ABSTRACT
The palace of social life is believe, grounded in a basic social contract between women, mainly as sisters and mothers and daughters, which helps and constrains each of them to meet obligations to their children and other personal dependants. These ties are logically and perhaps even historically prior to any which involve adult men. Family institutions, in particular marriage, give women the power to bring men into their systems of mutual support, and they must think be seen as having evolved as part of communities' strategies for getting the best possible value out of men. The search for new patterns of conjugality in the sixties and seventies triggered a strong revival of interest in the family, which in the process became redesignated as the patriarchal family, for the whole point of that exercise was to discover alternative forms where men were not dominant.
