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Fam Proc 24:31-47, 1985

Feminism and Family Therapy

VIRGINIA GOLDNER, PH.D.a
aAssistant Clinical Professor of Pyschiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 102 E. 22 St., New York, N.Y. 10010.

Feminism has had a profound effect on contemporary culture and on thinking in most academic fields, including
psychoanalysis. Interestingly, until very recently it had made virtually no impact on the theory and practice of family
therapy. This paper proposes an explanation for this peculiar phenomenon and argues that family therapy has been
considerably handicapped by its insularity from the feminist critique.
Utilizing feminist scholarship in psychoanalysis, history, and sociology, the paper analyzes the structural
contradictions in family life that family therapists have essentially ignored and then outlines their clinical implications.
Key points in the discussion include the argument that systems theory is an inadequate explanatory matrix from which to
build a theory of the family, that the archetypal "family case" of the overinvolved mother and peripheral father is best
understood, not as a clinical problem, but as the product of a historical process two hundred years in the making, and
that power relations between men and women in families function in terms of paradoxical, incongruous hierarchies that
reflect the complex interpenetration between the structure of family relations and the world of work. This conceptual
model then provides the basis for an analysis and critique of sexual politics as they emerge in the prototypical clinical
situation.
A Jewish patient tells the following story:

Her father and grandmother were living in Germany during Hitler's rise to power. When impending doom seemed
imminent, a Gentile family offered to hide the pair. Her father refused. He could not bear the thought of being
trapped alone with his mother for an indefinite period of time. Some months later her father was offered a chance to
escape the country alone. Once again he refused, since it would have meant leaving his mother behind.
Her father survived the war. Her grandmother perished.

The enormity of this story is silencing, but inside that silence lies invariably a shudder of recognition. That is because the
image of mothers and sons or mothers and daughters contains, even without a corroborating story, the spectre of impossible
dilemmas and ambivalent devotion.
Much has been written about this phenomenon, from the sentimentalized devotional tracts of the nineteenth century to
the misogynist invention of the schizophrenogenic mother in the nineteen fifties. But it has only been in the last decade,
with the development of feminist theory, that "momism" (51), in its many varieties, has itself become a subject for
systematic analysis and critique. That analysis, which spills over to incorporate an evaluation of women's social position
generally, has now made its mark on most academic fields. Literature, history, sociology, even psychoanalysis, have been
deeply affected by the feminist critique. Hardly any contemporary analysts, for example, now talk of "penis envy" without
quotation marks or their conceptual equivalent, and even more significant, the very notion of "gender" is no longer accepted
uncritically but has itself become a subject for sophisticated psychoanalytic inquiry.
If the construction of gendered personalities is of concern to psychoanalysts, then certainly the construction of gendered
familial arrangements should be of concern to family therapists. Yet the notion that motherhood and fatherhood are
ideological categories, and not states of nature, has barely entered the thinking, let alone the discourse of family therapists.
That is unfortunate, but not all that surprising. Family therapy, for all its pretensions as a social and socially conscious
therapy, has only recently begun to confront the extent to which "the family" is itself a construct weighed down with
ideological baggage. Indeed, it is only as the middle-class nuclear family has begun to unravel and take on new forms that
family therapists have come to recognize that we have taken a snapshot of white, middle-class family life in the fifties and
mistaken it for a Platonic model of family structure.
It would be interesting to speculate why family therapy has been slow to recognize the need for its own conceptual
reform. Thinking in terms of the sociology of knowledge, we might refine the question to ask why feminists have virtually
ignored family therapy when they have been so vigorously involved in critiquing psychoanalysis. This is clearly a complex
question, and the simple answer is that, unlike psychoanalysis, which has played a pivotal role in the shaping of both
high-brow and popular culture, family therapy has had virtually no impact on the culture at large. But beyond its
marginality, feminists may have been slow to recognize family therapy as a subject for critical analysis because this
generation of feminists have been writing as "daughters," not as "mothers." Thus, their critique of family relations has
focused primarily on the contradictions of growing up female as reconstructed through the lens of young womanhood. That

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kind of "looking back" is, of course, the traditional preoccupation of the analytic situation. It simply took this cohort of
well-educated, politically conscious young women to turn this bourgeois rite of passage"being in therapy"into a
confrontation with The Method itself.
But the concerns of young, single women are not necessarily the concerns of their mothers. When feminist daughters
leave home, they leave their mothers behind. Now "on their own," they are concerned with their family origin only in terms
of sorting out the past. Their more immediate preoccupations involve establishing themselves as actors in the public realm,
liberating themselves from the bonds of sexual repression and so-called "sexual liberation," and establishing romantic
intimacy without compromising selfhood.
These challenges are, in fact, the subjects women wrote about during the first stages of the current feminist movement. A
content analysis of publications of the period would document the formalization of these life stage concerns into subjects for
social analysis. The differential socialization of boys and girls, the barriers to women's equal participation in the world of
work, sexual objectification, romantic masochism, and so on. By contrast, the politics of domesticity (housework, child
care, the problems of long relationships, etc.) are underrepresented in the literature of this period.
But more recently, as more of those feminists have become mothers and as mothers have become feminists, family life in
general, and motherhood in particular, have emerged as categories for analysis, critique, and reconstruction (5, 6, 7, 8, 39,
47, 48). We might expect, therefore, that as women begin to investigate the organization of the domestic sphere, there will
be an upsurge of interest in family therapy from feminist quarters, potentially commensurate with the earlier flood of
attention to psychoanalysis. This paper, which joins a small but steadily growing collection of related attempts (4, 19, 22,
27, 29, 32, 38, 45, 49, 50), reflects this shift in ethos.

