The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility

Abstract

Families are at the center of a number of important and contentious public debates in the United States, as is the common impulse to link the state of families to the state of the nation. Social movements and politicians call for strengthening families as seedbeds of virtue and for promoting marriage. Efforts by same-sex couples to gain access to civil marriage trigger state and federal efforts to defend traditional marriage, even as some states have introduced new legal forms of family. Despite this keen interest in families, the place of families in our constitutional and political order has received insufficient attention.

The book's thesis is that family life has a relationship to political life: families have a place in a formative project of developing persons who are capable of responsible personal and democratic self-government. Government, families, and other institutions of civil society all play a role. Society depends upon such a formative process, but sharp points of disagreement arise about its contours. The idea of an important link between family self-government and democratic self-government has a long history, but that history includes state-sanctioned gender inequality. My approach develops this connection in a way that embraces equality, defends rights as facilitating responsibility, and supports families while respecting women's - and men's - capacities for self-government. The book carries forward the work begun by liberal feminist political theorist Susan Moller Okin, whose influential book, Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), pointed out that family and gender were neglected topics in political theory and asked how families could be schools for citizenship - or seedbeds of civic virtue - if they were frequently sites of male domination and an unjust division of labor. My book develops a framework that synthesizes liberal and feminist political and legal theory, and also finds room for civic republican ideas of government's formative responsibilities. It also critically engages with the claims of social movements centrally involved in calls to "shore up" the family, such as the civil society movement and the marriage movement.

This liberal feminist framework for thinking about the place of families has three orienting ideas: fostering capacity of persons for democratic and personal self-government; fostering equality within and among families; and fostering responsibility of individuals, rather than government, to make decisions about intimate association, forming families, reproducing, and parenting. I apply this framework to a cluster of contested issues of family law and policy: how best to support the civic role of families; welfare policy and the proper balance between personal and public responsibility for the care and support of children; governmental promotion of healthy marriage; the recognition of same-sex marriage; the extension of family rights and responsibilities to nonmarital families; the protection of constitutional rights to reproductive freedom; and sex education.

Chapters of the book:

Introduction 1. The Place of Families and Government in a Formative Project 2. Families as Seedbeds of Civic Virtue? 3. Care, Families, and Self-Government 4. Marriage Promotion, Marriage (E)quality, and Welfare Reform 5. Recognizing Same-Sex Marriage 6. Beyond Marriage? 7. Rights, (Ir)responsibility, and Reproduction 8. Teaching Sexual and Reproductive Responsibility Epilogue

Keywords: family, marriage, family law and policy, equality, sex roles, civics, civil society, feminist theory, liberal theory, welfare