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Custody: The Secret History of Mothers
Not yet published
Expected 26 Feb 26We think that our children belong to us, but families are fragile things.
Every day, for over a century, children have been moved between homes because of law cases that decide their fates. Yet child custody is curiously absent from history books and from how we generally understand our world. Lara Feigel’s groundbreaking book shows the fraught, complex territory of child custody to have been one of the vital battlegrounds of modern history and culture.
Custody is the story of seven women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of matrimony in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts.
It’s a book of dramatic storytelling, and of blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation. Each chapter immerses the reader in the life and times – and struggles – of these fascinating, charismatic, complex women and their children. All of these women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too – writers, lovers, or activists – and they and their children were punished for these attempts.
Feigel has been deep in the archives, looking into thousands of other cases in each place and time, and she’s been sitting in on the family courts in the present. So alongside these central figures, the book presents a teeming picture of fractured family life in Britain, Europe and North America across two hundred years, offering a major new interpretation of how our modern culture has evolved. And Custody is an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care.
This book is of urgent interest to anyone concerned with women’s roles in the world and how institutions fail them. Ultimately it’s a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet. Custody cases can seem in these chapters to be quintessentially tragic, but the stories of these passionate, conflicted women also make us want to figure out how to do things better.
Every day, for over a century, children have been moved between homes because of law cases that decide their fates. Yet child custody is curiously absent from history books and from how we generally understand our world. Lara Feigel’s groundbreaking book shows the fraught, complex territory of child custody to have been one of the vital battlegrounds of modern history and culture.
Custody is the story of seven women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of matrimony in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts.
It’s a book of dramatic storytelling, and of blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation. Each chapter immerses the reader in the life and times – and struggles – of these fascinating, charismatic, complex women and their children. All of these women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too – writers, lovers, or activists – and they and their children were punished for these attempts.
Feigel has been deep in the archives, looking into thousands of other cases in each place and time, and she’s been sitting in on the family courts in the present. So alongside these central figures, the book presents a teeming picture of fractured family life in Britain, Europe and North America across two hundred years, offering a major new interpretation of how our modern culture has evolved. And Custody is an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care.
This book is of urgent interest to anyone concerned with women’s roles in the world and how institutions fail them. Ultimately it’s a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet. Custody cases can seem in these chapters to be quintessentially tragic, but the stories of these passionate, conflicted women also make us want to figure out how to do things better.
- GenresNonfiction
Kindle Edition
Expected publication February 26, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from Publisher
A well researched read and a lived experience for the author.
A complex history of custody battlefields between the patriarchy and feminism.
Court decisions of madness at times. Imagine awarding custody to a father in prison for armed robbery (still with 10 years to go) because the mother had an affair. Leaving the children with a father who abused them because the mother had anxiety which was deemed more harmful in the long run for the children.
Not all mothers are amazing but decisions should be fair and child focused.
Chapters of mothers and their fight to keep their children in a male controlled environment. Aren't most judges, male?
"But what is a child between injured parents? A weapon"
It was a tough read. I felt anger but I felt some hope too, that things will continue to get better especially with Cafcass around. Child focused. A home should feel safe.
A book I'll be thinking about for a while.
Thank you to William Collins publishing for this proof copy book.
A complex history of custody battlefields between the patriarchy and feminism.
Court decisions of madness at times. Imagine awarding custody to a father in prison for armed robbery (still with 10 years to go) because the mother had an affair. Leaving the children with a father who abused them because the mother had anxiety which was deemed more harmful in the long run for the children.
Not all mothers are amazing but decisions should be fair and child focused.
Chapters of mothers and their fight to keep their children in a male controlled environment. Aren't most judges, male?
"But what is a child between injured parents? A weapon"
It was a tough read. I felt anger but I felt some hope too, that things will continue to get better especially with Cafcass around. Child focused. A home should feel safe.
A book I'll be thinking about for a while.
Thank you to William Collins publishing for this proof copy book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review