Family Therapy Ideology

Silence on the "woman question" within family therapy is not, however, only a function of its insularity from the feminist
critique. Indeed, one could argue that the very theoretical advances that entitled family therapists to consider themselves
"advanced" with regard to social issues, simultaneously constrained the development of a truly systemic and critical clinical
paradigm, one that confronted, rather than sidestepped, the issue of gender.
In this regard, the key concepts of context and circularity embody this contradictory legacy. The problematic aspects of
the notion of context derive from the de facto presumption that the family is the preeminent context organizing the
arrangements of intimate life. Erecting a conceptual boundary around the family was clearly essential for the development
of family systems theory, but it also deflected theoretical attention away from an encounter with the ways in which
participation in family life is not merely an idiosyncratic accommodation to the "needs of the family system" but is regulated
by social forces operating above and beyond the family's affective field. More specifically, although family therapists are
obviously not blind to the general point that social forces make an impact on family life (cf. Families of the Slums [35] and
the progressive tradition it set in motion), family therapy ideology would oppose the suggestion that social forces could
differentially regulate the nature of participation and the distribution of power within the family, such that some family
members would be more equal than others.
In this regard, the feminist assertion that power in family life is socially structured by gender simply offends the systemic
aesthetic. The idea, for example, that work or suffering or pleasure might be distributed unequally between men and women
would clearly complicate, and perhaps compromise, the circular presumption that family members are eternally involved in
a balancing operation in which all positions are interchangeablethat anyone can play any part in the service of system
maintenance. Indeed, from a feminist perspective, the systemic sine qua non of circularity looks suspiciously like a
hypersophisticated version of blaming the victim and rationalizing the status quo. No matter how subtle the argument,
feminists detect at its core the notion that "battered women are asking or it" or that women's anger is misplaced because
their manifest powerlessness is just another "move in the game," and so on.
Insofar as there is potential for this kind of moral misuse of an important idea, it derives from the social and intellectual
isolation of contemporary family therapy. Despite documentation from sociologists (2, 3, 15, 23, 24, 30, 41, 42),
demographers (16, 17, 18), and, of course, psychoanalysts that "his" marriage and family are quite different from "hers," the
category of gender remains essentially invisible in the conceptualizations of family therapists. This blind spot seems
absolutely extraordinary when one considers the embattled condition of the contemporary family and the extent to which the
battle lines have been drawn around conflicting ideologies about how gender relations should be structured. The political
critiques of family life, first by the New Left, and later by the New Right, have been essentially a matter of sexual politics,
and this politicization of gender relations has dominated recent cultural history.
Against this backdrop, an eerie calm pervades the pages of Family Process. The battle of the sexes over the terms of
family life that has made a major impact on all of us as individuals, just as it has stirred things up among those we treat,
seems to have been written out of the record. One may catch a glimpse of what's been going on in the details of a clinical
anecdote, especially in couples work, but that is like watching a parade through a keyhole. The scope of what is being
observed is always outside of view. In essence, it is as if our official response to feminism has been a terse "no comment,"

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while at the same time, we have all been responding helter skelter to its meanings in our work and in our lives.
The problem with this approach is that by avoiding a systematic and self-conscious encounter with feminism and its
impact on the family, we are left with a conceptual map that does not fit the terrain. Feminism, as an idea held by an
individual wife, mother, or girlfriend, or as a social movement with leaders and literature, strikes at the very core of family
relations. What is at stake here is not who does the laundry but who defines the relationship and how its rules are made. In
other words, the issue is joined at the level of second-order change. A stance of "no comment" here can have the same effect
as a prohibition to comment, and this, in turn, can function as a constraint against fundamental structural change. As
Gurman and Klein (22) put it when making a related point:

A husband may now share equally in washing the dishes, changing the diapers, etc., yet retain a privately held
attitude of how he "helps out" his wife that belies the apparent meaning of his new behavior. The wife of this man
may, herself, foster the collusive delusion that her husband has changed his behavior by having come to empathize
with his wife's former [sic] dehumanizing position in the family. [p. 182]

Failure to address these clinical dilemmas derives from family therapists' commitment to aunitary theory of the family
dependent upon a cooly abstract systems theory stripped of connection to the larger social field. No matter how expansive
the possibilities of systems theory, it cannot contain its subject. The family, as James and McIntyre (29) argue elsewhere, is
not merely a "special case of a system." It is a historically evolved social formation subject to internal contradictions that are
rooted in that history and in the contemporary organization of the surrounding society. The difficulties in family life cannot
therefore be reduced to, or universalized as, abstract organizational problematics. Nor is the problem solved by recourse to
the truism that the family exists in a social environment and is an "open system." What is needed is a theory that
particularizes these relations so that their clinical implications become manifest. Otherwise, as a later section of this paper
will argue, we inevitably become unwitting participants in what Betty Friedan called twenty years ago, "the problem
without a name" (13).
With this caveat in mind, what follows is an attempt to bring to bear on the theory and practice of family therapy, the now
formidable resources of feminist scholarship in psychoanalysis, sociology, and history.

