ABSTRACT
The modern family of sociological theory and historical convention designates a form no longer prevalent in the United States: an intact nuclear household unit composed of a male breadwinner, his full-time homemaker wife, and their dependent children. Feminists intentionally accelerated the modern family's demise. Feminist enthusiasm for female autonomy encouraged women's massive entry into the postindustrial labor market. As postindustrial society became entrenched, many women, perhaps the majority, found their economic and personal conditions worsening. The group bore far greater resemblance to the postmodern family of the imaginary twenty-first-century Joneses than it did to the image of traditional family life that arouses the nostalgic fantasies so widespread among critics of contemporary family practices. The postmodern family is not a new model of family life, not the next stage in an orderly progression of family history, but the stage when the belief in a logical progression of stages breaks down.
