' Some laws provided for the suspension of the sentence if the father could provide a bond for the future support of his wife and child. The legislatures that drafted nonsupport statutes were following the prevailing cultural paradigm for understanding child support: Professional charity workers during this period repeatedly used the language of punishment to describe how they dealt with deserting or nonsupporting husbands.'

This was the beginning of the professional charitable organization, with the apparent goal of making the world a worse place. Punishing poor men for being poor and demanding that men slave for the profit of others and without rights of parenthood or respect for upholding the social safety net of society. Meanwhile employers remained free to debase the value of labor such that single mothers couldn't afford to raise children in the new industrial cities. This industry is now dominated by Feminist women maintaining the old status quo of profiting off of State funding with elite capture, helping only women to avoid the horrors of capitalism, and punishing and blaming Men for causing expensive public burden. The only difference is that the rhetoric is now bound up in gender ideology and concerns the innate evil of Men and innate victimhood of Women. All of which has been found repeatedly to be false.

"Courts justified the criminal nature of the new statutes by asserting-as had the courts inventing the common-law support obligation that a nonsupporting husband violated his duty to the public to keep his wife and children from going on poor-relief. "

"...The idea that desertion and nonsupport statutes punished an offender for his role in causing dependency on the state was vigorously asserted by courts interpreting the new laws. In these decisions, courts tied the dependency and punishment rationales together, completing the move to the modem American way of thinking about child support. "

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By the way, the exact same thing is happening with Alimony at the same time. But the focus of the author is on Child Support. Ultimately both would be considered a 'natural duty' to be viewed and treated as criminal if disobeyed or through non-payment.

The Use Of Poor Law Logic, Child Support Obligations To Reinstate Slavery

The child support system that developed in American courts in the nineteenth century was open only to white families. Under slavery, almost no blacks in either the Northern states that permitted slavery or in the South were permitted to marry.

"Even legally sanctioned marriages did not give black fathers either the right to direct the upbringing of their children or the duty to support them. Soon after the Civil War, most Southern states passed "apprenticeship" statutes as part of the Black Codes. These statutes allowed whites to indenture black children, regardless of whether the children lived with their families or whether their parents were working to support them. The statutes essentially reintroduced slavery for black children. As a result, black men in the period after the Civil War were only under legal child support obligations when their children could not be successfully indentured."

I can't state this enough, the historical and present child support, alimony, and male-disposability industry at large are a creation of a capitalist slavery society, specifically with the goal of forcing Men to subsidize capitalist exploitation and reduce burden on the State and the Wealthy. It is a horrific fact that the labor left has ignored or scoffed at the idea of child support or alimony as indentured servitude, and at the role of Feminism in expanding it, but the historical facts line up to make it very clear that that's what it was intended to be. This system is the reason we don't have a real social safety net for Children, as well as the reason Men are blamed by default, it's more profitable and socially acceptable this way.

As a result of the unofficial nature of black marriages in the late nineteenth century, prosecutions against black fathers occurred under the 'bastardly' or illegitimacy statutes. "designed to compel a putative father to support his out-of-wedlock children".

Many black families of this time survived these systems by boarding with each other, often taking in children for long periods of time.

Powerful Takeway :

These 'Feminist' Laws were written by conservatives. The pro-female bias even today is carried out by a majority conservative judicial body. "Feminism" as a movement is historically a consequence of this bias and privilege, taken to further extremes of course but still originating in 19th century america. This is why 'gynocentrism' or male disposability is a much more accurate view of female institutional privileges than the rise of second wave feminism a century later. Feminists absolutely made it worse and even expanded it in new ways in the20th century, (such as in the new Domestic Abuse industry), but I've seen this take many times on MensRights that Feminists invented and created this system. They did not. They're the byproduct of it.

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Earnings and Costs Of Living For Families And Single Mothers

This video showing the expenses of a Family in 1860 cites an average 12$ of weekly income, and breaks down the expenses of an average family that would have a windfall of 5.72$ a month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL0QEzubKVc

In many ways they had it much better than we do, before the financialization and speculation of rents and housing, as well as increasing population size, housing was relatively cheap and things like machinery, medicine or tools were very expensive.

However a poor single mother made much less.

During this time, women frequently made significantly less money in low-skilled, industrial labor positions.

