Handbook of Feminist Family Studies

A Feminist Critique of Family Studies

Contributors: Alexis J. Walker

Edited by: Sally A. Lloyd & April L. Few
Book Title: Handbook of Feminist Family Studies
Chapter Title: "A Feminist Critique of Family Studies"
Pub. Date: 2009
Access Date: January 17, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412960823
Online ISBN: 9781412982801
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412982801.n2
Print pages: 18-27
© 2009 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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A Feminist Critique of Family Studies

Can one be both a feminist and an editor of a traditional family science journal? Can a feminist editor make
a notable difference in the “business as usual” of a conservative family journal? How is the feminist work in a
mainstream family journal different—and better? What do we need for family studies to help improve women's
lives?

In this chapter, I reflect on these questions. As an organizing framework, I draw from Marie Withers Osmond's
(1987) thoughtful feminist analysis of the work of the early thinkers of the field, most notably Ernest Burgess. I
follow her lead in summarizing their deeply conservative underlying assumptions and also show their remark-
able persistence to the present day. Exposing these assumptions is essential for showing the shallowness of
our research questions and the distortions of people's lives that result from how we study them. As I have
done before, I once again raise feminist objections to these assumptions. I also show how feminist and tra-
ditional approaches coexist in contemporary family studies. I conclude by asking feminists to pay attention to
subject matter in choosing research topics and to be reflexive in writing about our work.

Osmond (1987) summarized the fundamental family studies assumptions. Organizing them a little differently
than she did, I state them here:

• The family” is the foundation of social order, with role divisions that are both essential and universal.
• The functions of the family for society have become less important as the family has lost its economic
purpose and as the family has shifted from a social institution to a location for companionship.
• Families are best seen as networks of personal relationships.
• The family is a private realm, distinguishable and separate from the public realm.
• Families follow marriage; the solidarity of marriage is at the core of the field.
• The study of families, particularly family sociology, differs from the sociology of society because of
the public/private distinction between the family and society. One can only study families by studying
the interaction of individuals within families (not by studying the relation between families and soci-
ety).
• Families are homogeneous units, so one family member can faithfully account for the views, beliefs,
and experiences of other family members.
• Quantitative methods and scientific objectivity are the sine qua non of family studies.

Although these assumptions characterized the study of families in its earliest days, later I describe how they
continue to be evident in much of the contemporary family research. First, though, I reflect on the experience
of editing a mainstream family journal.

Confessions of a Former Editor

For 6 years (volumes published from 2002 through 2007), I edited the Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF).
In some disciplines and to many renowned scholars, JMF is the preeminent outlet for family research. It is a
well-established journal, having been published since 1939, among the earliest days of the field. It is often the
first outlet family researchers consider when deciding where to submit a manuscript for publication. Given its
centrality to the discipline, it should not be surprising that, nearly seven decades after its initiation, it remains
deeply conservative and the research published in it true to many if not most of the fundamental assumptions
outlined by Osmond (1987).

For this reason, I found the role of editor to be particularly challenging. On the one hand, selection of an
avowed feminist as editor was conceivably a way of moving the field forward in the direction of understanding
and improving women's lives in all their diversity. For years, rather than a solution, feminists had seen JMF

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as part of the problem (Thorne, 1982; Walker & Thompson, 1984). Rarely did it include critical analyses of
“the family” or of the family field, and the empirical work within it often assumed that families “naturally” con-
sisted of young, married heterosexual couples with children whose members shared “a harmony of interests”
(Thorne, p. 10). Furthermore, gender was almost never a central focus of the analysis, even though much of
the work could be described as “wives' family sociology” (Safilios-Rothschild, 1970). And families were almost
never studied in relation to the broader social structure (Thorne; Walker & Thompson). With a feminist at its
helm, perhaps more feminist scholars could now see JMF as a friendly and supportive outlet.

