feminism and family

The Place of Feminism in Family StudiesAuthor(s): Linda Thompson and Alexis J. WalkerReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 847-865Published by: National Council on Family RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/353407 .Accessed: 25/06/2012 06:04

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LINDA THOMPSON University of Wisconsin-Madison

ALEXIS J. WALKER Oregon State University*

The Place of Feminism in Family Studies

We address the question: What is the place of feminism in family studies? We focus on family studies scholarship published between 1984 and 1993 in three journals, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Family Relations, and Journal of Family Issues. We characterize feminist scholarship with five themes: (a) social construction of gender as a central concept, (b) commitment to gender equality and social change, (c) feminist practice, (d) centrality of women's lives and experiences, and (e) questioning "the family." In analyzing the place of feminism in family studies, we focus on challenges, contradictions, tensions, and themes. Within each of the themes, we highlight a strong core of feminist scholarship and suggest directions for future work. We conclude that the discipline has created a legitimate place for feminism, but this place often is at the margins offamily scholarship rather than the center. It is only in the domain of housework that feminism has moved to the center. In most domains, authors consider gender to be irrelevant to their understanding offamily life.

In this article, we ask the question: What is the place of feminism in family studies? Scholars

Child and Family Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.

*Human Development and Family Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331.

Key Words: family studies, feminism, gender.

often take stock of their discipline. They search for what is there and what is missing, what con-

cepts, theories, questions, and methods are at the center and margins, and what directions for future

scholarship hold the most promise. Taking stock is an essential practice for feminist scholars who want to work at the center, yet retain the right to be critical, of their discipline. They need to know how they fit into the discipline as a whole. Family scholars who do not think of themselves as feminist ought to know how feminism shapes their

discipline, and how their discipline accommo- dates and resists the contributions of feminism.

Ten years ago, we wrote a "state of the field" article about feminism and family studies (Walker & Thompson, 1984). We searched for evidence of feminism in family studies journals, coded articles as feminist or not feminist, and charted the

progress of feminism with a tally. We also considered whether feminism was compatible with positivist social science. A decade later, we want- ed to revisit feminism and family studies, but the

landscape had changed so much that we could not use the same markers to find our way. We had to find new ways to approach the place of feminism in family studies.

The field of family studies is changing, feminism is changing, and both of us, as scholars, are changing. We are in the midst of a transformation. In the middle of such change, it is hard to find the place of feminism in family studies. In 1984, we thought we could chart the progress of feminism in family studies with categories, count- ing, and strong conclusions. A decade later, we

Journal of Marriage and the Family 57 (November 1995): 847-865 847

Journal of Marriage and the Family

find it useful to think about challenges, contradictions, tensions, and themes. In the midst of transformation, we cannot make straightforward statements about whether feminism is at the center or margins of family studies. Our answer depends on where we stand, at a particular moment, and where we look.

Family studies is moving into an era in which

many scholars recognize the contextualism of our knowledge (Doherty, Boss, LaRossa, Schumm, & Steinmetz, 1993). Scholars who advocate a contextual approach emphasize diversity among families and consider how their knowledge of families is limited by their own values and context. As Doherty and his colleagues (1993) noted, feminism helped push family studies toward this postpositivist stance. They also noted that journals may be the last stronghold of positivism in family studies, the most resistant to change.

At the same time, feminism is changing. It is opening up to a wide range of ways to be a feminist and to do feminist scholarship. The boundaries between scholarship that is feminist and scholarship that is not feminist are blurred, making it perilous to classify a given piece of work. The category of feminism changes historically, and what we do to make a feminist contribution to scholarship changes. Rapping (1994) noted that, at one time, feminists could talk of "we" and "them." "We" meant a common feminist voice who spoke for the good of women, and "them" meant a hostile and ignorant world. Those days are gone. It is no longer we and them, and there is no common feminist voice about how to study and accomplish what is "good for women," including women in families. Family studies and feminism are more diverse and inclusive in 1995 than they were a decade ago. Diversity and inclu- siveness create new tensions in our discipline and make it difficult to draw unequivocal conclusions about the place of feminism in family studies.

How, then, did we go about analyzing the place of feminism in family studies for the present article? We approached the question in a spirit of diversity and inclusion. Between the two of us, we considered every article published in Journal of Marriage and the Family (JMF), Family Rela- tions (FR), and Journal of Family Issues (JFI) in the decade spanning 1984 to 1993. We also include as examples feminist articles that appeared more recently. The three journals are leading journals in the field of family studies. They cover basic and applied research, policy, and practice. They provide an outlet for a substantial portion of

family scholarship. From the diverse work that appeared in the journals, we created themes of feminist scholarship. Some journal articles serve many themes; others just one. Each theme pre- sents unique challenges to feminism in family studies. We illustrate each theme with examples from family studies journals. We also note tensions between feminism and mainstream scholarship.

Osmond and Thorne (1993) offered five central themes to feminist scholarship in family life: (a) social construction of gender as a central concept, (b) attention to sociohistorical context in the analysis of gender, (c) commitment to gender equality and social change, (d) centrality of women's experiences, and (e) questions regarding unitary notions of "the family." We drew on these themes to organize the feminist scholarship in

family studies journals. We folded the first two themes into one on the social construction of gender, and we added a theme on feminist practice. Within these themes, we created narrower themes based on the scholarship we reviewed. We worked and reworked the organizational scheme until we found a place for every version of feminist scholarship we found in the journals we reviewed.

THEMES OF FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP IN FAMILY

STUDIES JOURNALS

Social Construction of Gender as a Central Concept

Feminist scholarship takes the social construction of gender as a central concept (Osmond & Thome, 1993). Gender is constructed at all levels of social life. To analyze the social construction of gender requires that feminists move beyond gender as a characteristic of individuals. Femi- nists examine the structural, cultural, historical, and interpersonal conditions that create distinctions and perpetuate power relations between women and men. Within this broad theme, we consider four kinds of feminist scholarship: (a) overriding issues in conceptualizing the social construction of gender in family life, (b) immediate structural and cultural contexts for the social construction of gender in families, (c) larger sociohistorical contexts for the social construction of gender, and (d) social construction of gender through women's work in and for families. We also consider whether social role approaches to gender are compatible with feminism.

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Feminism in Family Studies

Conceptualizing gender in family life. There were several articles published in the past decade whose main purpose was to move our thinking about gender away from gender differences, functionalist gender roles, and separate spheres for women and men. Readers who want a review of these issues should consult Ferree (1990). Al- though the authors may illustrate their points with a particular substantive area, their purpose is broad-to change thinking about gender in family life across contexts and content areas, to create a

gender perspective on family life (Chow & Berheide, 1988; Ferree, 1990; Hare-Mustin, 1988; Lopata, 1993; Thompson, 1993). The authors draw heavily on feminist scholarship across disci-

plines; they bring feminism to family studies. Collectively, the authors build a feminist literature within mainstream family studies journals. Feminist authors can assume some prior knowledge about feminism; we do not have to repeat its central themes and assumptions every time we write. We no longer have to spend half of our space explaining our critical stance to prevailing approaches. Feminism, with its notion of the social construction of gender, is now a legitimate perspective.

