The Feminist Leader Who Became a Men's-Rights Activist: Remembering Karen DeCrow.

Gawrsh · 2014-06-16T09:22:33+00:00

Great read. Interesting how she remained a staunch feminist while also looking at both sides of the gender issues coin.

Eclipto14 · 2014-06-16T05:23:27+00:00

A lifelong champion of women’s rights, DeCrow was nonetheless skeptical about many key aspects of latter-day feminism, including its focus on sexual violence and male abuse of women. She was also, for much of her career, a men’s-rights activist. DeCrow raised eyebrows in 1981 when she served as defense counsel to Frank Serpico, the former New York detective and whistleblower, in a paternity suit. Serpico claimed the plaintiff had used him as a “sperm bank” and lied about being on the Pill while knowingly trying to conceive, and asserted that he had a constitutional right not to become a parent against his will. (The family-court judge, a woman, ruled in Serpico’s favor, but he lost on appeal.) DeCrow, by then a lawyer in private practice in Syracuse, New York, endorsed Serpico’s argument on feminist grounds. “Just as the Supreme Court has said that women have the right to choose whether or not to be parents, men should also have that right,” she told The New York Times, calling this “the only logical feminist position to take.” Quite a few feminists disagreed. Marjory D. Fields, then co-chair of Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force On Domestic Violence and later a family-court judge, described the defense tactics in the case as “almost a classic antiwoman presentation: that women seduce and entrap men with their feminine wiles.” DeCrow was unfazed. In a 1982 letter to the Times, she wrote that since men have no legal power to either veto or compel an abortion, it is only just that they shouldn’t have to pay for a woman’s unilateral decision to bring the pregnancy to term: “Or, put another way, autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice.” DeCrow also championed men’s rights as fathers, arguing for a “rebuttable presumption” of shared custody after divorce. She worked with the Fathers’ Rights Association of New York State and joined the board of the Children’s Rights Council, a pro-joint custody group. More recently, she was on the board of Leading Women for Shared Parenting.

123vasectomy · 2014-06-16T19:48:11+00:00

Wonderfully unbiased treatment of her career by the Atlantic. It's refreshing. Now let me see how Jezabel covered this..

Edit: Predictably, the Jezabel article makes no mention whatsoever of her decades of fighting for Men's Rights and Fathers' Rights. I chastised the author mildly and linked to this Atlantic article in the comments.

Nomenimion · 2014-06-16T16:30:55+00:00

So Karen DeCrow really was a 'true equality' feminist. I used to doubt such a creature ever existed.

It seems there is no mystery involved in how the feminists converted to full-on female chauvinism: there was no political reward involved in fighting for men, so instead of changing their equalitarian principles, they became hypocrites who preached equality with one hand while oppressing men with the other. It was a simple matter of political necessity.

Power corrupts... and this is how.

Eclipto14 · 2014-06-16T20:55:11+00:00

As a sidebar: "father's-rights movement" has a more pleasant ring to it.

Title	The Feminist Leader Who Became a Men's-Rights Activist: Remembering Karen DeCrow.
Author	Eclipto14
Upvotes	105
Comments	6
Date	June 16, 2014 5:21 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/289b27/the_feminist_leader_who_became_a_mensrights/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/the-feminist-leader-who-became-a-mens-rights.999152 https://theredarchive.com/post/999152

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