A Very Short History of the Modern Family

Historians of the family generally agree that with the emergence of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century there
occurred a progressive separation of family life from work life such that the family, once a social institution charged with
innumerable public responsibilities, became transformed into a fortress-like retreat from public life. Just as work left home
for the factory, so education, once a domestic function, became appropriated by the school, childbirth by the medical
profession, religion by the churches, and so on. All that remained of the once bustling family enterprise were the
vicissitudes of personal relations, now stripped of their task-oriented, instrumental functions (1, 20, 28).
Through a complex social process, this newly established preserve of the psyche was ceded to women, just as a newly
distinctive "public world" became a male preserve. Thus, two separate, gendered spheres were constructed out of the
disintegration of the preindustrial family, one private, presided over by women, the other public, presided over by men. By
the mid-nineteenth century, an entire cultural superstructure had been erected to support and promote this division of labor
(7, 31, 48).
The effect of this dichotomous social arrangement was not only to place women in the home but to virtually equate
women with the home, so that women were not simply members of families, they were embodiments of "The Family." To
use the nineteenth century phrase, the family had become "women's sphere." What this means is that family life became
female-dominated, a social fact that family therapists mistake for a clinical disturbance. Seen from this perspective, the over
involved mother and peripheral father of the archetypal "family case" emerge as products of a historical process two
hundred years in the making.
It has been argued that the implications of this arrangement are nothing short of monumental. Psychoanalytically oriented
social critics, for example, trace the origins of misogyny, the fear and hatred of women, to female-dominated childhood,
arguing that as long as men absent themselves from full participation in childrearing, families will continue to reproduce
psychologically gendered men and women who are prey to misogynistic fears and fantasies (5, 8).
Clearly, from a family therapist's perspective, there are also high costs and consequences to maternal centrality and
paternal marginality. Unfortunately, however, we have never confronted the implications of this dilemma systematically,
theoretically, or philosophically. Rather, it has been an ad hoc awareness that has colored our clinical decisions but has not
informed our thinking.
This is not surprising when one considers the historical context in which family therapy developed. Like the "cult of true
womanhood" that flowered in the early nineteenth century, the fifties were an intensely "familistic" era, complete with
cultural propaganda emphasizing marriage, motherhood, and domesticity as women's natural destiny and responsibility.

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(There is, in fact, considerable evidence to demonstrate that this glorification of home and hearth as women's sphere was
not merely happenstance but was part of a deliberate attempt by business and government to pressure women to vacate the
jobs they had held during the war, so that returning GI's could re-enter the labor force (11, 38).
Academic conceptualizations of the family mirrored, and more important, legitimized this resurgence of the notion that
the family was women's domain. Talcott Parsons (37), for example, the patriarch of mid-century sociology, provided a
mantle of academic respectability for the doctrine of separate spheres by espousing a gender role theory that assigned to
men the "instrumental" (rational and task-oriented) tasks of breadwinning, while women were to enact the "expressive"
(emotional and nurturant) tasks of family maintenance. The idea was that the husband's occupation was to link the family to
the socioeconomic system, whereas the wife was to adapt her roles to the husband's occupational identity. In this way,
conjugal relations based on role complementarity were to be the mechanism by which the family system would be
articulated with the economic system (37, 44).
Although this picture of harmonious sex-role accommodation no longer retains credibility, family therapists have not
developed any alternative conceptualization of gender relations. The matter has simply been dropped, but the problem has
not been solved. If we are to pick up the pieces of that abandoned project, family therapists will have to historicize the
question of women's centrality in family life. This, in turn, should elucidate the social origins of a related but unrecognized
phenomena: the paradoxical nature of women's domestic power.
In this regard it must be understood that, historically, female-dominated family life was a sphere with no independent
existence. Its sole raison d'être was as a counterpoint to the masculine culture of the "outside world." As guardians of the
family, women were to construct a domestic haven, a moral refuge where men, exhausted and tainted by the lure of getting
and spending, could be restored, at least momentarily, to spiritual virtue and where children were to be sheltered from the
contamination of competition (7, 31, 48). In other words, the family was to become a sanctuary "presided over by
[homemaker] mothers, frequented by [bread-winner] fathers, and inhabited by [housebound] children" (46, p. 310).
But if this shelter of love was to be the antidote for the lure of money, it was not to be its equal. "The business of America
was business," as Calvin Coolidge said a hundred years later, and "women's work," regulated by the rhythms of life and not
the time clock, belonged to the past. It existed as a sentimental alternative, idealized in the popular imagination, but
ultimately degraded and devalued, precisely because it was outside the cash nexus.
If Mom was to preside over home and hearth, it was only because Dad was busy with more important things. In a sense,
it was an in loco parentis arrangement, with unpaid mothers sitting in for working fathers. In fact, in some patriarchal
households, mothers were probably more like parental children than like paternal surrogates. In either case, maternal
authority would have to be compromised, indeed, perhaps disqualified, by such an ambiguous, potentially "incongruous"
(33) hierarchy.
The two spheres, therefore, were not only separate, they were also unequal. And it is this fact, still true and still secret,
that complicates the relations between parents and children and between families and family therapists.