In the articles we reviewed, Ferree's (1990) decade review of feminism and family research is at the center of scholarship on gender in family life. In her conclusion, Ferree summarized the gender perspective in this way:

The new gender perspective has shifted emphasis away from socialization and toward processes of categorization and stratification. Gender models also explicitly theorize the connection between structural and ideological levels of analysis. The family, as a cultural system of obligation, a "tangle of love and domination," is distinguished from the household, a locus of labor and economic struggle. Neither families nor households can be conceptualized as separate or solidary "spheres" of distinctive relationships; both family and household are ever more firmly situated in their specific historical context, in which they take on diverse forms and significance. Race and class are understood as significant structural features underlying the diversity of family forms .... The feminist perspective redefines families as arenas of gender and generational struggles, crucibles of caring and conflict, where claims for an identity are rooted, and separateness and solidarity are con- tinually created and contested. (pp. 879-880)

The social construction of gender moves family scholars beyond thinking of gender as an indi-

vidual property. There are a variety of ways that feminist scholars accomplish this purpose. Be- cause the social construction of gender takes place at all levels of social life, it is ideal to attend to multiple levels. This complexity, however, is daunting. Even if a particular feminist scholar cannot attend to all levels of social life, feminists collectively can build a comprehensive approach to gender.

Immediate structural and cultural contexts. To move beyond gender as an individual property, many feminist scholars focus on the structural and cultural conditions of the immediate context. Microstructural approaches focus on situational constraints and opportunities that shape the enact- ment of gender in families (Peterson & Gerson, 1992; Risman, 1986; Risman & Park, 1988). Pe- terson and Gerson (1992), for example, used a social-structural approach to study child care arrangements. They moved beyond a gender difference approach to the structural bases underlying gender differences. They asked what structural conditions in the immediate situation encourage men to take on child care responsibility and women to relinquish it. They argued that men take on responsibility for child care only when the demands of household labor are great and women are unavailable. Peterson and Gerson also looked at structural opportunity in the workplace as a source of situational constraints on child care arrangements. The most extreme microstructural approaches assume that, if women and men are in the same situation, individual gender differences disappear (Risman, 1986; Voydanoff & Donnelly, 1989).

Other feminist scholars focus on family relationships as cultures in which gender is created symbolically through everyday interaction (An- drews & Brewin, 1990; Blaisure & Allen, 1995; Thompson, 1991; Wolf-Smith & LaRossa, 1992). For the most part, scholars focus on how women and men in marriage create gender relations day by day. Thompson (1991), for example, considered how couples create a private culture in which women do most of the family work but see this lopsided arrangement as fair. Women sense an in- justice if they lack some outcome they desire, compare themselves with others who are better off than they are, and believe there is no acceptable justification for being deprived of desired outcomes. The everyday relations of women and men in marriage often undermine these conditions. In many couples, the desired outcome for

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women is appreciation rather than equality. Women compare themselves with other women, rather than with their husbands, when they think about what is fair. Compared with other husbands, their husbands do not seem so bad, even if

they do little around the house. Men get more credit than women for family provision through wage work, and women get little credit for family work. This undermines women's'sense of entitle- ment to service and solace at home. In many couples, women and men collude to accept men's justifications for not doing family work (e.g., he works hard at his job, he was not brought up to do housework, his standards for cleanliness are low). The justifications would not work for women. It is through the immediate cultural context of mar-

riage that couples create gender and gender in-

equality. Feminist scholars who focus on the structural

and symbolic conditions of the immediate situation tend to acknowledge the broader context. For example, they may note how structural opportunities in the immediate workplace reflect gender stratification in the larger society, or how the private culture of marriage reflects broader cultural ideologies.

Larger sociohistorical contexts. Many feminist scholars insist that gender and gender relations should be analyzed within their sociohistorical context. This analysis pushes scholars beyond individuals and their interpersonal relations (Os- mond & Thorne, 1993). In the journal articles we reviewed, we found feminist scholarship that places the social construction of gender and gender relations in families within the following contexts: military life (Kohen, 1984; Mederer & Weinstein, 1992), neighborhood impoverishment (Young & Gately, 1988), kinship and social network structures (Gerstel, 1988; Isvan, 1991; Mi- lardo, 1987; Williams, 1989; Wolf, 1988), culture of day care (Woodhouse, 1988), Orthodox Ju- daism (Kaufman, 1985), service economy (Oropesa, 1993), historical era (Allen & Pickett, 1987; Atkinson & Blackwelder, 1993; LaRossa & Reitzes, 1993), and gender stratification (Blum- berg, 1988; Chafetz, 1988; Coleman, 1988; Collins, 1988; Huber, 1988). Allen and Pickett's (1987) article on family careers of lifelong single women provides a wonderful example of gender embedded in sociohistorical context. Using a family life course perspective, the authors show how hardships of the Great Depression and widespread familistic ideology among working-

class immigrant families came together with the needs of particular families to shape women's lives. The confluence of these conditions shape women's caretaking responsibilities and create situations in which some women marry, some women delay marriage, and other women do not

marry at all. Allen and Pickett's analysis takes gender beyond individuals and their interpersonal relations.

Women's work in and for families. One topic stands out from the others in its conceptual progress-the social construction of gender through women's work. Some articles in this category overlap with other themes, but we cluster these articles together so their contribution will not be overlooked. Part of the feminist agenda is to rethink family concepts in new ways. There ex- ists in the family studies journals a strong core literature rethinking women's work. What is novel about the research in this section is that each article successfully combines a data-based research project with the centrality of women's experiences and the social construction of gender. Other feminist authors accomplish this feat as well, but what is noteworthy in this case is the number of articles in the same topic area.

This scholarship includes rethinking the notion of family and domestic work (Dressel & Clark, 1990; Erickson, 1993; Gerstel & Gallagher, 1993; Mederer, 1993). Mederer's (1993) research is ex-

emplary in its rethinking of family work. She pushed thinking beyond household labor captured by time and task. She distinguished between task accomplishment and management of family work. She expanded the conceptualization of family work to encompass creation of a household in which family members are cared for. Mederer categorized housework into types of caring (caring for home, family members, and transactional matters) and considered perceptions of fairness and conflict about housework allocation. She linked her conceptualization of family work to gender stratification in society. In her artful rethinking of family work, Mederer captured the complexity of household labor, and she placed it within a consideration of gender at various levels of analysis (gender identity, conflict among family members, and gender inequality in society). Mederer went beyond conceptualization to mea- sure allocation of family work in new ways. This research should become the new standard by which scholarship on family work is judged.

