ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what happened to the concept of "family" as it worked in concert with "war" in the so-called war on drugs in 1989 and then, in 1990-1991, in the war in the Gulf. The household seals the space occupied by the family unit, quite literally, from the public space of the streets. The higher a family's income, the more likely it is that a female member of that family will die at the hands of another family member—simply because she is less likely to die on the streets. If, as Christine Stansell suggests, the respectable middle-class family began in the early nineteenth century as an evangelical fantasy and a means to upward mobility, then during the course of the century the fiction appeared to come true. In City of Women, Christine Stansell provides a stark example of exactly how one class brought the abstraction to bear on another in the United States.
