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Unsettled Times for American Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Calvin Morrill
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Abstract

In Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (2014), Sandra Levitsky reveals how an enduring ideology of family responsibility and a decoupling of social support groups from organized advocacy constrains mass legal mobilization to address long-term elderly care in the United States. This essay argues that American families have entered an unsettled period linked to social inequality, young adult living arrangements, immigration, and institutional shifts related to LGBTQ families, workplace-family conflict, and the criminalization of elder abuse. These changes to the family may create the conditions for questioning the ideology of family responsibility and new possibilities for collective action with potentially contradictory meanings and lines of action, including politicization and legal mobilization.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , Winter 2018 , pp. 249 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2018 

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