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The scholarship on women's work in and for families includes rethinking wage work by defin- ing family provision and breadwinning from the vantage point of women (Fassinger, 1989; Hood, 1986; Loscocco & Leicht, 1993; Potuchek, 1992). Similar to Mederer's scholarship on family work, Potuchek's (1992) research set a new standard for scholarship on women's breadwinning. Drawing on the work of Ferree (1990), Potuchek succeed- ed in rethinking women's breadwinning from a gender perspective. Breadwinning is not the same as labor force participation. Breadwinning is not just an activity, but a contested, negotiated, and renegotiated meaning system that defines the boundaries of gender. Building on the work of Hood (1986), Potuchek considered variation in three dimensions of the meaning of breadwinning: (a) a woman's employment as something she thinks of as a contribution to the financial support of her family, (b) a woman's definition of her job as central to family life, and (c) a woman's normative expectations about the gender boundaries of breadwinning. Based on the three dimensions, Potuckek generated a typology of women's orientations to breadwinning: employed homemakers, co-breadwinners, helpers, supplementary providers, reluctant traditionals, reluctant providers, family-centered workers, and committed workers. Only co-breadwinners (15% of employed wives) redefine breadwinning as a shared, nongendered activity. Potuchek went beyond a description of the diversity of women's breadwinning orientations to demonstrate the power of situational conditions to account for differences in breadwinning orientation.

We note that, with rare exception (Isvan, 1991; Kranichfeld, 1987; Williams, 1989), there is no feminist scholarship in family studies journals that focuses on power. For the most part, concern with power is contained within the literature on division of labor and economic theory (Blumberg, 1988; Chafetz, 1988; Coleman, 1988; Huber, 1988; Wolf, 1988). All of these articles appeared in a special issue of JFI on gender stratification, economy, and family. Unlike a decade before, there was no decade review article on power in 1990. Analysis of power is central both to feminism and to understanding gender relations in families (Osmond & Thorne, 1993). Feminist scholars in family studies need to reclaim and elaborate this essential area of study.

Social role approaches to gender. Feminists who argue for the social construction of gender tend to

be highly critical of gender role approaches (Fer- ree, 1990). Although it was rare in the articles we reviewed, the analysis of gender roles can contribute to our understanding of the social construction of gender in families. We note, for example, exemplary work on the roles of mother (Elman & Gilbert, 1984; Hock, Gnezda, & McBride, 1984) and father (Cohen, 1987). Draw- ing on Komarovsky (1992), we consider a gender role approach compatible with the social construction of gender if it fulfills any of the following criteria: (a) The author uses role analysis to locate conflict, discontinuity, or contradictions between structure and culture (e.g., contradictions between gender norms and structural demands), (b) the author uses role as a conceptual link between actual behavior in interaction and gender norms and structures at a broader level (i.e., role as a link between cultural ideology and everyday interaction), (c) the author examines the social interaction involved in creating gender roles, or (d) the author acknowledges that women's and men's roles are not created equally (i.e., gender roles serve and perpetuate the power advantage of men over women).

Overall, functionalist approaches to gender, which are incompatible with the above themes, prevail in the journal articles we reviewed. Most often, these approaches appear as (a) sex role ideology measured as a coherent package of personal attitudes or expectations, and (b) sex as an individual characteristic and a variable in data analysis, with no attention to gender as a concept or to the context of gender differences. Only feminist scholars push the analysis of gender beyond gender as an individual property. There is no paradigm shift in mainstream scholarship toward the social construction of gender.

Commitment to Gender Equality and Social Change

Feminists advocate change in women's subordi- nation and disadvantage in families. In the journal articles we reviewed, many feminist scholars were clear about their value commitments. They stated openly that women are often disadvantaged in family life, men's interests are served more often than women's interests, and gender inequality is unacceptable. The authors stated openly that the purpose of their scholarship was to promote gender equality and the well-being of women in families. Some feminist authors combined this purpose with the social construction of gender.

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We place their work in the theme of gender as a central concept. In the theme of commitment to gender equality and social change, we place work that is feminist in purpose but does not give much attention to the conceptualization of gender. For the most part, this feminist scholarship focuses on two areas in family studies: (a) gendered division of labor and (b) advocacy for policies and programs responsive to women's needs and interests. Aside from these two areas, in a small number of articles, the authors stated clearly that men's abuse of women in families is unacceptable and must stop. As we note below, the prevailing approach to family violence in the journals we reviewed is gender neutral.

Gendered division of labor. Above, in the theme of the social construction of gender, we noted some of the feminist scholarship on the division of labor. In that theme, the authors contribute to our understanding of both the social construction of gender and the distribution of housework and child care. The feminist scholarship we focus on now is noteworthy because, in each case, the authors are outspoken in their commitment to gender equality. The authors openly stated that women and girls do more than their share of housework in families and that this situation is unacceptable. The goal of gender equality was evident throughout their written work. The authors considered the interests of and outcomes for women, and they searched for ways to make the division of housework less exploitive (Blair & Johnson, 1992; Firestone & Shelton, 1988; McHale & Crouter, 1992; Rachlin, 1987). Many of the authors drew on the insights offered by Ferree (1990), demonstrating the consolidation of feminist thinking and scholarship in this area. This theme in feminist scholarship is strong. Both feminist language and the number of articles grew as the decade between 1984 and 1993 unfolded.

Demo and Acock (1993) showed that, regard- less of family type and women's employment, women do 2 or 3 times more housework than their husbands or cohabiting men partners. Bray- field (1992) reported that unemployed men with wage-working wives do 40% of domestic work. Brayfield asked, if the overall division of labor is fair, shouldn't unemployed men with working wives do more than 40%? Benin and Edwards (1990) considered chores done by adolescents in two-earner and one-earner families. They found that the relative exploitation of girls compared with boys is the worst in families where both par-

ents work full-time. In these families, daughters spend 71/2 hours more per week on housework than sons, whereas daughters in single-earner or part-time two-earner families spend only /2 hour more per week than sons. Their findings challenge the notion that children who grow up in families where both parents work full-time participate in and are prepared for an egalitarian division of labor.

Advocacy for women. Several feminist scholars passionately argued for policies and programs responsive to women's needs and interests. In some cases, the authors demonstrated the inherent un- fairness of gender-neutral policies. For example, gender-neutral policies on parental leave (Haas, 1990) and child support (Christensen, Dahl, & Rettig, 1990) disadvantage women. Some authors focused on the need for reliable, convenient child care that promotes the welfare of both wage- working mothers and their children (Auerbach, 1990; Floge, 1985). Campbell and Moen (1992) argued for programs and policies that empower and serve employed single mothers. Scanzoni and Arnett (1987) focused on programs and policies that promote gender equality and women's autonomy but, at the same time, are sensitive to the needs and interests of rural women and girls. Zimmerman (1992) advocated beyond a focus on women as she called for policies that distribute well-being fairly across gender, race, and class. Rueschemeyer (1988), Haas (1986, 1990), and Bohen (1984) expanded scholars' thinking beyond the United States-to the German Demo- cratic Republic, Sweden, and Europe-to understand why, even when state-supported programs and policies promote gender equality, gender practices and inequalities persist in the mingling of work and family life. Ryan and Plutzer (1989) challenged the assumption of couple harmony that undergirds policies requiring notification of husbands for abortions. Kohen (1984) demonstrated how the organization of military life is in- sensitive to the needs and interests of military wives, rendering women dependent and disadvantaged.