On the other hand, I had promised the screening committee that my first priority would be “to do no harm.”
Maintaining and hopefully enhancing the status and quality of the Journal was my quintessential editorial re-
sponsibility. To be faithful to this promise, to the field, to its leading scholars, and to the core disciplines it
represents (i.e., primarily sociology; clinical, developmental, and social psychology; and interdisciplinary fields
such as human development and family studies), maintaining or enhancing quality meant continuing to pub-
lish work in the (conservative) tradition on which the field was founded and to which it had mostly remained
true in the intervening years.

Nevertheless, I did not see my two goals (i.e., do no harm and publish feminist work) as being in conflict.
Instead, as any feminist would, I believed and continue to believe that feminist scholarship, being a strong
reflection of the reality of people's lives, would present multiple opportunities to enhance our understanding
of families and to advance the field. Furthermore, I thought I could accelerate the rate of change by changing
the editorial board over which I had complete authority. And indeed, I added many women, feminists, scholars
of color, and international researchers to the review panel over the course of my term. And yet, not surprising-
ly, work within the conservative tradition was mostly what the journal received— and published—during my
tenure.

Despite dramatic editorial board changes, most of the reviews during my tenure were conducted by individu-
als who were in the journal's database of occasional reviewers. Given the large numbers of submissions and
the need for three reviewers for each submission, at best, no more than 30% of the reviews were carried out
by editorial board members. I necessarily drew instead from the list of occasional reviewers, which consisted
primarily of researchers who had been working in the field of family science for many years, who had pub-
lished in JMF and/or related journals, and who had a long-standing record as effective reviewers. True, even
this database changed significantly over the 6-year period—and also doubled in size—thanks in large part to
my very capable journal staff as well as to the Internet, which made it possible to seek and to find scholars
who would not normally be within the scope of JMF's radar. But mostly it was business as usual at JMF.

Trying to change the status quo. Changing the editorial board and updating the reviewer data base are the
types of changes that may ultimately change the nature of what gets accepted in a journal, but it is change
at a snail's pace. (Adding a name to a list of 2,000 names is not very noticeable.) Although my term was
extended from 4 to 6 years, I expect that the impact of the gradually changed database will occur primarily
in the years to come because, over time, hundreds of new names will be noticeable. In the meantime, I had
no choice but to pursue my two goals of (a) doing no harm and (b) helping feminist researchers come to see
JMF as a welcoming outlet by using a panel of reviewers culled largely from the conservative traditions of the
field, who were reading manuscripts largely describing research from within these conservative traditions.

Perhaps most researchers submitting to JMF do not even know who the editor is. For example, during my
tenure, I received correspondence for former editors Robert Milardo, Marilyn Coleman, and even Alan Booth,
who edited JMF as long as 16 years before my term began! I could invite submissions and comments, of
course, but I had a limited ability to do so. To fill the pages of a journal with invited work, without the publisher
(the National Council on Family Relations) adding additional pages, could lead researchers to believe that the
journal was losing precious space and would not be able to accept as many papers; that is, JMF would be
seen as not having as much room as it used to have before the editor began to squander it away. Such a per-
ception would have conflicted with my goal of doing no harm. This example illustrates one of the challenges

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of journal editorship. On the one hand, it is a position of absolute power. In making a decision, for example, I
not infrequently said to myself,“I get to decide.” More women should have the experience of doing so!

On the other hand, my decisions were constrained by my two competing or conflicting goals as well as the
material with which I was working; that is, the submissions I received and the reviews. Although the review-
ers who crafted reviews were very competent and incredibly generous with their time, they mostly were not
feminists. Both their strong, positive feelings about the traditional work they evaluated and my editorial deci-
sion were always conveyed to the authors. Reviewers' input was important, in part, because I often knew little
about the subject matter of a manuscript. Given that JMF covers such a wealth of family-related topics, rarely
did I know more or even as much as the experts in a subject matter area. For example, one of my interests is
families in middle and later life. Yet much if not most of what I read during my term focused on families with
young children or adolescents. (I return to this point later.) Over the course of my term, many, many manu-
scripts that did not even pretend to be feminist received extremely positive reviews. It would take enormous
ego strength for me to have sent those reviews to authors and then to reject their work because it was not
feminist.“Experts” in the area—carefully chosen reviewers—had evaluated it positively.

