ABSTRACT
Feminists have always connected individual lives and experiences with social and cultural (hence political) issues. Following in the footsteps of earlier failures to connect the psychic with the social (Reich in the 1920s and Laing in the 1960s providing perhaps the best-known examples), we should not, however, be surprised to learn that it has never proved easy to draw the links between the two. Both sides of the equation shift, and the connections fall apart, with the pressures of changing times, leaving the study of personal life and politics once again in their separate spheres. We can see this in the shifts which have occurred in feminist thinking about family life, and the differing critiques they have offered of familial ideology and relationships.