In this theme of feminist scholarship, the authors straightforwardly stated that women are disadvantaged compared with men, although there is diversity in their disadvantage. Collectively, they argued that policies and programs that serve the interests of men or purport to be gender neutral are not responsive to the interests and needs of women. They suggested policies and programs

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that are sensitive to women's needs and interests-especially women's efforts to combine wage work and family life. The authors also discussed the complexities and difficulties of social change.

Violence against women. In the journals we reviewed, we found only a handful of articles in the decade between 1984 and 1993 in which authors stated clearly that men's abuse of women in families is unacceptable and must stop (Berk, Newton, & Berk, 1986; Edleson & Brygger, 1986; Edleson, Eisidovits, & Guttmann, 1985; Rosen & Stith, 1993). Edleson and his coauthors, for example, argued that prevailing approaches either excuse men's violence or fail to understand its complexity. They reminded readers repeatedly that woman battering is a sociocultural phenomenon and prob- lem, and that violence must not be stripped from its situational and temporal context. They did not lose sight of women's terror and danger.

Rosen and Stith (1993) offered a threefold intervention strategy for treating women in violent dating relationships: (a) help the woman ensure her safety (e.g., by developing a safety plan), (b) help her get a broader perspective on her situation (e.g., by looking beyond the relationship and con- sidering her options), and (c) help her create appropriate boundaries between herself, her partner, and outside support (e.g., by suggesting she take a vacation from her boyfriend and reconnect with friends and family). For Rosen and Stith, violence against women is unacceptable, and they aimed each intervention strategy at protecting and promoting women's welfare.

In the family violence scholarship we reviewed, there was a prevailing gender-neutral focus on the transmission of violence across gen- erations and the shared participation of women and men in couple violence. These approaches are grounded in systems theory and, except for Rosen and Stith (1993), the authors did not use systems theory to accommodate inequalities by gender and generation or to attend to the larger context of family violence (Whitchurch & Constantine, 1993). The prevailing approach is to treat battered husbands and battered wives as though they are the same. More often than not, scholars who use this approach ignore gender or look at sex differences in the frequency of violent acts. Feminists do not deny that women can be violent, but they insist that the context and outcome of violence are not the same for women and men (Emery & Lloyd, 1994; Lloyd, 1991; Renzetti, 1989).

Even when researchers focus on men's violence against women, they tend to ignore the gendered context in which violence occurs, and they fail to recognize gender inequality or to mention the unacceptability of violence against women. They emphasize, instead, the prevailing themes regarding men's abuse of women (Edleson et al., 1985): a history of domestic violence in child- hood, use and abuse of alcohol and drugs, psychological disturbance and other personal charac- teristics, social class, and details of violent events (e.g., onset, frequency, and severity of violence). In the scholarship we reviewed, there was no feminist paradigm shift in how scholars think about domestic violence.

Recently, however, two articles (Gilgun, 1995; Johnson, 1995) appeared in JMF that make important contributions to a feminist approach to violence. Johnson (1995) distinguished between two forms of violence: patriarchal terrorism and common couple violence. Patriarchal terrorism is an escalating pattern of violence by husbands at- tempting to exercise control over their wives, violence being only one of the ways in which control is exerted. Other modes of control are isolation, threats, and economic dependence. Patriarchal terrorism is uncovered in studies of women at sites where victims seek help (e.g., women's shelters, hospital emergency rooms, and law enforce- ment agencies.) Common couple violence is an occasional occurrence of mostly minor forms per- petuated by both wives and husbands in response to everyday conflicts. It is the type of violence uncovered through national surveys yielding quantitative data.

Johnson's (1995) rethinking of the forms of violence against women was provoked by the following pairs of contradictory conclusions in exist- ing literature: (a) Wives more often are victims of their husbands' abuse than the other way around, and wives are as likely to hit their husbands as they are to be hit by them; (b) the average number of intracouple incidents can be staggeringly high, and few incidents of marital violence occur within the same couple in any year; and (c) marital violence escalates to ever more severe forms, and it remains minor in form and may even de-escalate. Johnson's insightful rendering explained these discrepancies by distinguishing between patriarchal terrorism and common couple violence and demonstrating the impact of sampling on results. In each case, the first conclusion reflects patriarchal terrorism revealed by battered women who seek help, and the second conclusion reflects

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common couple violence revealed by national surveys.

Johnson (1995) contributed to our understanding of violence against women in other ways: He noted that his term patriarchal terrorism "has the

advantage of keeping the focus on the perpetrator and of keeping our attention on the systematic, in- tentional nature of this form of violence ... [as well as its] historical and cultural roots" (p. 284). Johnson's conceptualization clarifies the distinction between rates of couple violence and patterns of exercising control, thus helping to account for the relatively low rates of serious and frequent violence found in national surveys. As Johnson

pointed out, a husband may terrorize his partner without using violence. Johnson described ways researchers might uncover the motivations behind each form of violence, and he suggested a variety of policies, programs, and theories to address both forms of violence against women.

Gilgun (1995) attended to the moral discourse of incest. She demonstrated that, despite contradictions inherent in their own statements and between their behavior and sociocultural mores, incest perpetrators define their acts as love and care. Although they coerce children to cooperate, continue when children ask them to stop, and help others to believe that children who disclose incest are lying, perpetrators are unreflective of their abuse of power, often believing that the "love" in their incestual relationship is mutual. Although most perpetrators know that incest is wrong (e.g., they take pains to avoid discovery), they take advantage of children who are encumbered by age, dependence, and gender (most are girls), selfishly concentrating on their own pleasure. Gilgun noted similarities among incest perpetrators, therapists who perpetrate sexual relationships on their clients, and men who rape women. The uncaring talk and conduct of incest perpetrators are part of wider cultural practices that support violence against women. Gilgun placed her findings within the broader cultural context, acknowledged inequalities of gender and generation, and placed responsibility for incest with perpetrators, where it belongs.

We are surprised by the prevalence of a gender-neutral approach to domestic violence, but heartened by recent contributions by Johnson (1995) and Gilgun (1995). Few articles on domestic violence contained clear statements about gender inequality as a context for domestic violence or about the need for social change. Violence against women is a topic feminists brought to

family studies, but, in the articles we reviewed, feminist approaches to violence did not prevail. With the recent interpretation of the literature by Johnson (1995), we hope for a paradigm shift in how family scholars think about violence against women.

