Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions by Barrie Thorne; Marilyn YalomReview by: Gaye TuchmanSigns, Vol. 10, No. 4, Communities of Women (Summer, 1985), pp. 790-792Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174316 .

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790 Book Reviews

that the housewife's role is the equivalent of a man's specialized profes- sion. Rather her role-diffuse, generalized, and complementary to her husband's-is treated as inferior, and her housework is not appreciated as real work. Lebra's observations about work resemble Bernstein's. Women in family businesses (like Haruko on her farm) tend to extrapolate their diffuse housewife's role to the business. Thus the legacy of Meiji era policies lingers today, as women's social and economic contributions are subsumed under a role assigned to them one hundred years ago.

It is indeed heartening to read these books, which signal a maturation of the field of women's studies within Japanese studies. All three authors take gender for granted as an appropriate category of analysis and assume that their readers do too. All three books, but especially Sievers's and Bernstein's, will undoubtedly be included in mainstream university courses on Japanese history and society, and their almost simultaneous appearance validates the feminist approach for other researchers and graduate students.

Rethinking the Family. Some Feminist Questions. Edited by Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom. New York: Longman, Inc., 1982.

Gaye Tuchman, Queens College, City University of New York

In Rethinking the Family, Barrie Thorne, with Marilyn Yalom, provides an essential text for feminists now rescuing the topic of the family from two recent attacks: the conservative war on diversity and the radical recon- struction of the patriarchal middle-class Victorian family as an ideal type.

There is an unhappy irony here. For decades, social science depart- ments that hired women asked them to teach courses on the family. To do so, women taught versions of functionalism, some the product of research by women, some by men. When courses on gender were introduced into the curriculum, many of the feminists decamped, preferring seemingly greener fields to the strictures of the all-too-familiar women's ghetto. They left "the family" to the functionalists, conservative and radical, with whom this book does battle once again.

However, this collection is much more than a political and theoretical response to others' concerns. It advances feminist thought. In twelve cogent chapters, male and female scholars active in anthropology, sociol- ogy, psychiatry, economics, law, philosophy, and history explore ques- tions central to contemporary feminisms. As Thorne explains in her superb introduction, the essays are arranged around five themes: (1) detecting errors in the ideology of the monolithic family; (2) "decomposing" the family into its underlying structures of sex, gender, and generation; (3) differentiating individual experiences of the family,

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Summer 1985 791

currently mystified by, for instance, the glorification of motherhood; (4) determining the nature of boundaries between the family and other institutions, such as the state and the economy; and (5) exploring femi- nists' ambivalence about the individualism promoted by capitalism and the nurturance and collectivity supposedly characteristic of women's cul- ture. Carefully and insightfully, Thorne explains how those themes emerge from contemporary feminist debates.

Eight of these essays originated in a lecture series sponsored during 1979 by Stanford University's Center for Research on Women, of which Marilyn Yalom is now acting director. Three additional articles are also included: Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto's "The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother," Sara Ruddick's "Maternal Thinking," and Rayna Rapp's "Family and Class in Contemporary America." I appreciate having the Chodorow and Contratto, and Ruddick articles back-to-back for class- room use. Of the original essays, I particularly admire "Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views" by Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako, and "Home Production for Use in a Market Economy" by Clair (Vickery) Brown, for each offered important new insights.

The essay by Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako starts by criticizing anthropology's confusion of household and family. The authors argue too against a modern concept of "the family" that views its essence as mother and children who are bonded to one another, who share a physi- cal space and "a particular set of emotions, family love" (p. 27). That contemporary notion merely updates hackneyed assumptions about the "married couple," since the cross-cultural evidence emphasizes vast varia- tions among people who are kin. These Stanford anthropologists extend their criticism to sociological discussions of contemporary class variations in the family, arguing that "the Family is . .. an ideological construct" (p. 25). This theme is developed in Rapp's essay and in Eli Zaretsky's historical consideration of the incursion of the state into the family to the detriment of all its members, especially women.

Clair Brown's article indicts neoclassical arguments about women, work, and family economy. According to Brown, this school assumes that the sphere of production (the workplace) and the sphere of consumption (the home) are interchangeable. However, she argues, the change to a consumer economy has increased diversity in economic goods but has not increased flexibility for the home economy to produce such goods and services. Rather, economic growth has brought dependence on the mar- ketplace: a family cannot produce its own telephone system. Brown goes on to analyze the amount of money and number of hours needed to reproduce families of one or two adults and up to six children. She then introduces a notion all feminists must think about: the family soon will be unable to make do by sending another adult into the labor market.

Other articles in Rethinking the Family discuss equally important

Signs

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792 Book Reviews

topics, from men's resistance to feminism to mothers' role in some mental illnesses. I like this book; my students have liked it too.

Women's Realities, Women's Choices. An Introduction to Women's Studies. By Hunter College Women's Studies Collective. New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1983.

Barbara J. Harris, Pace University

Women's Realities, Women's Choices is the book those of us who teach women's studies have been waiting for. Unlike most texts in the field, which are really collections of articles or readings from different disci- plines, this book is genuinely interdisciplinary. It was written collectively by eight members of the Hunter College faculty: Ulku U. Bates (art history), Florence L. Denmark (psychology), Virginia Held (philosophy), Dorothy 0. Helly (history), Sarah B. Pomeroy (classics), Elizabeth Dorsey Smith (nursing), and Sue Rosenberg Zalk (psychology). The authors have divided the collection into three major sections-defining women, the family circle, and women in society-which they visualize as "a series of concentric rings" moving outward from the individual woman. These sections are themselves divided into fifteen chapters.

As a text, this book has a number of strengths. It opens with a clear definition of women's studies, an explanation of the relationship of women's studies to feminism, and a persuasive argument for including women's studies in the curriculum. Each chapter combines an impressive survey of traditional and current ideas about its subject, an examination of how these ideas are or have been translated into practice, a feminist critique of mainstream theories and social arrangements, and an explana- tion of the kind of change feminists consider necessary. Boxes containing well-chosen excerpts from some of the works under discussion and a generous number of wonderful illustrations enrich the text. Each chapter concludes with discussion questions, recommended readings, and a bib- liography.

Throughout, the authors have been sensitive to the need to consider women from as many social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and parts of the world as possible. They never fall into the trap of equating women with white middle-class women from the United States and Western Europe.

Women's Realities, Women's Choices is an extremely ambitious book both in the breadth and depth of its coverage. No one, therefore, is likely to be completely satisfied with the treatment of each of the many topics covered or the relative attention given to particular groups of women, particular disciplines, or particular points of view. In my opinion, the

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