My options were limited. The most I could do in such situations was to require authors to temper their con-
clusions, to highlight the limitations of their work, and to consider alternative explanations, including feminist
ideas and accounts. Typically, the changes I required amounted to two or three sentences about the limita-
tions of the sample and the measures or the lack of information about other potentially key contextual factors.
These sentences usually were buried in the discussion. I also asked authors to insert words such as seems
and may into the description of the results. The effect of these minor changes no doubt was limited. I worked
as well to convince authors—and reviewers—that it was acceptable, even preferable, to use the first person.
Doing so is consistent with the feminist position that research is an embodied process and that researchers
have agency in designing studies, in recruiting participants, in collecting and analyzing data, in drawing con-
clusions, and in writing the research text (Sprague, 2005). Even in my most self-confident moments, however,
these changes never felt sufficient. How difficult it was indeed to move away from business as usual!

Feminism Comes Face-to-Face with Antifeminism

In the very worst instance of my tenure—one that still haunts me—I felt compelled to publish a manuscript
that went against all my feminist sensibilities. The paper described a population- based quantitative study of
interpersonal violence. The design employed a gender-difference approach to study the prevalence of vio-
lence and its effects on mental health. Reviewers— experts in the area of interpersonal violence— extolled
the importance of the population studied, the recruitment procedures, and the final sample. The analytic tech-
niques were beyond reproach. Given the contested nature of this area of study, however, views regarding the
measures were predictably divided: Reviewers argued either that the measures were reliable, valid, and in
the successful measurement tradition well established in this area of study (non- feminist view) or that they
lacked nuance and attention to context (feminist view). Although I saw to it that the appropriate cautions were
inserted into the text, I could only think that publishing this sort of work had the potential to harm women rather
than to meet the feminist imperative of improving the quality of our lives.

Because of my promise to do no harm, I felt that I had no choice but to accept this work for publication. I
could not reject it because it used a research design that I did not like. Indeed, the very same methods have
been used by many feminists to document gender inequality (see Sprague,2005). Nor could I reject it on the
basis of measurement. As noted, although problematic from a feminist perspective, the measures used were
indeed consistent with an approach respected for its adherence to current (and long-standing) standards for
validity and reliability. The field of interpersonal violence seems to be hopelessly divided: a mainstream, con-
servative approach is maintained alongside a feminist approach critical of its research questions, its metrics,
and, ultimately, its conclusions. In other words, in the contemporary family field, both approaches are consid-
ered to be “scientific” and both are viable.

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I did the only thing I could think of that was within my power and that would attend to the thoughtful, meaning-
ful, and essential feminist critiques of a conservative approach to the study of interpersonal violence. I invited
feminist scholars, well respected for their work in this field, to comment on this article. And I gave them free
reign to write whatever they wanted. Doing so made me feel better about getting the feminist message into
JMF and helped me worry less about the consequences—for women and for this line of research—of pub-
lishing the study in question.

Nevertheless, I continue to wonder whether these articles and comments make a difference. Have I done a
disservice to women in general and to feminists in particular by giving this work space within a prestigious
journal? How much difference did it make that the article was published? Unfortunately, more difference than I
had hoped. Sadly and perhaps predictably, given the very conservative nature of our field (Osmond, 1987), at
the time of this writing (June 2008), the article in question ranks 17th in articles cited among those published
in JMF during the previous 3 years. Did the comments make a difference? It is doubtful. They appear neither
in the 20 most cited nor in the 20 most downloaded articles. In the end, I may have only strengthened the hold
of the conservative tradition on the study of interpersonal violence. Just as Judith Stacey (2004) confessed
when describing her painful experience with public sociology, I found that I had inadvertently bolstered the
conservative ideology I had sought to depose.

