This important new book creates new terms for thinking about gender and generational relationships. In so doing it recasts conventional understandings of the family as an institution for organizing labour and consumption.

Delphy and Leonard present their wide-ranging theoretical discussion alongside a comparative study of the family in urban and rural areas. Theoretical innovation is consistently matched by empirical analysis of the family in diverse settings.

Classic analysis of gender relations and patriarchy under capitalism

Close to Home is the classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women's liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether "bourgeois" and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women's movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure.

Rachel Hills's foreword to this new edition explores how Christine Delphy's analysis of marriage as the institution...