ABSTRACT
After a long period of relative obscurity, remarriage and stepfamily life have begun to attract the attention of family practitioners, policymakers, and the public. The demand for information has caught social scientists short for remarkably little is known about stepfamilies. In the 1970s, when I first examined how divorce and remarriage were altering kinship conceptions and practices, I discovered that virtually nothing of significance had been written by sociologists on remarriage since the classical studies of Jessie Bernard (1956) and William J. Goode (1956). Textbooks on the family, replete with discussions of exotic family forms, all but ignored families reconstituted after divorce and remarriage. When the subject of remarriage was treated at all, it usually appeared at the conclusion of a chapter on divorce (Furstenberg, 1979). Often we learned that the return to matrimony resolved problems of divorce. It was as if remarriage operated to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, in the form of a nuclear family, cleverly concealing the cracks.