The Clinical Paradox

Even now, one hundred years and two feminist movements later, the hierarchical ambiguities between parents construct
innumerable paradoxical situations for families and family therapists. Consider the following varieties:
 Mom is supposed to be the medium through which Dad speaks, but she disagrees with him.
 Mom wants to be the medium through which Dad speaks, but he has nothing to say.
 Dad, because he is male, is supposed to embody superior skills and judgment, but Mom is clearly more adept at most
things.
 Dad does possess superior skills and judgment, but he deactivates these capacities at home, because family life is
"Mom's concern."
These familiar conundrums are merely particular instances of a generic paradox inherent in modern family lifewomen
are simultaneously too powerful and socially degraded. This dual status not only compromises family functioning but also
challenges conventional family theory, which presumes that in a "normal" family, parents are at the same hierarchical level
(25). This idea may have been a necessary fiction for the development of a rudimentary model of family structure, but it no
longer will do. The truth is much more slippery. For example, the paradoxical dilemmas just cited presume a two-parent,
nuclear family not in open conflict about issues of gender privilege and power. It could easily be argued that the use of such
a prototype is tantamount to setting up a "straw man" [sic], since the cultural ferment around women's issues has reached
into every corner of our society and has itself contributed to the almost 50 per cent divorce rate, which, in turn, has
rendered this kind of normative nuclear family a formation of the past.
In reality, today's couples and families probably vary enormously (and in interesting ways) with regard to their level of
awareness and degree of conflict about issues of sexual politics. Since researchers have only just begun to document,
describe, and analyze the array of these possible permutations (see 3, 12, 42 for some important first steps), we cannot

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know which are the most frequently occurring and clinically significant subtypes. Moreover, without a systemic analysis of
the contradictions associated with traditional gender arrangements, we shall not be able to construct meaningful categories
for comparison. Hence, the traditional nuclear family is the focal point of this discussion only by default, and it is hoped that
others will follow with their elucidation of the emerging variations.
But even with regard to this one particular (fading) family archetype, it is nevertheless essential to reckon with the social
fact that men and women still preside over separate and unequal spheres of influence, and, as a result, power at home
stands in some complex, dialectical relation to power in the outside world. Housework is a good example. One of the most
commonly reported findings in studies of the allocation of domestic chores between spouses is that wives continue to
perform the major share of household tasks, even when both partners work outside the home. A recent study, for example,
finds that working wives do more than five times as much domestic work as their husbands. It also appears, however, that
when women's earnings approach that of their husbands, men do more housework (36)! Apparently "money talks." In other
words, work alone, whether in or out of the home, does not yield domestic power (at least in regard to this issue), but those
women fortunate enough to earn male wages may be able to buy their way into an equal partnership.
Findings such as these suggest that our conceptions of hierarchy and complementarity will have to be expanded to
incorporate the traffic between these social levels. From this perspective, it now appears that "complementarity" has
functioned within the idiom of family therapy much like the notion of "sex roles" within sociology. Both have served to
obscure aspects of power and domination by appealing to the prettier, democratic construct of "separate but equal." Given
such an orientation, the sexual division of labor becomes either a harmonious arrangement of specialization, as Talcott
Parsons maintained (37), or a burden equally oppressive to men and women, as the male liberationists would have it (11).
But this idea is about as illuminating as the suggestion that relations between labor and management can be captured by
conceptualizing boss "roles" and worker "roles."
Clearly, relations between the sexes are neither beatific divisions of yin and yang, nor crude hierarchies of slave and
master. They seem, rather, to contain a paradoxical mix of complementary and hierarchical aspects that can only be
elucidated by locating the psychological dynamics between spouses in a context that incorporates the political and social
relations between men and women generally.
However "complementary" the psychological dynamics between husbands and wives, the fact remains that, outside the
family, men and women do not function as equals. Not only are women economically devalued (they still earn only 59 per
cent of their male counterpart's salary), but they are also economically dependent. Both their standard of living and their
social status are derived through their relationships with men. We know, for example, that the most accurate predictor of a
man's income is his occupation, whereas for a woman, it is her marital status (10).
Thus, marital complementarity must be understood not only as a psychological arrangement between husband and wife
but also as a phenomena structured into intimate relations by the larger social context. Whereas psychologically
complementary relations can be fluid, with two people gracefully shifting hierarchical positions as the situation demands,
socially complementary relations are rigid, resulting in fixed hierarchies organized around social categories like "gender."
These gender hierarchies then complicate the functioning of generational hierarchies, which family therapists have
considered to be the core of family relations.
All this is easily evoked by the maddening opening gambit, so characteristic of many first interviews:
Mother (looking helplessly at therapist): I've told my husband he needs to take charge of our son. The boy needs a
strong father, but my husband won't take the reins.
Clearly, this is a version of the "be spontaneous" paradox, but with an extra twist as the social context enlarges. At the
level of the family, if Mom tells Dad to be in charge and he complies, then she is in charge of him. At the level of the larger
society, however, Mom does not have the leverage to get Dad to comply because she is socially denigrated, if not socially
powerless by comparison. Thus, Mom needs to enlist the support of the socially sanctioned therapist to legitimize her
position.

