Women and Family Life: Introduction

Abstract

Understanding motherhood—the shared concern of the papers that follow—hardly exhausts the theme of Women and Family Life, but it raises a complex of issues that are crucial to the future of women and families in our society. These are not narrowly “women’s issues” (as if there were such a thing), since they affect all family members; and they are not issues whose significance ends at the borders of the family, since they concern the capacities and possible forms of fulfillment of women (and, indirectly, of men) in general. Nevertheless, the context of motherhood is surely an appropriate point at which to consider aspects of these larger issues, since, given our patriarchal inheritance, this has been the point of much debate and struggle over the proper roles of women in society and the forms family life should take.