REVIEW: Rethinking Family

September-October 1997

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, an adviser to the Center for Public justice is one of the editors of, and a contributor to, Religion, Feminism, and the Family (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Although not a public policy book, several of its chapters on work, women's public roles, and parenting deal with important contemporary issues.

The book provides helpful background reading for today's political debates that rage between opposing camps of activists with quite different convictions about how to promote the family. Valuable chapters on biblical, Jewish, and Christian views of the family precede a section of six chapters on the historical and contemporary context of family, religion, and feminism. Several final chapters compare Asian views of the family and of women's roles.

The 20 authors of this scholarly volume do not share a common viewpoint, so the reader should not expect to find in it a sustained argument for a single thesis. Van Leeuwen explains in her introduction that the book's purpose is "to address the relationship of various forms of feminism to the structure and functioning of families; to examine whether there is an inherent conflict between families as defined in the past and the current goals of feminism; to explore what kind of ethic can best promote gender justice while strengthening family life and the family as a societal institution; and to explore what religiously based feminism can contribute to the resolution of the above questions."