I made many, many decisions during my 6-year term as editor, none as painful as the one I described above.
I read—multiple times— everything that was published in JMF during this period. And I also read the vast
majority of the manuscripts that were rejected. Editing the premier family journal provided me with a very wide
window on contemporary family research, a view I saw both through the eyes of an editor and through the
eyes of a feminist. As editor, I was pleased to have the opportunity to read exciting work that I knew would
influence the field; as a feminist, I was thrilled when this work paid attention to women, placing them front and
center. I made an editorial decision on more than 2,700 manuscripts over the course of my term, about 15%
of which were eventually published in JMF. As already noted, most of what I read was unrelated to my own re-
search. It also was decidedly not feminist. And yet, nearly every manuscript was interesting, even absorbing.
I am a passionate feminist but I am also passionate about families and the family field. Nearly all research re-
lated to families interests me, sometimes only because it makes me wonder what a feminist approach would
have contributed to it.

Functionalism and Contemporary Family Science

The irony of an avowed feminist editing a major, even powerful, mainstream social science journal was not
lost on me. Here I was in a position of power among a most privileged group. By making decisions to publish
the work of mainstream family scholars, I was, in Sprague's (2005) words, “helping to naturalize and sustain
their [italics added] privilege in the process” (p. 2). During my editorial term, as already noted, the manu-
scripts I published continued to reflect the functionalist thinking long since identified by Osmond (1987): (a)
an emphasis on families as a set of personal relationships disconnected from macrostructures; (b) a view of
women as subordinate to the interests and well-being of other family members; (c) an insular and ahistorical
approach; and (d) an emphasis that overstates agreement and similarity. This thinking is rarely if ever explicit.
Instead, it is a subtext reflecting the underlying assumptions that imbue the empirical work in the field. I de-
scribe each of these in turn, giving some attention to how they are reflected in contemporary family research.
I follow with a discussion of several notable, feminist exceptions.

Families as Personal Relationships

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The emphasis on families as individuals in interaction divorced from the broader sociohistorical context is
perhaps best seen in the identification of families as social problems. The assumption underlying this work
is that social problems can be resolved if individuals would only behave differently in their interpersonal re-
lationships. Viewing them as relationships divorces families from the structural context in which they are em-
bedded, a context that influences family structure as well as family processes. Family studies is replete with
a focus on individuals as both the cause of and the solution for social problems. In JMF, for example, the
“problems” of young children who are not doing as well as their peers by conventional metrics of academ-
ic performance are laid at the feet of their low-income, unmarried, and often minority mothers. That these
women have limited social and personal resources and a truncated, impoverished academic history of their
own is rarely mentioned. Similarly, the “acting out” behavior of adolescents is framed as an outcome of “in-
competent” or “poor” parenting or of parental conflict, without consideration of the complex and overwhelming
set of demands and constraints that individual parents—and couples—face. For example, researchers rarely,
if ever, draw attention to the institutionalized racism, sexism, and heterosexism that women and minority par-
ents face every day.

A social problems orientation reflects the general view of family scholars; that is, we focus primarily on the
individuals and families at the bottom of the social structure rather than on those with privilege (Sprague,
2005). At this social stratum, we emphasize how individuals within these families relate to each other— par-
ents (mostly mothers) to their children or wives to their husbands—rather than on the structured set of social
relations in which people are embedded. For example, although poverty is unevenly distributed across racial-
ethnic groups and is also linked to multiple partnerships, far more attention in the literature is given to the
“problems” of multiple partnerships for children rather than to how poverty limits relationship options and neg-
atively affects the interactions of people in partnership with each other.

Women as Subordinate Family Members

Much of family studies, particularly that focused on children and on marriage, emphasizes women's roles as
wife, mother, and daughter, that is, as nurturer, central to the well-being of others (Stacey & Thorne, 1985). In
this view, women's own needs, desires, and abilities are ignored or, at best, given minimal attention. Missing
and so central to a feminist analysis of families (Andersen, 2005) is a focus on power and power relations.
As feminists have argued, women's position inside families reflects the wage gap between women and men
outside families as well as inflexible waged labor (Risman, 2004).