Feminist Practice

Feminists struggle in many ways to build feminist

praxis-that is, to put their beliefs into action. In the theme of commitment to gender equality and social change, we considered scholarship focused on research, policies, and programs promoting gender equality and the well-being of women. In the theme of feminist practice, we focus on how feminists put their beliefs into action day by day. With the exception of one article on feminist methodology (Thompson, 1992), this theme focuses on feminist teaching. Nearly all of this literature focuses on teaching in universities. In the

journals we reviewed, there is no similar literature on feminist practice in other areas-for example, the everyday practice of feminist beliefs by thera-

pists, activists, researchers (see Sollie & Leslie, 1994), or teachers in settings other than universities (see MacDermid, Jurich, Myers-Walls, & Pelo, 1992). Feminists who practice divorce me- diation, advocacy, therapy, and community education need to build a scholarship within family studies journals. We recognize that many family scholars publish their work on feminist practice in other journals (e.g., feminist and family therapy journals).

Feminist pedagogy. This literature accomplishes several purposes: It brings the multidisciplinary literature on feminist pedagogy to teachers of

family studies; it provides specific strategies for practicing feminism in the classroom; and it chronicles the everyday struggles of feminists as they put their beliefs into action as teachers, high- lighting the intimate connections among educational processes, content, and participants (Mac- Dermid et al., 1992). This scholarship embraces feminist criteria for the selection of textbooks (Meyer & Rosenblatt, 1987) and feminist visions for family life education (Allen & Baber, 1992). The authors focus on strategies for teaching from a feminist perspective (MacDermid et al., 1992; Marks, 1995), teaching about diversity (Thomp- son, 1995; Walker, 1993), uncovering heterosexu- al privilege (Allen, 1995), training family therapists (Leslie & Clossick, 1992), and teaching

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family studies courses in general (Allen, 1988; Allen & Farnsworth, 1993).

We describe the following exemplary articles as an overview of the themes and challenges of feminist teaching. Allen's (1988) article initiated a literature on feminist teaching strategies for family studies. In it, she brought together the scholarship on feminist pedagogy, the content of family studies courses, and her own experiences as a feminist teacher. Allen described her orientation as a feminist teacher:

Feminism gives new focus to the educational values of diversity, cooperation, interaction, and equality. Collectively, they are redefined by the feminist assumption that the knower cannot be separated from the known or from the process by which knowledge is gathered. (p. 32)

Allen offered ways to integrate feminism into family studies courses: (a) self-disclosure to show how the personal is political-a strategy she pur- sued in later work (Allen, 1995), (b) diverse as- signments to give value to personal experience, and (c) readings and resources to incorporate missing voices.

Drawing on the literature on feminist family therapy and their own experiences as feminist teacher and student, Leslie and Clossick (1992) discussed feminist approaches to training family therapists. They offer teaching objectives and strategies for each of the following tenets of feminist family therapy: examination of the values of client, therapist, and therapeutic model; appreciation of the legal, economic, and social context in which the client lives; recognition of individual needs, choices, and responsibility within families; integration of women's experiences into family studies courses; and recognition and minimization of power inequities in therapy and in the classroom. Leslie and Clossick concluded their article with a discussion of possible "rough spots," issues and challenges of feminist teaching: (a) whether feminist material should be presented in a separate course or integrated throughout the curriculum, (b) use of the term feminist, (c) deci- sions by feminists to avoid sexist, but commonly understood, therapist terminology, (d) questioning their identity as family therapists as students come to see things from a feminist perspective, (e) blurred distinctions between therapy and advocacy when conditions contributing to a family's issue lie outside the family, (f) development of departmental tension and disruption of estab- lished practices as students learn to question the

way things are, and (g) paucity of literature on the diversity of men's gendered lives in families.

Most recently, Family Relations included several articles on feminist pedagogy (Allen, 1995; Marks, 1995; Thompson, 1995) and a commentary on feminist multicultural teaching (Lewis, 1995). Thompson (1995) offered a pedagogy of care as one way to teach a course about ethnic minority families. Her overall aim in the course is to help students care about the welfare of diverse people and their families. Thompson's teaching about ethnic minority families focuses on three essential activities of care: attentiveness, empa- thy, and responsiveness. To care means to attend to the desires and needs of ethnic minority families, understand their life conditions from their perspective, and actively respond to their needs and promote their welfare. For each activity of care, Thompson discussed pedagogical aims, challenges, and strategies. Her pedagogy of care is a detailed map for approaching the difficult ter- rain of teaching about ethnic minority families.

Marks (1995) described his goals as a feminist teacher of a gender course:

to undermine the essentialist investments that people put into gender differences; to identify how this creation of difference goes hand in hand with the perpetuation of male privilege; to foster the habit of recognizing and naming un- earned male privileges wherever we encounter them; in the service of multiculturalism, to keep sight of how sexism intersects with other systems of inequality; to decrease the moral dis- tance between my students and myself; and to offer a vision of greater wholeness. (p. 143)

Marks strives to instill in students the feminist commitment to improving everyday life. He re- jects the power inherent in the position of teacher, and turns his class over to students. In his article, he highlighted the importance of timing in pre- senting feminist content, the potential for polar- ization among students, and the need to "invite men" in as participants in the struggle.

It is imperative for feminist teachers to have a space where they can reach and lear from each other. The Feminism and Family Studies Section of the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) created a space for paper presentations on feminist pedagogy at annual conferences. As editors of Family Relations, Tim Brubaker and Mark Fine, envisioning special issues and inviting submissions, created a place for feminist teachers to publish their work. The scholarship on feminist teaching as praxis is distinctive. These are the

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only journal articles where the "I" of feminist authors-their subjectivity-strongly comes through. The articles are filled with the personal experiences of feminist women and men strug- gling to put their beliefs into action. The writing is impassioned, close-up, and lively-not distant and objective.

Methodology as feminist practice. In our 1984 article, we included a discussion of whether a scholar can be both a scientist and a feminist. Al- though we argued for making a place for a multi- tude of methods within feminist scholarship, we thought that traditional quantitative methods limited our knowledge about women and gender in families. We went so far as to code research articles using feminist methodological criteria. We coded whether the researcher (a) allowed participants any say in the kind of information they provided, (b) presented information on the uniqueness and diversity of individual experience in family life, and (c) had any direct or interpersonal contact with participants. In Osmond's (1984) commentary on our article, she called for a less rigid feminist approach to methodology in family studies.

A decade later, we are no longer tempted to code research articles by rigid feminist criteria regarding methods. This is so for two reasons. First, the scholarship on feminist methodology moved beyond a simple struggle between quantitative and qualitative methods to a more inclusive discussion of agenda, epistemology, and ethics. Readers who want a discussion of these issues should consult Thompson (1992). Second, because of the overall shift toward postpositivism, there is greater acceptance in family studies of a variety of methodologies. As we read through the scholarship of the past 10 years, we were struck by the diversity of methods within both feminist scholarship and mainstream family studies. Quali- tative research, almost invisible in recent decades (LaRossa & Wolf, 1985), now is more common in our journals and thrives within the Qualitative Family Research Network in NCFR. There is still concern about research method as feminist practice (see Sollie & Leslie, 1994), but the dialogue is open and inclusive. A decade ago we felt com- pelled to argue for an opening up of methodology, to argue for bringing interpretive methods in from the margins of feminist family studies. Now, we conclude that feminist scholars are practicing feminism and contributing to a feminist agenda through a great variety of research methods.

