The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility ‐ By Linda C. McClain

• Author: Karen Czapanskiy
• Published date: 01 April 2007
• Date: 01 April 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2007.00147.x

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 45 No. 2, April 2007 335–340

© 2007 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

Blackwell Publishing IncMalden, USAFCREFamily Court Review1531-2445© Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, 200710.1111/j.1744-1617.2007.00147.xApril 2007452Original Article

THE BOOKSHELFFAMILY COURT REVIEW

THE BOOKSHELF

The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility

(Linda C. McClain) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Reviewed by Karen Czapanskiy

In the world envisioned by Professor Linda McClain in

The Place of Families

, a

metaphorical intersection exists where two apparently parallel streets might cross, at least on

a diagonal. The streets are liberalism and feminism. Where they cross, families, government,

and institutions of civic society would be at work nurturing growing children and supporting

loving adults. Professor McClain’s project is to examine whether the intersection can occur

and, if it can, on what terms. Professor McClain explains in depth how liberals and feminists

have differed deeply on the proper places for government and families. She argues that

both liberalism and feminism must make more of a place for families and that the

objections of both can be answered so long as the center of the intersection is the formative

project of fostering capacity, equality, and responsibility. After exploring her foundation,

McClain applies her thinking to a group of issues affecting contemporary American families,

including welfare reform, marriage promotion, same-sex marriage, cohabitation, reproductive

rights, and sex education.

In brief, fostering capacity means, in terms of children, promoting civic virtue and

providing material care. For adults, fostering capacity involves their intimate associations

and their opportunities to enjoy intimacy and family life. Both families and government

foster capacity. Government must become involved in fostering capacity, in McClain’s

view. When it does, government should “be guided by respect for relevant public values,

such as sex equality and orderly social reproduction, and by principles of toleration and

respect for individual intimate association” (p. 8). Fostering responsibility means allocating

to individuals the opportunity to make personal decisions about sexual intimacy, marriage,

reproduction, and parenting (p. 8). Fostering equality means attending to the equality of

members of a family in respect of each other, particularly with regard to sex and gender. It

also requires attending to the equality of families with respect to other families, whether

on the basis of economic sustenance, gender, or sexual orientation (pp. 5–6).

In her insistence about the importance of sex equality, McClain asserts that, while

political theory accepts equality as a core value, social acceptance of sex equality has been

more ambivalent. In addition, liberal theory boundaries the home against government inter-

vention, and sex equality is sometimes believed to be hostile to the idea of family. As a

result, the issue of government’s role in promoting equality within the family, while not

simultaneously denying the importance of family, has not been the topic of adequate critical

reflection. The better approach, according to McClain, “would be to state explicitly that a

commitment to antisubordination and to women’s equal citizenship is a core public value

and civic virtue, as reflected in federal constitutional and statutory norms, transformations

Correspondence: kczapanskiy@law.umaryland.edu