Sexual Politics in Family Therapy

The sexual politics that organize the family therapy situation are elaborations of this fundamental contradiction. In fact,
the family therapist is really the last in a long line of professionals from whom women have sought legitimation and power.
In the early nineteenth century, for example, middle-class women and Protestant clergymen became allies in a variety of
activities that served to elevate women's social status in and out of the home while solidifying the power and authority of the
church. Later, women became active in the social reform movements that flowered in mid-century. Here again, the
struggles by women for social recognition, esteem, and power in the family merged with the ambitions of another group of
socially sanctioned moral arbiters, this time concerned with the problems of urban poverty (7, 46).
These alliances, like those that came much later between women and mental health professionals, were complex and
uneasy. As long as everyone's self-interest prospered, good will and good works prevailed. But when the aspirations of
women conflicted with the ambitions of their professional allies, things predictably fell apart. In a sense, the social history

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of these relations repeats itself in every family therapy session.

Look, for instance, at the typical context surrounding the initiation of family therapy. Insofar as family life remains
women's sphere, it is women, in their roles as wives and mothers, who typically bring their families to professionals for
help. This constitutes an intrinsic problem for the work ahead because it constructs an ambiguous alliance between the
woman and, in this case, the family therapist. Each needs the other, and it is this very interdependency that makes for
trouble.1
He needs her, first, to gain entry into the private sphere of family life and then to carry, and perhaps carry out, his
message of reform to the rest of the domestic circle. She needs him, first, to legitimize her grievances and observations and
then to help her get her brood to change their ways. The problem, of course, is that his notion of reform may be quite
different from hers, and even if they agree (which, although rarely made explicit, is often the case) his methods for
achieving what may be common goals will be quite different from what she has in mind. In fact, what all this means in
practice is that the family therapist typically uses Mom's extended hand to gain entry into the family and then twists her arm
behind her back to position himself to make the changes they both may want.
One could argue (facilely) that this is a small betrayal in the service of a larger goal, and this is probably what we family
therapists would argue, if asked to think about it, which they are not. Rather, this familiar initial maneuver typically remains
no more than a dimly perceived cause for unease, which, if examined at all, is construed in entirely instrumental terms.
("How can I keep Mom/wife on my side while I convey to the other members of the family that I am not her mouthpiece?")
No thought is given to what such a therapeutic dilemma tells us about the family, even though family therapists are taught
that every constraint on their freedom of movement conveys an important message about how the family is structured.
This striking lack of theoretical attention to such a pervasive clinical event is really a vestige of unprocessed "Momism."
We all think of mothers as gatekeepers, regulating the interaction between the family and the outside world, and also as
switchboards, regulating communication patterns within the family. We depend on them for these services, and we resent
them because of it.
A recent feminist theory argues that this resentful dependency is at the core of an essentially universal experience of
motherhood that is retained long after childhood ends, continuing to distort our adult perceptions (5, 6, 8). We typically see
mothers through the eyes of the eternally angry child within, no matter what our age, sex, or parental status.
The origins of this infantile attitude lie in the social fact that mothering, which is essential to human survival, is the sole
responsibility of women, and in advanced societies, it is the sole responsibility of a single woman in isolation from her
female peers and relatives. It is no wonder then, that relations between mothers and children are supercharged, and since
virtually every adult was raised by a woman, all of us are likely to retain exaggerated images of an all-powerful, fearsome,
and enticing figure, who rendered us helpless merely by contrast.
It is easy to see how this infantile state of mind could be reactivated by the family therapy situation, which subjects the
therapist to intense pressures, envelops him in a total environment, and thereby narrows his field of vision and sense of
options. The social fact of Mom's centrality could then merge with the primitive wish to blame her for all that's gone wrong,
and the result would be some sadistic act masquerading as an unfortunate, but necessary, clinical maneuver.
Mom is, of course, an easy target for everyone. She is at the hub of the wheel, after all, and her very overexposure makes
her more vulnerable. Every facet of her personality is in view, and everyone in the family feels its effects directly. Whether
she is too overbearing or too timid, too critical or too generous, too self-centered or too masochistic, she is flawed simply
because she is a unique individual with a characteristic style that inevitably has its limitations. Insofar as all roads lead to
Mom, her excesses and deficiencies will indeed make an enormous difference in how life flows around her and how her
children develop.
Ostensibly family therapy offers a progressive alternative to this preoccupation with Mom's inadequacies, since we
contextualize rather than personalize her problems in parenting. But for all the self-congratulation that has accompanied
this paradigmatic shift, it remains debatable whether things have improved much for the mothers we treat. One could argue,
in fact, that the blame has simply gone underground, resurfacing as a high-powered romance with Dad.
In this regard, consider the therapist's typical first encounter with father. One of the most common initial impressions is
that Dad is not as competent as his wife in negotiating the therapeutic milieu. For a whole host of reasons (34, 38), women
appear better suited to the unique demands of the psychotherapeutic situation than men, and the tension surrounding this
open secret is usually palpable in the initial session with a family. Both wife and therapist sense the husband's relative
helplessness (which is usually analogically communicated by facial expressions, body posture, and tone of voice), and they
often pick up another message from him as well: "If I am not protected here, I'm not coming back."
Here again is the fundamental paradox. Dad's very helplessness contains the inevitable threat of abandonment, because
his participation is a gesture he can take back, a kind of noblesse oblige. Moreover, Dad tells us in that complex message
that he is risking something by coming at all and that he therefore deserves our protection. In a sense, that is true. As long
as the world of the family is a female-dominated world, Dad's whole-hearted participation in family therapy could easily

