ABSTRACT
This essay surveys the contributions of feminist scholars to the history of the family. In particular, it examines how and why the fields of family history and women and gender history have often sat in tension with one another. The essay argues that the most significant feminist interventions into the history of the family resulted from the globalization of the field in the 1990s as postcolonial and feminist scholars challenged the universality of the Euro-American family model. Feminist scholarship has revealed the historical diversity of family forms and critically interrogated the power of normative family ideologies to shape history, using the history of the family to recast a wide range of other historical master narratives about slavery, imperialism, race, class, and state formation. The persistence of anti-feminist myths about the timelessness of the patriarchal family, especially in popular discourse, presents both a challenge and an opportunity for feminist scholarship.
