Feminism and Families

Critical Policies and Changing Practices

Edited by Meg Luxton

The absence of a specific “family politics” has ceded an important political space to anti-feminist movements and weakened the capacity of the feminist movement to intervene effectively in the debates and struggles of the current period. Despite significant changes in family, domestic and interpersonal relations, the prevailing ideology of the heterosexual nuclear family as the norm still shapes social, economic and legal practices. This book argues for feminist debates in all areas affecting families and begins with such important areas as demographics, family law, lesbian parenting, women’s friendships, child benefit legislation, the contradictions of parenting, etc.

Contents

• Feminism and Families: The Challenge of Neo-conservatism (Meg Luxton)
• Canadian Feminism and Demographic Politics: Some Lessons from the South (Heather Jon Maroney)
• Feminist Strategies for Policy and Research–The Economic and Social Dynamics of Families (Suzanne Peters)
• Credits in Crisis: Evaluating Child Benefit Reform in Canada (Frances Woolley, Judith Madill and Arndt Vermaeten)
• Feminism, Familial Ideology and Family Law: A Perilous Menage a Trois (Shelley A.M. Gavigan)
• Family Inside/Out (Brenda Cossman)
• In the Family Way: Lesbian Mothers in Canada (Katherine Arnup)
• Reproducing Difference: Changes in the Lives of Partners Becoming Parents (Bonnie Fox)
• “Nothing Natural About It”: The Contradictions of Parenting (Meg Luxton)
• In the Shadow of the Family: Women’s Friendships with Women (Katherine Side)
• Theorizing Gender, Sexuality and Family: Feminism and Psychoanalysis Revisited (Roberta Hamilton)

About the Author

 Dr. Luxton is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and the Women’s Studies Programme at Atkinson College, York University. She is Director of the Graduate Programme in Women’s Studies and has published widely, with several highly acclaimed books and articles on the women’s movement, women’s work, paid and unpaid, and relations among work, family and class.