Family researchers, for example, continue to be preoccupied with the effect of mothers' employment on their
children. Researchers fail to emphasize that employment contributes substantially to women's well-being.
Furthermore, there is limited acknowledgement that, for most families, women's economic contributions, long
essential to minority and working-class families, are now essential to middle-class families as well (White &
Rogers, 2000). Women's struggles to accommodate the demands of the provider role—met primarily through
low-wage, inflexible, service-sector employment—in the context of continuing responsibilities for the well-be-
ing of other family members—also have received limited attention.

An Insular, Ahistorical Approach (i.e., All Families Should Be Compared with Contemporary White, Middle-
Class, U.S. Families)

As JMF is a U.S. journal, it is not surprising that U.S. families would be positioned front and center. But a
focus on White, middle-class, heterosexual U.S. families, without attention to historical, racial-ethnic, and sex-
ual variation, reifies the Standard North American Family (SNAF; Smith, 1993). According to Smith, the SNAF
ideological code is the family against which all other families are measured—and judged. Having rejected the

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avowed objectivity of science, feminists recognize that researchers' background assumptions are rooted in
their values (Sprague, 2005). Feminists know that family is both a practice and an ideology (Barrett & McIn-
tosh, 1982; Thorne, 1982).

The ideology of family positions the two-parent, heterosexual, nuclear family as both necessary and essential.
By implication, it defines all other families as dysfunctional. It refuses to accept the knowledge of families de-
rived from contemporary research as limited, narrow, and rooted in a specific sociohistorical time and place
(Harding, 1998; Hartsock, 1983). It fails to point out White privilege or even to acknowledge that families out-
side the SNAF code are disproportionately families of color. It ignores the heteronormativity of traditional fam-
ily science linked to binary systems of gender, (male-female), sexuality (“deviant”-“natural”), and family struc-
ture (“genuine”-“pseudo”) (Oswald, Blume, & Marks, 2005). Or recognizing “deviance,” it attributes this“social
problem”to individual decisions or, worse, to “flawed” cultural values. Only “the right kind of family” is studied.
Or if “deviants” are the focus, they are compared with “the right kind of family” and found to be wanting.

One illustration of disproportionate attention to “the right kind of family” is the inordinate focus in the past
decade on cohabitation, and particularly to the “effects” of cohabitation on children. At any one time, only 6%
of children reside with cohabiting parents (although 40% of children will live in this arrangement at some time;
Bumpass & Lu, 2000). In fact, “marriage,” which was implied, should be added specifically to the SNAF cri-
teria (Smith, 1993). In the family literature, cohabitation is nearly always problematized when compared with
marriage, the preferred, socially approved, and “appropriate” form of partnership. Few recognize explicitly that
marriage seems—and is—less and less available to poor minority women (Edin & Kefalas, 2005).

Some societies outside the United States have supported cohabitation; they have, for example, enabled co-
habiting-couple families to receive the same benefits as married-couple families. In these societies, cohab-
iting families do not show the “deficits” evident in families in the United States (see Kiernan, 2004). In the
United States, where policy privileges and fosters marriage, cohabiting-couple families begin at a tremendous
disadvantage. An emphasis on marriage relative to cohabitation is particularly punitive to minority families,
who disproportionately lack the resources and options that foster marital ties. Family scientists contribute to
the reification of marriage by comparing cohabiting partnerships with marital partnerships and by comparing
parenting in cohabiting with parenting in marital partnerships. Analyses of average differences further situate
marriage as the standard of comparison. They fail to attend to distinct causes and consequences of both mar-
riage and cohabitation, as well as to the ranges of relationship quality and parenting evident within each.

Another way in which the value of “the right kind of family” is evident is in the attention to single-parent—most-
ly single-mother—families in the literature, especially single minority mothers. Some national data sets, in
fact, disproportionately surveyed poor African American and/or poor Latina single mothers, paying less or
only superficial attention to the largest numbers of poor women in the United States: Whites. In fact, race
and social class are conflated in this work, perpetuating outmoded ideas about a culture of poverty, which
apparently Whites do not have. Traditional family scholars ignore the politics of location. They fail to see the
relational aspects of difference and do not see the intersectionality of multiple identities that shapes individual
life experience at a given place and time (De Reus, Few, & Blume, 2005).

