Custody is the first book for general readers on the history of child custody, an issue that affects so many lives and a question that seems fundamental to our experience and understanding of family.

It is also an issue that has played a central, at times troubling role in the history of feminism. Lara Feigel's book probes the relationship between emancipation and care via a range of fascinating (and also heartbreaking, surprising and enraging) custody cases 1800 to the present.

This book is the story of eight women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Isabella Robinson, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O'Brien, Alice Walker, Sharon Bottoms, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of marriage in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts.

It's written as a book of stories because mothers enter courtrooms as storied figures. In custody hearings, the most intimate aspects of our lives as women and mothers get driven into the public sphere, and are subject to public interpretation. Stories are told about us, and we respond with stories of our own; judges weigh these stories against each other and come up with stories called judgments, and then send us out into the world and tell us to cooperate with our traducer in the upbringing of a vulnerable child who fears precisely the strife that has just been whipped up by the court.

Ultimately it's a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet, and in the process argues that motherhood is the shameful secret of modernity, and custody the shameful secret at the heart of motherhood. And, because questions of power for women are questions of feminism, it's a book about the tortuously ambivalent relationship between feminism and motherhood, and about feminism's equivocating commitment to emancipation and care.