Shows that attention to child welfare today is not as consistent as we might assume. [Mason's] evidence reveals a system struggling to find a clear path through conflicting political and social interests while the best interests of the child are often ignored.... But what are the best interests of the child? How should courts proceed when children's interests conflict with those of their parents or even of the state?... Such questions become intractable in a society that has lost all consensus on what family, parenthood, and childhood mean. Mason has no easy answers, but her history of custody law holds a mirror up to a society that sorely needs to look honestly at its treatment of children.

Mary Ann Mason is Associate Professor of Law and Social Welfare at the School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Equality Trap, coauthor of Why Kids Lie, and coeditor of Debating Children's Lives: Current Controversies on Children and Adolescents.

Introduction
1. Fathers/Masters: Children/Servants: Child Custody in the Colonial Era
2. From Fathers' Rights to Mothers' Love: The Transformation of Child Custody Law in the First Century of the New Republic, 1790-1890
3. The State as Superparent: The Progressive Era, 1890-1920
4. In the Best Interest of the Child? 1960-1990
5. The Ascendancy of the Social Sciences