PERSPECTIVE ON CHILD CUSTODY : Equality Comes to the Career Trap : Women fought hard to get men to put family ahead of work, so if the kids need someone home by 6, Dad will do fine.

Since the announcement that Marcia Clark’s estranged husband is seeking custody of their two children because, he claims, she isn’t home enough to take care of them, Clark, the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial, has received widespread backing from many feminists.

This knee-jerk reaction ignores several important questions that anyone concerned about the role of women--and the well-being of children--must address. Why shouldn’t a high-powered professional woman be criticized for spending little time with her kids because of the demands of her job? Why are feminists so quick to assume that any father who wants primary custody is a bad guy? And why is there such unquestioning acceptance of a culture that encourages male and female careerists alike to put all kinds of work-related demands ahead of their families?

Twenty-five years ago, when the modern feminist movement was launched, one of our targets was workaholism among men. Too many men, we argued, had sacrificed their families to their careers. It was time for them to become real parents, cutting back on their hours at the office so they could share more equally in child-rearing and enjoy some of the most precious years of their children’s lives. Sure, many working-class parents were forced to work long hours or juggle two jobs as a matter of economic necessity. But two-income professional families seemed ideally suited to achieving a balance between work and family that others couldn’t afford.

Today, however, it’s not just Dad who’s missing dinner or the school play. A lot of women who have gained access to upscale jobs in business, banking, law, medicine or the media as a result of feminist breakthroughs are now “no shows” as well. They’ve embraced long hours as the price of proving themselves and getting ahead in their chosen fields.

And unlike the General Motors assemblers who recently staged several strikes to win more time off, most ambitious professionals aren’t exactly in the forefront of the shorter work-week movement.

The moral here is that no one can have it all--nor should they want to--and they can’t have it both ways. If both partners in a marriage are unwilling to adjust their careers and/or work schedules to facilitate raising kids, perhaps they shouldn’t have any. Beyond that, there’s a range of possibilities. Both parents can make the arrangements necessary to share responsibility as equally as possible. Or one parent--it doesn’t have to be the woman--can take primary responsibility for child-rearing, while his or her spouse generates most of the income necessary to support the family. What doesn’t work on a personal level--and becomes pretty embarrassing to feminism politically--is when women pursue their careers at the expense of family life and then, at the same time, try to assert their primacy in the domestic realm based solely on their being the mother instead of the father.

Obviously, we shouldn’t sanction the double standard that’s still applied to women in the world of work. But we all ought to spend more time challenging and trying to change the employer expectations and job conditions that make it nearly impossible for parents to create a more equitable division of labor at home. Furthermore, we ought to recognize that there may be fathers for whom the issue of child care is not just a source of leverage in a custody battle. After years of much-deserved badgering, some men have finally gotten the feminist message and realize that a man can’t be a good father if he’s emotionally or physically absent from home most of the time. They’ve rejected the model of parenting based on the traditional division of labor between men and women. They genuinely want to spend more time with their kids and build the kind of relationship with them that, in the past, most mothers have had but many fathers have not.

This development is a real victory for feminism. Where a father’s concern for his kids is genuine and custody issues are not just part of a power struggle between embittered ex-mates, male claims for a greater role in post-break-up child rearing ought not to be rejected out of hand. Children need their parents--at least one of them anyway--now. Not months from now, after a trial or the next deal or the next series of work-related trips. And, more fundamentally, they need parents willing to fight the system, rather than each other, for the sake of their children.