All in the Family

The award-winning historian Robert O. Self is the first to argue that the separate threads of that realignment - from civil rights to women's rights, from the antiwar movement to Nixon's "silent majority," from the abortion wars to gay marriage, from the welfare state to neoliberal economic policies - all ran through the politicized American family. All in the Family is a revelatory narrative about the activism on the left and the right that reshaped postwar America. With authority and nuance, Self shows that when we disagree about gender, sex, and family, we are really disagreeing about equality, power, and money - in essence, about the nature and role of government itself. As Mark Schmitt put it in his glowing review in The Washington Monthly, Self, by demonstrating that economic and social issues are one in the same, has rewritten recent American political history "from its most basic assumptions."