ABSTRACT
Critical family studies were central to Second Wave United States feminists invested in extending to women the liberalist (or “modernist”) project of producing autonomous, self-interested, contractual individuals who owned property in themselves. The assumption, in much of that literature, was that women had to be freed from the patriarchal family to benefit from the liberalist project, which fundamentally involved change in the “public sphere.” Despite the benefits accruing to women (and to minority and working-class men) from the liberalist project, in the United States and much of the West, it has had (perhaps at best) only mixed results discursively. Yet, the scrutiny to which Western feminists subjected “the” family, as a result of that project, has been searing. In Arab studies, with few exceptions (Sharabi 1988; Barakat 1993; Joseph 1999; Doumani 2003; Hopkins 2001; Charrad 2001) neither feminists nor non-feminists have subjected “the” family to such a searing critique.
