New fathers, old mothers? Parenthood between equality and difference

Abstract

This article presents a discourse analysis of recent legislative changes in the fields of child custody and child support in Switzerland. We identified four interpretative repertoires in these documents: Equality of women and men, child’s welfare, inequality of mothers and fathers and individual familial solutions. Between these repertoires, we identified several ideological dilemmas: Equality of women and men directly contradicts the inequality of mothers and fathers, while the principle of governmental non-intervention into the private sphere of the family is being questioned by the high importance attributed to the child’s welfare. This discourse analysis shows that the widely discussed ideal of the equality of women and men does not hold up against the hidden subtext of the inequality of mothers and fathers. The dilemma is solved by declaring the implementation of the ideal of equality as an individual problem. In this reading, mother and child are still connected in an essentialist way, while the image of the father undergoes marginal changes only.