Centrality of Women's Lives and Experiences

A central theme in feminist scholarship in family studies is an emphasis on the life experiences of women in all their diversity (Osmond & Thorne, 1993). It is not enough simply to study women. The scholarship reviewed in this section uses women's life experiences to challenge prevailing notions about women, reclaim a part of women's lives that other scholars have neglected or distorted, change how scholars think about central concepts of family scholarship, and capture the diversity of women's family life experiences. More often than not, the feminist work we present in this section does not belabor issues of gender equality or the social construction of gender. Rather, the authors strive to see family life from the valued vantage points of women. This literature focuses almost entirely on women as mothers and daughters. Many of the authors focus on women providing care in families. Exceptions to this theme are Herbert, Silver, and Ellard's (1991) work on women's experiences of abusive relationships, Abell's (1987) study of how women think about sterilization in the context of family relationships, and Meiners and Olson's (1987) research on farm women's experiences of wage work, farm work, and housework.

Women's experiences as mothers. Hare-Mustin and Hare (1986) noted that most scholars treat mothers as context for the developing child, giv- ing little attention to motherhood and women's experiences as mothers. Feminist scholars focus on the everyday experiences of single mothers (Olson & Banyard, 1993; Richards, 1989) and mothers who care for disabled and chronically mentally ill children (Cook, 1988; Traustadottir, 1991). Rosenblum (1986) and Arditti and Mad- den-Derdich (1993) focused on noncustodial mothers. They challenged prevailing assumptions about mothers who do not have custody of their children, providing detail about the complexity and diversity of their lives and situations. Presser (1989) challenged a prevailing notion that grandmothers caring for their grandchildren is a solu- tion to the child care needs of wage-working mothers. By focusing on the lives of grandmothers who have such child care responsibilities, she shifted attention to the lives and experiences of grandmothers. This handful of feminist scholarship on women's experiences as mothers must be contrasted with a plentiful literature that blames mothers (especially their status as single mothers

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and their employment) for things that go wrong in children, marriages, and families. Of the mainstream scholarship we reviewed, we found the literature on mothers most resistant to change. We

encourage feminist scholars to focus on women's experience as mothers as part of the social construction of gender and, as reviewers of journal articles, to state clearly that mother blaming is un-

acceptable.

Women's ties with kin. Kranichfeld (1987) began with the experience of women in intergenera- tional ties to challenge the prevailing notion of power in families. Other scholars focused on mother-daughter relationships. Boyd (1989) reviewed the literature on mother-daughter relationships. Jackson and Berg-Cross (1988) focused on mother/daughter-in-law ties among African American women. Allen and Walker (1992) re- cast the care daughters provide for their older mothers as attentive love rather than the prevailing notion of care as burden. Matthews and Ros- ner (1988) considered sisters and how they nego- tiate the care of their elderly parents. Apfel and Seitz (1991) focused on adolescent mothers and their ties with their own mothers in a Black community. They challenged scholars to consider the complexity and diversity of adolescent mothers' kin ties, and of their mothering and grandmother- ing experiences. Gerstel (1988) focused on women's experiences after divorce and their ties with kin. Allen and Pickett (1987) challenged prevailing notions about lifelong single women by placing them in the context of kin responsibilities and sociohistorical conditions.

Taken collectively, the scholarship we cite above makes a unique contribution to family studies, especially to our understanding of the complex and diverse experiences of mothers, daughters, their relations with each other, and their care for others. Many of the authors prefer to let women speak for themselves and hesitate to foist their own scholarly interpretation of gender on women's lives. The most powerful feminist scholarship in this theme, however, offers a mingling of women's experiences with the social construction of gender (e.g., Allen & Pickett, 1987; Cook, 1988; Hare-Mustin & Hare, 1986; Hill & Zimmerman, 1995; Traustadottir, 1991).

Hill and Zimmerman's (1995) article on low- income African American mothers caring for children with sickle cell disease (SCD) provides a remarkable example of women's experiences and the intersection of gender and race. The authors

showed how the social construction of gender and illness, embedded in the socioeconomic conditions of African Americans, shape and constrain the lives of caregivers and their children. Hill and Zimmerman found that SCD challenges the gender expectations mothers hold for their sons, but not for their daughters. Mothers strive to protect their sons with SCD, especially from physical activities that require strength, aggressiveness, and risk. This protectiveness violates gender norms:

Sports are one of the few acceptable ways for low-income Black boys to enact their masculini- ty. Mothers of daughters with SCD, on the other hand, purposely avoid pampering and protecting their girls. Mothers trust girls to look after themselves and get on with life. Overall, mothers lav- ish more caregiving labor on their child with SCD if the child is a son rather than a daughter. Given their involvement in caregiving, mothers of sons with SCD are less likely to have jobs than mothers of daughters. Hill and Zimmerman concluded: "The protectiveness of these mothers toward their sons reflects not only the higher social value

placed on males in general, but also the growing concern over the survival of African American males in particular" (p. 50). In this exemplary study, the authors considered how mothers create caregiving strategies within the complex conditions of their, and their children's, lives. They considered outcomes for both mothers and children. Hill and Zimmerman also emphasized the centrality of gender in social life.

Rediscovery of the father. We cannot consider the scholarship on women's experiences as mothers without commenting on men as fathers. A strong theme of rediscovery of the father-or the "new" or "forgotten" father-prevails in the articles we reviewed. Some may see this scholarship as challenging conventional assumptions of men and of gender by focusing on fathers as involved, responsible, nurturant family members-qualities conventionally thought of as womanly. For the most part, however, this scholarship is not compatible with feminism. It does not use social construction of gender as a central concept, advocate gender equality and social change, help scholars rethink basic concepts, or question prevailing notions about "the family."

There are examples of feminist scholarship on fathers: Cohen's (1987) work on men as husbands and fathers, LaRossa's (1988) article on the culture and conduct of fatherhood, and Bertoia and Drakich's (1993) analysis of the fathers' rights

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movement. LaRossa's (1988) article can be considered characteristic of feminist approaches to fatherhood. LaRossa placed fatherhood in sociohistorical context and made a distinction between the culture and conduct of fatherhood. The way scholars think about fatherhood has changed over the course of the 20th century, but what fathers do has changed very little. LaRossa encouraged scholars to think about how fathers' involvement is conceptualized and measured. He pointed out, for example, that playing and being with children is not the same as being continuously accessible to and responsible for them. He did not forget that, overall, mothers, not fathers, are responsible for children. LaRossa discussed fathering and mothering as contested issues in couples. He described how couples, day by day, socially con- struct their gender relations through accounts, excuses, and justifications. He linked fathering to structural constraints on involvement in the workplace and to prevailing gender ideologies that le- gitimize the excuses and justifications fathers use to account for their unavailability to children. LaRossa used social construction of gender as a central concept, expanded thinking about father involvement, and recognized that parenting is not a gender-neutral endeavor.

