ABSTRACT
Feminist conducts a close scrutiny of the family in the last years and have seen how oppressive it can be for women. The family has long been regarded by feminists as an important location where sexual equality must be won. Through centuries of English and American feminism, marriage and family have been amongst the foremost institutions critiqued. Feminists have found most forms of family prevalent in history and in the present to be destructive of women's equality both within the home and in all other spheres of life, and sometimes of their basic well-being. Ambivalence about families goes far back in feminist thought. Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in the late eighteenth century largely in response to Rousseau's claims that women needed above all to be pleasing to men, criticized the unjust family relations she saw around her. Contemporary feminists have continued to critique existing family forms, though in most cases, like feminists of the past, not giving up on family's altogether.
