In the 1999 book "Divorced Dads," University of Arizona scholar Sanford Braver reports that three-quarters of divorcing men and one in four women in his study thought the system was slanted in favor of mothers -- while one in 10 women and none of the men thought it favored fathers.

The work of Braver and other researchers, such as Joyce Arditti of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, lends credence to some other key claims of the fathers' rights movement: that noncustodial fathers who are economically stable usually have a good record of financial support for their children; that divorced fathers generally don't enjoy higher living standards than mothers; that the lack of opportunity to be regularly involved in their children's lives is a source of severe emotional pain for many of these men, and that many are at least sometimes denied court-ordered access to their children.

Like all advocacy groups, the fathers' rights movement can be somewhat simplistic in its analysis of the problems and in its proposed solutions (a presumption of joint custody unless one parent is unfit; an emphasis on mediation instead of litigation). Nevertheless, there is no question that the movement is raising real issues that affect millions of families.

But is it anti-woman?

There is no question that some of the men in the fathers' rights movement are every bit the woman haters feminists make them out to be -- whether because a nasty divorce left a chip on their shoulder or because of personal propensities. Virtually every woman in the movement has had occasional run-ins with these types. (McNeely recalls being told by a man at a fathers' conference that she ought to be staying home with her children, not going to law school.)

And yet many women in the movement strongly believe that what they are doing is simply the other half of the feminist quest for equality between the sexes. "As women have been struggling to get equality in the workplace, men are struggling to get equality in the home," says matrimonial lawyer Friedman.

These women talk about the stigma faced by noncustodial mothers because of the assumption that a woman would have to be a really terrible mother to lose custody -- or, worse yet, to willingly give up her children. They say that joint custody, just like equal parenting during marriage, can free women to be more successful outside the home.

In her essay "The Maternal Bond," published in the American Journal of Family Law in 1995, Mitchell argues that the belief in the supremacy of the mother-child bond -- which underlies the legal system's anti-father bias, and which, she believes, is being perpetuated by feminist "maternalists" who back mothers in the divorce and custody wars -- also forces women to take on the sole burden of child rearing and holds them back from career achievement and economic self-sufficiency.

McNeely says that in her writings, she is careful to balance "pro-father" points with "pro-woman" ones -- for instance, that the bias many mothers encounter in the workplace, based on the assumption that motherhood makes them less committed to their jobs, is the flip side of the bias fathers encounter in court.

Perhaps the most fascinating example of the intersection between feminism and fathers' rights is Karen De Crow, an attorney who was president of the National Organization for Women from 1974 to 1977 and is now the head of the Greater Syracuse chapter of NOW. In the early 1980s, De Crow began to actively champion joint custody and equal rights for fathers, speaking at fathers' rights conferences and joining the board of the Children's Rights Council.

She stresses that, as she wrote in 1994, "shared parenting is great for women, giving time and opportunity for female parents to pursue education, training, jobs, careers, professions and leisure." (De Crow is clearly reluctant to acknowledge the degree to which the opposite view is currently dominant in NOW. When asked about the organization's 1999 anti-fathers' rights resolution, she says that she has heard about it but has not read it and therefore cannot comment -- and then suggests, rather improbably, that it might have been passed "at the 11th hour" by a handful of delegates.)

There is, perhaps, a touch of arrogance in the rhetoric of pro-fathers' rights feminists who want to liberate divorced women from the burden of sole custody of their children regardless of what these women themselves may want. However, some studies show that mothers who have joint custody, even if they initially opposed this arrangement, are equally or more satisfied with their situation than sole custodial mothers. And besides, there is more than a touch of arrogance in suggesting that what women want is the only thing that matters.

One could see the women in the fathers' rights movement as traitors to their sex and unwitting tools of the patriarchy. One could try to psychoanalyze them and attribute their commitment to hidden self-hatred or the desire to please men. Or, maybe, one could see them as a model for a new kind of activism on the gender front -- the kind that promises to bridge the gap between men and women in the pursuit of equality.

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