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make him feel that his masculine identity and social status as a male are at risk. If he were to surrender the male privilege
that allows him to make his presence conditional, he would become prey to all the little boy fears of engulfment that propel
boys to disidentify with their mothers so early on (21).
So long as he keeps his distance, however, Dad is protected from the unreasonable demands that family members and
family therapists place on his wife. His ambiguous status, "there, but not there," renders him a fictive, as opposed to an
authentic, figure. He is cloaked in fantasy, translated to his children by his wife (who necessarily must distort her subject), a
creature more alive in their imaginations than in their daily world (5). Moreover, Dad's status as "other" necessarily elevates
him above his wife, since he represents an exotic alternative to workaday Mom. Where Mom's real lacks are magnified by
proximity, Dad's fantasied strengths are exaggerated by distance. In other words, Dad is interesting and special merely
because he is different.
It is, of course, this very difference that we family therapists depend on, since the search for alternatives is at the crux of
their work. Thus, Dad's elevated status is conferred not only by the family but by the family therapist as well. Whatever he
does, it is good just because it is new. Thus, the terms of the therapy reproduce, rather than challenge, the family's vision
that Mom has somehow ruined things and that Dad could magically turn it all around.
There is a maddening kind of double jeopardy operating here, not unlike the classic double bind. It is a situation from
which there is no exit and within which there is no way to win. Given the social facts of life, that women are responsible for
families, they cannot ever really "leave the field," nor can they truly step aside to make room for Daddy except with
tokenistic gestures.
There is evidence that we family therapists know this to be true, although this knowledge remains outside of critical
awareness. It is apparent in the contradictory messages we send to mothers. The overt message, "step aside," is
contradicated by the metamessage that we are depending on Mom to bring the family back, to come with the kids when Dad
refuses or is "busy," to promote and translate our ideas, even when they are not in her immediate self-interest, and so on. In
other words, we utilize the very centrality we challenge, we rely on the very traits of character we critique, and in essence,
without realizing it, we exploit women's helpless social position, all in the service of gaining therapeutic leverage.
This opportunistic stance operates at many levels, but at bottom it reduces to the fact that women are typically more
willing to change, so family therapists push them harder. (Think how extraordinarily difficult our work becomes when we
do not have a highly motivated, psychologically minded mother to lean on.)
But what are the origins of women's commitment to, and talent for, treatment? Since family therapists rarely think along
these lines because we tend to grab for opportunities and ask questions later, the quiet desperation behind what is for us a
convenient set-up remains invisible. Women are good patients, especially for family therapists, because their socialization
sensitizes them to the feelings of others and promotes the notion that caretaking is their responsibility, indeed, perhaps their
raison d-être (5, 38).
This exquisite sensitivity to interpersonal nuance and the values that go with it are, of course, the stuff of enmeshment
and worse. But even as we tell mothers to let family members "speak in their own voice" or "not to be so helpful" or to get a
job, we depend on their traditional empathy and ironclad sense of responsibility to get things done. Insofar as a woman's
identity is wrapped up in her ability to nurture, she will do almost anything to "fix things," including the often
disempowering, bizarre, and unnerving tasks suggested by family therapists.
Even the mother who is resistant can usually be pressured into some kind of concessions because she knows that she has
much more at stake and much more to lose if things don't work out than the man she married. If there is no improvement at
home, the 1980 census tells us that Dad will have the luxury of a mid-life crisis and later the chance to form a second family
with a younger woman, whereas Mom is lucky if she learns how to live alone with dignity or gains self-respect as a single
parent managing a household on a drastically reduced standard of living (23, 24). (Like the sexual revolution, the
breakdown of the traditional family has too often meant a new kind of freedom for men and a new kind of trap for women.)

Sexual Demographics
Indeed, the data from sociologists and demographers paint a rather grim picture of women's social options. Whether a
woman is single, married, or a single parent, she seems to end up painted into a corner. Following her from one impasse to
another should be instructive.
First, women have fewer marital opportunities than men because the "age squeeze" makes them less desirable as they get
older, whereas men have a larger pool of women to choose from the older they get (23). Moreover, once married, women
seem to benefit less from the marital state than their husbands (whose physical health improves [2]) and to suffer more
(they are two times more likely to get depressed, for example [22]). Should the couple have children, parenthood will
extract a greater toll on the wife than on her husband (22), and should the wife wish or need to work outside the home, the
likelihood is that her occupational commitments and achievements will threaten the marital relationship, whereas her
husband's successes will enhance it (3).