Families Are Characterized by Agreement and Similarity

As indicated earlier, power continues to be notable for its absence in family studies. Yet power analysis is
the essence of a feminist approach (see DeVault, 1999). The study of power within families enables feminist
researchers to position difference in relation to its social value. For example, feminist researchers would (and
do) highlight that heterosexual cohabiting relationships are more egalitarian than marital ties. They argue that
something about cohabitation is more fair, or, alternatively, something about marriage is less fair, to women

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(see Brines & Joyner, 1999; Smock, 2000). Relative to relationship stability and child well-being, however,
women's outcomes are rarely of interest to traditional family scientists. As argued by Smith (1993), the SNAF
ideological code means that marital stability and child outcomes always will be of greater importance than
women's outcomes. In the minds—and the studies—of family researchers, families should and do have young
children, even though there are comparatively fewer such families in the United States today. After all, this
construction of family is what the SNAF is all about.

Even when studying disagreement or conflict within couples, researchers do not study power. Instead, dis-
agreement is an independent variable and child outcomes (presumed negative) are dependent variables.
And researchers have barely scratched the surface of how reproducing gender within families simultaneously
brings women pleasure as well as reinforces their unequal status (e.g., DeVault, 1991; Di Leonardo, 1987;
Dressel & Clark, 1990; Risman, 2004). As feminist family researchers, we should turn our attention to ways
of bringing women both pleasure and equality within families (Risman).

Contemporary Feminist Family Studies

Fortunately, during my tenure, a number of feminists submitted their careful, revolutionary work to JMF. Hav-
ing met the standards of the preeminent family journal, it, too, is now part of the family science canon. Mar-
garet Nelson's (2006) fine qualitative work on single mothers is a stellar example. She positions women front
and center in her research question and in her analysis. Drawing specific attention to macroinfluences, she
shows the power of the SNAF ideology to influence the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of White, rural, sin-
gle mothers, even though a traditional family form “has failed them … in the past” (p. 794). She points to
recent changes in family structure among the poor as, in part, motivation for her research question. And she
focuses specifically on power—on mothers' power that comes from “being in charge”—that enables them to
deny that same power to—or to share that same power with—others such as grandmothers, boyfriends, or
nonresidential fathers. Although Cherlin (2006) suggests that the families they create are “non-SNAF-like” (p.
802) in their inclusion of social rather than biological fathers, Nelson believes otherwise, arguing that women
pursue the SNAF as a goal.

Lest we think that a qualitative approach is the sine qua non of feminist research (Sprague, 2005), I turn to
Yodanis and Lauer's (2007) research on money management as a compelling example of how cross-nation-
al, quantitative, survey methods can be feminist. Arguing that the management of resources within families
is an index of marital inequality and using individual-level data, they find that couples with equal contribution
of resources tend to share money management and that wives are more likely to have sole responsibility for
money management when financial resources in the household are fewer. Of course, fewer resources means
more difficulty managing, so it is no surprise that wives are more likely than husbands to have sole respon-
sibility when the funds are insufficient to meet the expenses. Individual beliefs matter as well. When partners
value equality in their relationship, husbands are less likely to have the sole control over money and wives
are less likely to have the sole responsibility for money management work—that is, to be stuck with the im-
possible task of managing limited resources. Using context-level data and looking across 21 countries, they
also demonstrate that institutionalized (i.e., cultural) beliefs about shared breadwinning are linked to the cou-
ple's shared money management strategies. This finding holds even when earnings are dramatically different
between wives and husbands. They draw specific attention to macroinfluences above and beyond individual
beliefs and actions “by showing that decisions within marriage are differently shaped according to variation in
the institutional arrangements within which couples live and act”(p. 1322). Yodanis and Lauer position women
as (potentially) full and equal partners in marriage, drawing specific attention to control of resources as an
indicator of power, more power when women themselves contribute more resources and less power when the
resources contributed by them are fewer.

