ABSTRACT
The family in america serves an important ideological and functional relationship to the state. Property, contract, and family law have been called the "three pillars of the civil law". Family law differs from the other pillars, however, in that it has been formulated to regulate idealized families those units that are the sites of socially condoned intimate associational relations. Consistent with the first goal, people should abolish marriage as a legal category and with it any privilege based on sexual affiliation. The new family line, drawn around dependency, would mark the boundaries of the concept of family privacy. The unit would also have legitimate claims on the resources of society. This re-envisioning reflects current empirical and social reality as to evolving family form. The Child is part of the Mother the embodiment of the idea of derivative dependency now hidden in the private family. Mother is a metaphor with power to make the private visible.