Questioning "The Family"

Doherty and his coauthors (1993) noted that the critique by feminist and ethnic minority scholars pushed family studies to rethink "the family" as a unitary notion. It was not until the 1980s that mainstream family studies began to confront the issue of what "family" means, and to consider the diversity of family life without seeing the standard package (i.e., married couple with children and husband as primary provider) as being syn- onymous with "the family." Feminists came to this discussion because prevailing notions of "the family" did not match the experiences of women or consider gender inequality in families (Os- mond & Thorne, 1993). Some of the scholarship we consider in this theme does not use gender as a central concept, but all of the work is compatible with a feminist agenda of diversity and rethinking the family.

This scholarship asks new questions about families, questions that do not assume that the standard package represents the best of family life. These scholars have three messages: (a) Who or what makes family cannot be taken for granted. It is no longer acceptable, given the diversity

and pluralism of family life, to treat the married couple with children as "the family" and every- thing else as a deviation from that standard. (b) It is time to ask new questions about families in all their diversity, rather than search for the bad things that are assumed to befall any family that does not match this standard. Scholars must stop asking about the price of deviance that faces individuals, families, and society when women work outside the home, when women strive for autonomy and equality in family life, when children are in child care, when couples divorce, when parents remarry, and when women, especially mothers, live without men. These old questions are mired in implicit functionalist assumptions about "the family" (Kingsbury & Scanzoni, 1993). There are new, different questions to ask. (c) Family ideology is socially constructed, and all family scholars bring their family ideology to bear upon their work; there is no value-free family science.

Since we last reviewed the journals in 1984, there has been a remarkable change in how family scholars think about the family. The family is now an openly contested issue, and the debate in the journals is lively. This debate includes a struggle between positivist and postpositivist stances, the social construction of family ideology, and the connection between values and science. This open dialogue is most apparent in the 1993 volume of Journal of Marriage and the Family in which the editor, Marilyn Coleman, invited exchanges in response to Amato's (1993) article on children of divorce, and Popenoe's (1993) article on American family decline. Alan Booth, an earlier editor, invited a similar exchange around Beutler, Burr, Bahr, and Herrin's article (1989) on the family realm. In each case, feminist scholars were invited to comment (Allen, 1993; Jurich, 1989; Stacey, 1993). Journal editors created a space for an open dialogue that included feminist voices.

Who or what is the family? Who or what is family cannot be taken for granted. Family studies must accommodate family diversity. This message comes through in many ways. It comes through in literatures on families whose lives have been ig- nored or distorted by the prevailing notion of "the family." This includes scholarship on African American families (Crawley, 1988; Crosbie-Bur- nett & Lewis, 1993; Demos, 1990), lesbian and gay families (Bould, 1993; Hare & Richards, 1993; Schrag, 1984), stepfamilies (Coleman & Ganong, 1990), and mother-child families

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(Richards, 1989). In each case scholars have argued that we must embrace the diversity of family life rather than treat anything other than the standard package as deviant. Other scholars have ad- dressed the implications of family diversity for family life education (Allen & Baber, 1992; Arcus, 1992).

Several scholars have focused on family policy. They argued that (a) current policies are aimed at reconstructing a nostalgic family that never was (Aldous & Dumon, 1990; Brown, 1984), (b) comprehensive family policies are im-

possible given the diversity and pluralism of family life (Cherlin, 1984; Ooms, 1984), and (c) the

pessimistic concerns of conservative policy makers are not the only way to view family diversity (Bould, 1993; Rodman & Sidden, 1992; Shehan & Scanzoni, 1988).

Several scholars have suggested that the notion of two parents as a necessary condition for family should be put to rest, and they have strug- gled to redefine family (Bould, 1993; Edwards, 1987, 1991; Scanzoni, 1987; Smith, 1993). This redefinition of family also is evident in the 1993 special issue of Family Relations, edited by Mark Fine, on family diversity. But this discourse par- allels another discourse that embraces the two- parent family as the essence of family life (Beut- ler et al., 1989; Popenoe, 1993). What is different in this scholarship is that family ideology is made visible; it is not taken for granted or hidden but is contested.

Asking new questions. Once family scholars move beyond implicit functionalist notions of "the family," they are able to ask new questions about families. In the past decade, scholars have encouraged us to ask new questions about parents and children (Ambert, 1994; Darabi, Graham, Namerow, Philliber, & Varga, 1984; Demo, 1992; Haggstrom, Kanouse, & Morrison, 1986) and about parental employment (Menaghan & Parcel, 1990). Several scholars asked new questions about poor mothers. Chilman (1991) described working-poor families as hopeful (they have at least one employed member) but vulnerable (they live in poverty). She asked what we as a society can do to help these families. Harris (1991) found that paid work is widespread for adolescent mothers on public assistance and as- serted, "The question that policy makers should ask, is not why recipients are not working, but rather why work does not lift families out of welfare" (p. 514). Explaining that families participate

in the economy differently according to household structure, Rank (1986) found that married couples and, especially, single persons without children are much more likely to leave public assistance than unmarried women with children. Through his questions, Rank acknowledged the diversity of families on public assistance and the limited options single mothers have for flexibility and success in the paid labor force.

Taken together, this scholarship questions basic assumptions about families in poverty and how they get there. It challenges underlying beliefs about how poverty is connected to race, age, family structure, and wage work. This scholarship challenges simplistic solutions to the problems of poor families. It shows that poor mothers do better when they have more education, but that they need nonsexist and nonracist business and gov- ernment policies to earn a family wage. Poor mothers also deserve recognition that they are doing a good job as mothers.

Family ideology and family scholarship. Cole- man, in an editor's note (1993, pp. 5-6), set the context for invited commentaries on Amato's article:

It probably cannot be overestimated that our values color the scientific questions we ask .... Value-laden behavior has always been seen as appropriate in our personal lives, but until lately it has been seen as inappropriate in our lives as scientists. ... I decided to deliberately seek commentary from people who likely see the world of divorce from different perspectives .... [This discourse] highlights the importance of examining our own beliefs and values as well as the beliefs and values of other researchers.

Coleman made it clear that part of what is being contested is whether family studies is value free or value sustaining. It is a struggle between positivism and postpositivism as much as it is a struggle about "the family."