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Should the marriage end (as almost half currently do), her husband will become single again, and she will become a
single parent. (In 80 to 90 per cent of the divorces involving children, mothers retain custody [11]). At this point, the gulf
between the two ex-spouses expands exponentially. One study of Los Angeles area residents found, for example, that a year
after divorce, women's "economic well-being" (income minus expenses) dropped 73 per cent, whereas their ex-husbands'
showed a 42 per cent improvement (10). Even after seven years, a separate study showed that men were still ahead,
demonstrating a 17 per cent improvement, whereas women were still 29 per cent behind their economic status before the
divorce (10).
The alarming dimensions of this downward spiral in the standard of living for single mothers has brought a new phrase
into sociological parlance, "the feminization of poverty," and along with it a prediction from the National Advisory Council
on Economic Opportunity that "if the proportion of poor in female householder families were to continue to increase at the
same rate ... the poverty population would be composed solely of women and children before the year 2000" (11, p. 172).
Many factors contribute to this dismal state of affairs. Probably most significant is the fact that "women's jobs"
(low-skilled, non-unionized, and part-time) do not pay enough to support a family. Moreover, child support payments,
which should ostensibly alleviate some of the burden, are received by only 34 per cent of female-headed families, and only
68 per cent of those receive the full amounts intended, which are modest in any case (24).
Seen from another angle, the data show that only half the fathers required to pay child support actually pay the full
amount, and 25 per cent pay nothing at all (10). It is important to note here that payment does not seem necessarily to be
related to ability to pay. The same Los Angeles area researchers found, for example, that 75 per cent of the divorced fathers
studied had the ability to pay the court-ordered amount without a major reduction in their standard of living and that
nonpayment was highest for men earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year (10)!
These dreary statistics are a major factor promoting remarriage for women. (Entering into a second marriage is positively
correlated with income level for men and negatively correlated with income level for women [16]). But once again,
women's social options do not equal those of their male counterparts. Although three-fourths of divorced women do
eventually enter second marriages, remarriage comes far more quickly to men, and only few divorced men (16 per cent)
never marry again. By contrast, a substantial minority of divorced women (25 per cent) are "left on the sidelines of the
marriage market" (14), especially those in mid-life when fewer than 12 per cent of women 50 or older remarry (23). In
other words, the longer a woman gives to her first marriage (and therefore the older she is at the time of her divorce), the
less likely she is to marry again.
Significantly, for those women who do remarry, their standard of living is likely to exceed that of their first marriage
(10). That is because the age differential between spouses in second marriages is much wider than in the first, and as men
get older, they get richer. (In first marriages women are typically two and one-half years younger than their husbands,
whereas in remarriages, the gap is five years or more [16]). Apparently there is truth to the common observation that
remarrying men prefer younger (and by implication, more attractive women), and remarrying women prefer older (and
verifiably richer) men.
The picture of marriage, divorce, and remarriage that emerges between the lines here, seems to suggest that alternatives
to marital disappointment typically reproduce and then exaggerate the emblematic contradictions of traditional family
arrangements. The deteriorating relations between divorced mothers and noncustodial fathers, for example, clearly
recapitulate the traditional sexual division of labor. Mom takes care of and controls access to the children (a key source of
her power in marriage and after the divorce), and Dad pays, or doesn't pay, their bills.
In the same sense, remarriage is a kind of exaggeration of the traditional marital hierarchy. The woman enters from an
even more impoverished and abject condition, and then selects a mate even more her age senior, whose economic and
social status far exceeds any that she (or her first husband) had ever achieved. Thus, it appears that social conditions have
the effect of preventing women from leaving marriage (divorce is positively associated with income level for women [43]),
impoverishing those women who do, and promoting remarriage as the apparent solution to this "catch 22." In fact,
remarriage is no solution at all, since 44 per cent of all second marriages end in divorce as well (14).

Epilogue
Set against this social backdrop, the attempts of family therapists to reorganize the arrangements of power and restore a
measure of good feeling to family relations seem both more crucial and more doomed. It should be clear by now, for
example, that bringing fathers back home cannot be the work of family therapists or their wives. If men are to become more
than paying guests in women's households, the social organization of the world of work will have to be transformed so that
both men and women will have the option to change the nature of their participation in, and attachment to, the labor force.
This, indeed, may be happening. While it is still too early to be definitive, a number of commentators are already
suggesting that a gender reversal in labor force attachment may be in progress. Whereas younger women are clearly
becoming more "masculine" in their commitments to a work identity, it also appears that older men may be growing less
attached to their jobs and careers (9, 40). If this tendency becomes a trend, it should lead to interesting changes in the

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rhythms and struggles of domestic life in the years ahead.