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Also attending to resources, Atkinson, Greenstein, and Lang (2005) illustrate the limitations of resource theory
and relative resource theory in the context of social inequality. Using data from the National Survey of Fam-
ilies and Households, they show how a gendered resource theory is the only way to explain the influence of
wives' breadwinning on wife abuse. Because the husband's income is not associated with the likelihood of
husbands abusing their wives, resource theory is not supported. Relative resource theory would suggest that
husbands who earn more than their wives would be less likely to perpetrate abuse, but it receives only limit-
ed support: Only when husbands have traditional attitudes toward their wives' employment is the husbands'
relative income associated negatively with the likelihood of wife abuse; that is, resources matter only in the
context of traditional attitudes. Gendered resource theory, however, receives the most support: For husbands
with egalitarian values, relative income is unrelated to the likelihood of wife abuse. But for husbands with tra-
ditional values whose wives earn more than they do, the likelihood of wife abuse is high. In other words, a
husband with traditional values whose wife earns more than he does is at risk of abusing his wife. Atkinson
and her colleagues point specifically to the structural and cultural conditions that foster the construction of
masculinity through wife abuse. In other words, traditional husbands who do not experience a sense of mas-
culinity through their own breadwinning compensate by exerting force over their wives.

Finally, in their ethnography of girls' family labor in low-income, mostly minority households, Lisa Dodson and
Jillian Dickert (2004) posit children's—mostly girls'—family work as a survival strategy used by low-income
families to meet family demands; that is, girls become “prime substitute(s) for parents” (p. 328). Dodson and
Dickert show how such girls' family labor differs from children's chores in nonpoor families as well as how
it is mostly done alone or with other children, when parents are not present. Furthermore, they point to the
individual and social implications when girls take on adult roles. Rather than focusing on schoolwork and tak-
ing advantage of extracurricular opportunities, girls pursue social ties, caregiving, and the management of a
household. They become competent in the social areas that foster early partnerships and early childbearing,
consequences the authors attribute to welfare reform, which has pushed poor women into low-wage jobs with
rigid work schedules. Dodson and Dickert also draw attention to challenges for researchers in the ways fami-
lies may hide their survival strategies or choose not to report them because they are so mundane.

Together, these four examples, and other feminist work that appears in JMF, show how feminist family studies
currently exists alongside mainstream family research. That feminist work can be said to meet the standards
of the discipline is a victory for feminists. That this scholarship continues to exist in parallel to traditional re-
search, rather than to have changed it, is a challenge to us. It is not enough to publish our work in mainstream
journals; nor is it enough for feminists to edit these journals. What is necessary to transform the discipline?

Final Reflections
Almost 25 years ago, with Linda Thompson, I asked whether one can be both a feminist and a (family) sci-
entist (Walker & Thompson, 1984). In this chapter, I ask whether one can be true to feminism and also edit
a traditional family journal. As in 1984, I answer in the affirmative, but I also acknowledge that contradictions
in the structured set of social relations in these two positions of feminist and editor create marked feelings of
ambivalence (Connidis & McMullin, 2002). Living with ambivalence is no problem for feminists, however. It is
the nature of existence on the margins (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1984). Of the many ways in which feminists can
continue to work to change the “natural order” in family science, I once again call attention to subject matter.

