ABSTRACT
Working-class parents and step-parents asserted that biology was largely irrelevant to parenting relationships and that it could be harmful to see relationships within step-families as different from other family relationships. There are dangers of marginalising and pathologising working-class families generally in the premise that 'democracy means discussion'. Notions of 'fairness' seem to be part of a particularly family-based set of understandings and language around goodness and inclusion, even perhaps a 'childish' one, although they may carry overtones of a more publicly based political and legal language around rights and justice. This chapter considers the implications of the findings for theorising the nature of contemporary family life, morality and intimacy. The gendered nature of the invocation of an individualistic discourse has resonance with writings about the content of morality and the nature of contemporary society by social theorists. Feminist criticisms of justice from care perspectives have been directed towards a specific variety: that of the liberal, rational, distributive model of justice.
