ABSTRACT
In common parlance, gender issues often slide inexorably into women's issues and are in that way designated as marginal, outside the concerns and lives of ordinary people. This chapter begins to look at some of the institutions, chiefly those associated with work and family, and sketches the areas of tension. The increasing public presence of the fathers' rights movement is a phenomenon of the nineties. While it emerged in Australia during the 1970s, in the 1990s it has become an effective and vigorous pressure group and has succeeded in capturing the sympathy of government. The chapter introduces a key unifying conception, that of the 'unencumbered citizen', and argues that the unencumbered citizen, the unspoken given in political and economic theorising, continues to have a profound impact upon the ways in which our lives are constructed: as men and women, as workers, as parents and as citizens.