Box maker (boys) — $3.50

Box maker (men) — $11.20

Box maker (women and girls) — $5.71

Cigar maker (men) — $12.00

Cigar maker (women) — $7.50

Printer (men) — $11.00

Printer (women) — $4.00

Spinner (girls) — $2.37

Spinner (men) — $8.00

Spinner (women) — $4.00

Weaver (men) — $7.50

Weaver (women) — $5.25

Many people at this time were boarders and lived in large households, but taking in again the length of time you now have to raise children before they can work - it was clear that Child Support and Alimony had to be increased. Just as in today, many poor men could not pay.

It's not hard to see that an uneducated single mother would struggle, although in terms of cost of living she would actually struggle less in a city than in 2021 where the cost of rent would likely exceed her monthly income. A working class man in 2021 paying her child support, not even mentioning alimony, would likely be homeless or living with parents, priced out of independence while supporting a woman who is on average more educated than he is.

At this time Cornelius Vanderbilt was worth 105$ million and the top 5% made 4,605/year on average.

According to this paper, women in this period were receiving 2-5 dollars a week, moving many of these women up the ladder toward the average income and moving some of these Men below where the women were before. The poorest Men of course, were jailed for nonpayment and sentenced to hard labor.

The economy is built on exploiting Men and our rights follow. Men work the worst jobs, suffer the worst injuries, have the least education, less hope in a future, make up the bulk of poorest americans and homeless - all while Men are keeping women alive in an increasing cruel economy. Without any rights in relationships, parenthood, or as victims of abuse. Because of the dependency-punishment model, Men receive no respect or status for working for women and children, they are treated like criminals while Capitalists extract so much wealth that it's no longer possible for working class people to afford children without two working parents or child support and alimony (which puts a working class person into destitution or prison).

The shift to maternal preference for child custody, and judicial bias for women

The earliest American custody decisions were made according to the traditional English rule of paternal preference. Mothers almost never won custody of their children in divorce cases from the colonial era to the early nineteenth century. Beginning in the first third of the nineteenth century, however, the strict paternal preference rule began to erode.

Child Support society in general became preoccupied with the "cult of motherhood," and this cultural construct influenced judges making custody decisions as they became increasingly likely to award custody of the newly valued children to the mother. By the 1850s, the trend toward maternal preference was well-established,4 and by the end of the century, the custody of children after a divorce was almost always awarded to the mother.

Present, The Post New-Deal Return To Poor Laws and anti-Welfare

President Clinton hailed the possibility that child support enforcement might shrink welfare rolls. "If every parent paid the child support they should," he said at the news conference following the signing of the bill, "we could move 800,000 women and children off welfare immediately." At the parallel Republican press conference, Representative Jennifer Dunn pointed out that nonpayment of child support was a major cause of welfare dependency. Reminding her audience that over thirty billion dollars in court-ordered child support payments goes uncollected, she asked: "What happens when that money is not paid? The children and the mother go on welfare. And so the taxpayer becomes in effect the parent of those children."

The villain in the child support reform story is the "deadbeat dad" who does not pay child support. In a speech in Denver one week before he signed the welfare bill, President Clinton assured his audience that nonpayment of child support was a serious crime, comparing it to robbing a bank or a 7-Eleven store. In a final cascade of warnings to "deadbeat dads," the President said: "I[I]f you owe child support, you better pay it. If you deliberately refuse to pay it, you can find your face posted in the Post Office. We'll track you down with computers ... We'll track you down with law enforcement. We'll find you through the Internet."

In other words: nothing has changed. In fact, criminalization has run rampant because of Feminist lobbying. New attitudes about gender and equality have done almost nothing to oppose the sexist laws of a pro-slavery, elitist society. The greatest 'win' is that a very small amount of wealthy women pay child support or alimony, but that industry is so evil, driven by greed that having 'equality' in destroying our relationships to feed capitalism isn't a win to me.

The author concludes with his view that a welfare system for children should be established.

The historical account of the origins of the American child support duty in concerns about dependency and punishment allows for at least a tentative sketch of a historical argument to explain why America in the early twentieth century did not enact a system of child benefits or family allowances...

...This system of private child support transfers and a lack of public supports for raising children remains with us today, as concerns about dependency and punishment continue to dominate the modem American child support system.

