The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship [1987]

Feminist scholars in the past fifteen years have made great strides in formulating new understandings of the relations among gender, kinship, and the larger economy. As a result of this pioneering research, women are newly visible and audible, no longer submerged within their families. We see households as loci of political struggle, inseparable parts of the larger society and economy, rather than as havens from the heartless world of industrial capitalism.2 And historical and cultural variations in kinship and family forms have become clearer with the maturation of feminist historical and social-scientific scholarship.