Full Description
Glance at a political party's platform, catch a politician's speech, sample the news, and you will find the family - not as a mere group of people living together in the private sphere, but as a contentious entity at the center of political disputes and policy debates over everything from marriage equality and gender identity to immigration and welfare reform. The key role of the family in politics and public policy, so often relegated to the outer margins of political science and theory, comes in for long overdue consideration in this volume. Bringing together political scientists and legal scholars of wide-ranging interests and perspectives, Stating the Family explores the role of the family in American political development: as a focus of political struggle, a place where policy happens, a means of distributing governmental goods, and a way of relating individuals to the state and to each other in legal terms.
While the authors gathered here examine important policy questions that relate to the family - including immigration, welfare, citizenship, partisanship, and ideology - they pay particular attention to changes in family structures and responsibilities in light of the rise of neoliberalism. Illustrated with case studies - some contemporary, some historical - their essays provide individual takes on different links between family and politics, creating a nuanced conversation on this complex topic. The result is a multifaceted view of the family's place in the development of American political institutions and a unique understanding of the work that family does to structure politics - and that politics does to structure families.
Contents
Foreword: Responsibility for the Well-Being of Families, Joan Tronto
Introduction. Stated Families, Family Stakes: The Family, the American State, and Political Development, Julie Novkov and Carol Nackenoff
1. Democracy and Family, June Carbone and Naomi Cahn
2. Obergefell, Marriage, and the Neoliberal Politics of Care, Tamara Metz
3. Constituting Families: Marriage Equality Activism and the Role of the State, Ellen Ann Andersen
4. The Legal Construction of Motherhood and Paternity: Interracial Unions and the Color Line in Antebellum Louisiana, Gwendoline Alphonso and Richard Bensel
5. A "Bridge to Our Daughters": Title IX Fathers and Policy Development, Elizabeth Sharrow
6. The Feudal Family versus American Political Development: From Separate Spheres to Woman Suffrage, Eileen McDonagh
7. Building the Administrative State: Courts and the Admission of chinese Persons to the United States, 1870s-1920s, Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov
8. Deportability and (Dis)unification: Family Status and US Immigration Policy, Alison Gash and Priscilla Yamin
Conclusion, Julie Novkov and Carol Nackenoff
About the Contributors
Index