In their commentaries on Amato's (1993) article, Demo (1993) and Allen (1993) argued that an unacknowledged family ideology, a bias toward traditional family as the best place to rear children, permeated Amato's discussion of children of divorce. Amato responded that it was Demo and Allen whose views were distorted by ideology. From a postpositivist perspective, they are all right. All of these scholars bring their values with them to the study of families, and their values shape the kinds of questions they ask and how they generate and interpret knowledge. Amato

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yearns for a discipline of family studies free of ideology. Allen yearns for an ideologically pas- sionate family studies; she openly located her standpoint "as the mother of a young child, an ed- ucator of teachers of young children, and a feminist scholar" (p. 49). What is striking about this exchange, and the others mentioned above, is that values and ideologies about families and family studies are openly contested in a mainstream journal. Feminists brought this debate to family studies, and journal editors created a space for it. The shift in family studies toward a postpositivist stance hardly is complete, however. In the articles we reviewed, we found rare recognition that knowledge is contextual and reflects the personal biographies of researchers (see McClelland, 1995), their ideologies, and the sociohistorical moment. Judging from journal articles, feminists and other advocates of postpositivism have made little headway in getting family scholars to reflect on the context of their knowledge.

CONCLUSION

We found it much more exciting and challenging to think about the place of feminism in family studies in 1995 than it was in 1984. We sense that the discipline of family studies is in the midst of transformation, a transformation that was, in part, instigated by feminists. Although some may long for a definitive conclusion about whether feminism in family studies is at the center or margins, we cannot draw such conclusions. As we noted earlier, it depends on where we stand and where we look. After reviewing 10 years of articles in family studies journals, we offer the following conclusions and suggestions:

1. Much of the scholarship that appears in family studies journals is gender neutral. That is, women and men, girls and boys, are treated as the same and equal. We note the gender-neutral approach in the scholarship on violence, programs and policy, housework, and other areas. More often than not, scholars who use a gender-neutral approach assume that gender is not important; they assume they have "analyzed" gender if they use sex as a control or independent variable in their analyses. There is often a false neutrality about gender-neutral language and perspectives. Gender-neutral scholarship often ignores or dis- torts the interests and needs of women. The social world is not gender neutral, and it is a misrepre- sentation to think of it as such.

In addition, we reviewed article after article- whole issues of journals-where gender is not mentioned except in passing. As feminists, we cannot conceive of any area of family studies where gender is not relevant. The vast majority of family scholars conduct their research as though gender has no bearing on what they are trying to understand about families. Feminists have not yet convinced most family scholars of the importance of gender.

2. The prevailing approach to gender remains at the level of individuals, as sex-difference or sex role approaches. There are, however, a heart- ening number of feminist articles that use social construction of gender as an organizing concept. This approach to analyzing gender is now a legitimate one in mainstream family studies. It ought to be the prevailing approach. Feminist scholars can contribute to this purpose by ensuring that their own work moves beyond individuals and places gender in its immediate and broader contexts. It should be unacceptable for scholars to offer glib, decontextualized, after-the-fact inter- pretations of gender as a property of individuals.

3. There are some domains in family studies where the strength of feminist scholarship shines through. This is especially evident in the areas of family work and feminist pedagogy. In both areas, heartfelt feminist commitment is clear in the use of feminist and, at times, first-person language.

In our judgment, feminist work on housework is at the center of scholarship in this domain of family life. In the area of housework, it is acceptable for feminists to be open about their commitment to gender equality. Although we found scholarship on housework that is gender neutral, a feminist approach prevails. Whether or not authors think of themselves as feminists, they cite and attend to feminist scholarship on housework. Having said that the feminist scholarship on housework holds a place at the center in family studies, we remind readers that the contributions of feminism are missing completely from other domains. To list these domains would take up a discouraging amount of space. If feminist notions were present in a domain of family studies, we mentioned it as a theme or subtheme. If we did not mention it, then feminism has not significant- ly touched that content area in family studies journals.

The task now is to extend the spirit of the feminist scholarship on family work and pedagogy to other content areas in feminist research and prac-

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tice. We especially encourage feminist scholars to reclaim domains of family life that were brought to family studies by feminists-power and violence.

4. Questioning "the family" is now an open debate, and the debate is linked with whether the discipline can accept that knowledge of families is contextual, shaped by personal and cultural ideologies. Scholars are beginning to address the issue openly in the journals, but family studies is a long way from contextual knowledge as the prevailing approach. The editors of The Sourcebook on Fami- ly Theories and Methods (Boss, Doherty, LaRossa, Schumm, & Steinmetz, 1993) made a concerted ef- fort to rethink family studies as contextual and to incorporate feminist scholarship into family studies. The task now is to sustain and expand this spirit of diversity, openness, and context in journals. Until a contextual approach to knowledge prevails, most family scholars will believe that feminists have ideologies that taint their scholarship, while their own scholarship remains pure.

5. In 1984, to chart the progress of feminism, we searched for evidence of gender equality in the organization of the National Council on Fami- ly Relations and the editorial boards of its journals. To do so again is beyond the scope of this article, but we cannot ignore the power of professional organizations. Most feminists strongly believe in structural change as a way to achieve equality. The scholarship that appears in the journals is shaped by professional organizations. It is hard for feminists to find a comfortable place for their scholarship in journals if they do not enjoy a comfortable place within their professional organization. We noted earlier, for example, how the scholarship on feminist pedagogy in family studies was born in the Feminist and Family Studies Section of NCFR.

6. Professional organizations choose or approve journal editors. Journal editors and their associate editors are the most powerful gate keepers of family studies scholarship. In the past decade, journal editors created a space for feminist scholarship and voices in family studies journals. This is especially evident in the areas of feminist pedagogy and discourse on "the family." In both areas, journal editors of Journal of Marriage and the Family and Family Relations-through special issues, invited submissions, and invited comments on controver- sial articles-welcomed and legitimized feminist approaches to family studies. Editors also created a place for family diversity, including scholarship on ethnic minority families. Ferree's (1990) article on feminism and family studies, invited by the editor

of JMF for the decade review issue, greatly contributed to the feminist scholarship we reviewed in family studies journals.

As we reviewed journal articles, we noticed that much of the feminist scholarship in family studies appears in special issues and invited pa- pers. This suggests that there is a legitimate place for feminist scholarship in mainstream family studies journals, but the place is often separate, contained, and dependent on sympathetic reviewers and the largess of journal editors. We note that many feminist scholars gave up on publishing in family studies journals and placed their work elsewhere-for example, in feminist and family therapy journals. Although, in 1995, feminists have a place in mainstream family studies journals, that place is not always at the center nor is it necessarily secure.

We conclude, overall, that feminism has a legitimate place in family studies scholarship, but that place is often on the margins rather than at the center. We will know that feminism is at the center of family studies scholarship when the following things occur: (a) A contextual approach to knowledge is the prevailing approach so that all scholars-feminists and nonfeminists-are open about how their knowledge of families is shaped by personal and cultural ideologies; (b) the social construction of gender is central to all domains of

family life and scholarship; (c) feminist authors can count on sympathetic reviewers and journal editors, and feminist scholarship is no longer dependent on the affirmative action of special issue editors and invitations but spills over into every issue of family studies journals; and (d) nonfemi- nist authors believe they must address the rele- vance of feminist scholarship to the family issue they are studying. Feminist scholars have accom- plished great things in the past decade. We took pleasure in chronicling these accomplishments and detecting the legitimate place of feminism in family studies. Much, however, needs to be done.

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