ABSTRACT
Family therapists were slow, compared, for example, with psychoanalysts (e.g. Mitchell 1974) to allow the voices of feminist critique to influence theory or practice. Many explanations for this might be advanced. Family therapy got off the ground in the 1950s, when the ideology of the return to ‘traditional family forms’ (i.e. father as breadwinner and mother as home-maker) was in its heyday, following the trauma of the Second World War, and accompanying the need to free up jobs (done by women during the war) for returning male soldiers. During the 1960s and 1970s, when resurgent feminism started to question the traditional roles of men and women and the idealisation of the family itself, family therapy was just beginning to find its feet, to build its theories and to expand its applications. It might be that family therapy, as a relative newcomer amongst the psychotherapies, avoided internal dissension in order to maintain strong boundaries while engaged in establishing itself as a viable new psychotherapeutic approach. We could therefore only allow ourselves to begin to question our practices when we started to feel sufficiently secure.