It is important for family therapists to be cognizant of these social developments and their clinical implications. By
ignoring the complex interpenetration between the structure of family relations and the world of work, family therapists
tacitly endorse the nineteenth-century fiction that the family is a domestic retreat from the market place economy. To argue
that this boundary between spheres is merely a necessary parsimony because "as clinicians therapists must draw the line
somewhere," begs the question. The dichotomization of these social domains is a mystification and a distortion that masks a
fundamental organizing principle of contemporary family life. The division of labor (both affective and instrumental) and
the distribution of power in families are structured not only according to generational hierarchies but also around gendered
spheres of influence that derive their legitimacy precisely because of the creation of a public/private dichotomy. To rely on
a theory that neither confronts, nor even acknowledges, this reality is to operate in the realm of illusion.
This illusory picture of family life is clearly a legacy of the early, formative years in the history of our field. The postwar
families who formed the clinical basis for family systems theory represented both a culmination and an intensification of the
doctrine of separate spheres. They were more nuclear, more socially isolated, and more gender-dichotomized than any in
previous history. Mothers and children were left alone to construct one another, and, indeed, middle-class children of the
fifties were probably the first generation of children ever to be reared by only a mother, who (all the paradoxes
notwithstanding) had total power over them and over no one else.
In some way, we are still punishing mothers for this extraordinary and aberrant social arrangement. That is unfortunate,
especially since we, as family therapists, have a unique and necessary contribution to make to the development of a feminist
theory of the family. Our training, for example, has rendered us equisitely sensitized to what feminists have called "the
politics of personal life." Indeed, family therapists have penetrated the infrastructure of this metaphor with a special kind of
brilliance.
In this regard, we could add an essential dimension to feminist theory by elucidating the rules of mutual accommodation
that structure social relations among intimates. Without a complex model of the dialectics of power between men and
women in families, feminist thinking could be critiqued for its linearity, leading to a simplistic politics of
"women-as-victims" of men, of society, of envious mothers, patriarchal fathers, and so on. Insofar as feminists are tackling
the more difficult questions, such as how and why women collude in their own domination, can offer a conceptualization
that incorporates Haley's insight that symptoms are strategies for control in human relationships (25). Without confronting
the shadow side of power, the power of weakness, the paradoxical ambiguity of women's oppression will remain obscure.
Moreover, although changing cultural expectations may transform the structure of domestic relations, the dynamics of
those relations remain constant. Family therapists have spent thirty years struggling with the details of those dynamics and
can provide an elegant and subtle notation system for recording the maneuvers and countermaneuvers that are set in motion
by the inevitable pursuit of power between people bound by love. This should be especially useful for documenting the
processes of influence and resistance that are generated between couples and across the generations, as men and women of
different ages and in various relationships take up their positions in an accelerated "battle of the sexes."

But What Is to Be Done?

Whether we can offer people anything beyond the wit of our social commentary is another question entirely. Family
therapy is not social change, and it is hardly self-evident that changes in the power relations between men and women can
be bought for the price of a therapist's fee. Male privilege and female masochism are structured into the psyche and into the
social arrangements of everyday life. A challenge to these structures requires no less than a momentous social upheaval,
and that is now in progress.
In the meantime, as we struggle with the clinical particulars of each family case, we ought to at least be aware of how we
participate in, and what it would mean to challenge, the structures of thought and the structuring of power that keep women
(and therefore their families) trapped in cycles of toxic devotion and recrimination. That is hardly a simple matter.
Women have always been buried in families, and as long as gender remains an invisible category in our clinical work,
they will remain submerged. But if therapy is about confronting what is unspoken, we must ask ourselves how we can get
people to talk about issues so fundamental and so inflammatory that they threaten the structure not only of the family as we
know it but of the whole society as well. Put in more immediate clinical terms, the question translateshow can we work
within the unique configurations of each family system and avoid force-feeding families "politically correct" solutions,
without succumbing to the temptation to avoid the subject altogether by trivializing a fundamental conflict into a series of
separate problems to be solved one by one. (He'll do the laundry on Saturday afternoon if she'll have sex on Sunday
Morning.)
What would it mean, for example, to say to a couple hanging by a thread that they cannot really fight or negotiate as
equals, no matter how perfectly balanced their stalemate appears, because the consequences of a breakup will be far more
catastrophic for her than for him (and that at some level they both know this)? And how do the meanings and consequences
of such a statement vary with the sex of the therapist delivering the lines?

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Indeed, once we have retrieved gender as a category of clinical observation, we ought to ask ourselves to be systematic
about how the politics of a session are shaped by the sex of the therapist. What, for example, are the range of likely
meanings associated with a male therapist siding with a wife against her husband or with a husband against his wife, and
how do they line up against the same maneuvers in the hands of a female therapist? (A male therapist telling a father to
shape up can be a rude awakening, a female therapist with the same message can be just another nag).
Mastering the "gentle art of reframing" is, of course, the key to any viable clinical strategy here, as it is in most family
dilemmas. But no amount of technical virtuosity can transform a female social worker into an avuncular male psychiatrist,
and as this paper has taken pains to argue, status within the therapeutic system, as within the family system, is derived from
social hierarchies structured outside the family orbit.
The point being made here is that the politics of family life and the politics of family therapy are not necessarily
susceptible to transformation by sheer clinical acumen. Certainly as family therapists develop increased critical awareness
of how they participate in reproducing oppressive sexual arrangements, they may be able to develop clinical strategies that
point in another direction. But at this juncture perhaps all that ought to be said is that family therapists might be able, in
some situations, to clarify the conflicts between men and women, thus providing them with an opportunity to look over the
edge of the cliff before jumping. In those final moments, in a quiet space free of rhetoric, each one would have the chance to
decide whether change is possible, whether compromise is tolerable, and whether separation can be borne. In this one way,
even if in no other, family therapists could be enormously useful to people struggling to find a way to be together when so
much divides them. And that, in a phrase, has been our mandate all along.

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443-455, 1980.
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24. Hacker, A., "Farewell to the Family?," N.Y. Rev. Books March 18, 1982.
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Manuscript received November 21, 1983; Accepted December 27, 1983.
1In the discussion to follow, the family therapist will be referred to as "he." Reasons for choosing the masculine pronoun are both
syntactical and theoretical. Since most of what follows involves an analysis of the relations between mothers and therapists, it would
be cumbersome and confusing to use "he or she" and "him or her" in every phrase. Moreover, one might speculate that since
leadership in family therapy has, until recently, been dominated by men, female family therapists would also tend to think "in the
masculine pronoun."

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