Pellegrino is especially livid because, last year, her boyfriend was arrested on Father's Day weekend for being behind on some child support as a result of fluctuations in his income as a window tinter -- even though, she says, he was making regular payments. "The father and child didn't even get to see each other that weekend," she says, her voice quavering. "My boyfriend was very upset, but he's an adult, he can get over it. The one that really got hurt was the boy. To choose that weekend to arrest the father was just evil."

Some women feel wounded by anti-father bias in more ways than one. Cindy McNeely, who is involved in Women for Fatherhood and plans someday to start a legal defense fund for "fathers' and children's rights," was 10 when her parents divorced in the early 1970s. She and her sister lived with their mother, who McNeely says was an emotionally unstable alcoholic. Eventually, her father won custody -- but only after a wrenching legal battle in which the children had to testify against their mother in court.

McNeely believes she could have been spared much of this trauma if the system hadn't been corrupted by a bias for mothers. "We might have stood a better chance of being placed with the more stable parent from the beginning," she says.

In 1990, McNeely married a divorced father of two, who she believes unfairly lost custody of his two children. Watching his struggles, she says, "brought back memories of the helplessness and futility my sister and I experienced as children, and I decided to channel my frustrations into something constructive." Both she and her husband went to law school and co-founded a fathers' rights group.

Not all the women who fight for fathers' rights have personal connections to divorced dads. Some are matrimonial lawyers like Sari Friedman, general counsel of the Father's Rights Association of New York State, who says her passion for the cause was inspired by the bias she saw against her male clients. And there are still others whose backgrounds offer no easy way at all to explain their activism.

Take Mitchell, whose life story would seem to make fathers' rights the last cause she would champion. Or take Vicki Tyler, 44, a divorced noncustodial mother who is involved in Women for Fatherhood and the Coalition for the Preservation of Fatherhood, a fathers' group, in Massachusetts.

Tyler, who is also a senior clinical research associate with a pharmaceutical firm in Cambridge, voluntarily gave up custody of her three sons -- then 6-year-old twins and a 4-year-old -- when she and her ex-husband separated 16 years ago and he told her he would fight for custody. No, she says, she was not intimidated, as many feminists would assume, but her husband's threat "opened my eyes to the fact that he was willing to work hard to keep the boys in his life."

Tyler and her husband were able to work out a mutual agreement on their own. A full-time mother before the divorce (by choice, she stresses), Tyler went to college but remained very involved in her sons' lives, even after she moved from Kansas, where her ex-husband has a ranch, to Massachusetts -- both for her career and because that's where her roots were.

Later, some male friends' divorce-related horror stories prompted her to join the fight for fathers' rights. Her dedication, she says, is rooted in the strong belief that "all children deserve to be with both parents if the parents are alive and willing to parent," and that the limits imposed on many noncustodial fathers' time with their children constitute "an atrocity."

Do these women, and the men whose cause they support, have valid complaints? To most people, the claim that child support awards are too high seems transparently absurd: It is, after all, conventional wisdom that divorced men make out like bandits while the women and children are left in the dust. Women's organizations even challenge the view that the courts are biased against fathers in custody decisions, asserting that men who seek child custody usually win and that career-oriented mothers, in particular, are victims of prejudiced judges.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.