Feminists long ago called for paying attention to women's lives (e.g., Thorne, 1982). In my previous work
(e.g., Walker, 2000; Walker & Thompson, 1984), I drew attention to subject matter that belongs to family stud-
ies and that is ignored too often, subject matter that draws attention to daily life experience and that calls for
social change. Of course, many feminists are pursuing such topics diligently and masterfully, as can be seen
in the four examples above as well as in works that have become classics in the field (e.g., DeVault, 1991;
Hochschild, 1989). Nevertheless, a significant gap remains between the daily experience of family life and

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the subject matter that occupies the attention of most researchers (Walker). To illustrate this gap, in loose
chronological order, I list below a few of the life events I experienced during the 6 years I edited JMF:

• Less than a month after I began my editorial term, a brother of mine was a perpetrator in a duck-hunt-
ing accident in which he almost killed a man. The “victim”—actually, so many family members who
were not at the location of the shooting experienced dramatic and life-changing consequences, so
there were many “victims”—survived but ended up losing much of his eyesight. (Ironically, my partner
and I are birdwatchers.)
• My father was diagnosed with bladder cancer, most likely caused by his having handled toxic chem-
icals during his 25-year employment as a laboratory technician. He was treated with a biological
therapy that failed. After consultation with a surgeon and his family members, he had his bladder re-
moved and a new bladder constructed from colon tissue. Six years later (at the age of 82), he is well
but was left incontinent by this “new and improved” way of dealing with the loss of a bladder.
• My sister, the oldest in a family of six children, disappeared and her body was discovered 36 hours
later. She had committed suicide after many years of struggling with mental illness.
• After years of debilitating migraines, my lesbian partner, an obstetrician-gynecologist, renegotiated
the contract with her physician partners to give up her beloved obstetrics and primary surgery. Doing
so would be painful but would enable her to have a relatively normal (7 to 7) workday and to avoid
the sleep deprivation that triggered many of her most severe headaches. Although her health and
quality of life—and mine—is much improved, she took a nearly 2/3 pay cut to make this change. To-
gether, a physician and a professor lead a privileged life with regard to household income in the Unit-
ed States. Nevertheless, we were forced to manage a dramatic income loss amid expenses—mostly
housing—that we incurred when our income was much higher.
• At the age of 54, after 8 months of testing and numerous doctor's appointments, I was diagnosed
with an indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma and successfully treated with radiation. The cancer recurred
within 4 months and I filed my last report as editor while undergoing infusion chemotherapy and bio-
logical therapy designed to keep this cancer at bay.

As a sister, daughter, partner, and individual, I was negotiating the daily family life experience of adult sibling
relationships, life-threatening health crises, aging parents, mental illness, income loss, and chronic illness.
Was I reading about these things in manuscripts submitted to JMF? No. Instead, I was reading about the
effects of cohabitation on children's math scores, the ways in which number and type of marital status tran-
sitions affect adolescent externalizing behavior, and how fathers would be more involved with their children
if mothers worked harder to foster their involvement. Where were the other issues that family members navi-
gate each and every day? We would know more about families—and about women's lives in them—if we paid
more attention to issues such as these. We would know more if we examined how the tangled web of social
class, race-ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are linked to family life experience and to what we choose to study
about them. As a feminist, I argue that these structural issues are essential to our life experience.

While editing JMF, I was struck by how much of what I read, no matter how interesting, seemed disconnected
from my own life as the White daughter of aging, working-class parents; the sister of five (now four) siblings
and an aunt to nieces and nephews; and a partner in a long- term dual-career lesbian relationship. The empir-
ical literature also was disconnected from the lives of so many others, lacking as it was in subjectivity, reflexiv-
ity, and certainly intersectionality. These were among the very concerns feminists objected to long ago when
criticizing the field. Research that makes life experience come alive for the reader, that shows why change is
necessary, will have a bigger impact on the field than research that maintains the status quo. It will be among
those things cited when future feminists are asked to tell us why they became interested in family studies in
the first place (Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame, 1981).

Given our focus on everyday lives and our commitment to social change, feminists are in a better position
than anyone to conduct this research. And to see to it that change happens, both in the field and in women's
everyday lives. I am happy to say that 6 years of reading—and publishing—mainstream family research has

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neither changed my feminist values nor deterred me from my feminist goal of a conscious, inclusive, and lib-
eratory family studies (Allen, 2000).

Alexis J.Walker

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j.1741-3737.2007.00449.x

• feminism
• money management
• resource theory
• cohabitation
• family studies
• manuscripts
• wives

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412982801.n2

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