Despite historical court records that explicitly detail the beginnings of Child Support and Alimony as a means to cut social spending, destroy welfare, and thereby hold back a need for socialist policies by pressing Men into peonage - this concept receives almost no recognition, and even more alarmingly no recognition at all from people who call themselves socialists, pro-labor, or advocates of the working class. It's not unfair at all to say that anyone who refuses to criticize this system is an authoritarian capitalist.

There are a lot of solutions. The problem isn't solutions. The problem is that while these monsters have no problem using generations of Men as slaves and then as debt slaves (peonage), they cry and shrink back at the idea of contributing to society with public spending.

Here's my idea: Because Child Support primarily ends up paying off landlords, if instead of punishing Men we had developed publicly owned housing such as in Singapore (but on an American scale) - there would be much less of a problem. They could be either free or low cost, and they also could solve domestic abuse situations where someone needs a place to stay as well as Child Support by freeing the parent of the biggest cost of living. In a place where the parent can't even fully pay rent in Seattle, SF, New York this is a huge win. We could've also been rid of our horrific homelessness problem which primarily affects Men, we could've avoided inflicting poor children with a sense of precariousness that leads to late life consequences. With housing, single Moms or Dads could easily afford to support and spend time with their children. Most importantly, with this policy in place there will be no need to create a Feminist style big budget program that will 99% benefit women and be paid for by Men. There will be no social workers, therapists, lawyers, or other forms of elite capture. You build, you give away to poor families. The abundance of free housing ends the speculative real estate bubble. Life gets better for everyone.

I'm sure there are other solutions too, but as I said, the problem is never solutions. The problem is class of people who don't want solutions because then they wouldn't have gold houses, or a media job complaining about Men, or a charity organization that can't or doesn't want to fix anything.

There is now a full multi-billion dollar industry (33 Billion due in Child Support in 2015 alone) that has formalized abusing Men and Children for the benefit of fiscal conservatism and more recently, Feminist directed greed and privilege. The paradigm has also changed to a society that does have public spending, but uses it to set up patronage systems for Feminists at the expense of victims (VAWA, Title IX). In this model, Men pay the most taxes, receive the most punishments, the least rights, have access to the least services, and have the most problems. Using an academic industry funded in the same way, they create a body of cherry-picked research (1 in 4 homeless are women!) to justify the acts of a for-profit, anti-welfare charity industry. This new feminist industry effectively acts as elite capture and conservative, anti-socialist deficit hawking. Recently the TimesUp MeToo charity was found to have spent most of it's money on itself.

The Bar association, one of the largest lobbying groups in the country, and family law has become a for-profit beast that no-one consented to. You are *required* to lawyer up at an average cost of 10-12K (Most americans have less than 1K in the bank at any given time), otherwise you'll be crushed by the opposing legal team. The judge makes 160,000$ a year rubberstamping restraining orders while having the same level of gender bias as the average idiot. This industry is for-profit, nonconsensual, and built on the backs of Men, and brutalizes children. The family court is the little saint james island of legal abuses. And now because of this history we realize that this court never had a legitimate basis for operating, merely a slavery-era elite justification that it was our 'natural duty' to help Capitalists destroy our prosperity and our families.

This industry has also expanded from the Family Court to control other aspects of our lives. Erin Pizzey wrote a book on her experience creating the first Domestic Abuse Shelters and watching them become a corrupt, anti-male, multi-billion dollar industry with little interest in using that money to actually help victims. In the US private charities have millionaire CEOs directing funding for 'women only' programs that the wealthy can donate to in order to avoid paying for public spending. These professional parasites lobby to shut down homeless shelters, support, and rights for Men.

There is also a for-profit global industry in the form of feminist NGOs who enter countries under imperialist economic relations, to 'save' women, in order to help justify imperialism while claiming to fight it's effects in hurting women. Elizabeth Bernstein explored this subject in Militarized Humanism Meets Carceral Feminism, where Feminists allied with Evangelical Christian NGOs in an fabricated fight to end 'sex trafficking' that required international cooperation to punish Men - not only did they not find the epidemic they were looking for, these NGOs routinely ignore the economic conditions that necessitate prostitution.

One of the most important things that has been discovered about this industry is the enormous impact of fatherlessness on children, with fatherless children being more likely to become involved in crime, homelessness, suicide, child abuse, and many other factors that are worse than poor children with two parents.

Alright, that's way too much and I don't feel like editing.