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Feminism comes to a discussion of public/private multiply. They focus on women exclusion from the public life, the historical development between workplace and home, and the distinction between paid and unpaid labor. There is also focus on the dependency of the public on the private. Private work ensures survival for the public arena. Feminists argue that the exclusive realms of family and society are bounded by assumptions about public and private and male and female sex roles. Women are coupled with the family, household, and private spheres "as mother" and excluded from the social, political, moral, and public spheres. Women are simultaneously restricted from being moral or rational agents and situated as inspirational models for morality. Their work in the private sphere makes male public life possible.

Feminisms negotiate these complications either through the inclusion of family in to the public and political realms to make visible the oppression of women within in the household or deny the private sphere in favor of advocating that women make there way alongside men in the public world. Feminism is concerned with acknowledging the personal sphere as a social and political space. The slogan "the personal is political" asks that the domestic sphere and the roles of mother and housewife be acknowledge within a set of social and political relations.

Frederick Engels argues that the restriction of women to the household, or private sphere is a result of private property attained by males. He argues that prior to patriarchy there existed egalitarian societies with equal division of labor. With the domestication of animals, herding, and animal husbandry came private property. To ensure security of private property the monogamous, patriarchal family was created to ensure that man belongings stayed within his biological offspring. Wives provided a private service and are excluded from public or social spheres where men have power (Lerner, 1986: 21). Women oppression is linked to private property and the creation of the monogamous, patriarchal family for protection of family stuff through bloodline. Materialist feminists wish to dismantle the biological/nuclear family in order to tease out the labor stratification, which leads to women toiling without recognition or pay.

In Classical Liberal political philosophy the private sphere is made up of a biologically determined social unit. The public realm, on the other hand, is a complicated, bustling arena of human social and political interaction wherein the laws of justice and equality are necessary for the pursuit of freedom. Justice governs the public realm where adult men deal with adult men by making rational decisions. The private realm contains no such decision-making, and deals solely with instinct and is so governed by natural law. Justice, equality, and freedom are possible only in the public spheres. Some contemporary liberal theory assumes that the patriarchal family is itself a just unit and focuses its concern for justice in the private realm on household income. In this sense, families are treated as social and economical units. There might be injustice or inequality between families, but not within families. Also, the Hegelian distinction between the state and the civil society fails to make room for the private life. Private spheres are left out of civil society. Equality and justice are impossible in private spheres.

Some feminists have followed this line of reasoning by asking for equality and recognition of women in the public sphere, while disregarding the private sphere. Simone de Beauvoir argues that women have been trained to be more concerned about their bodies then their minds. The private or domestic sphere is merely a construction to keep women out of the mental/social/political/public interactions of men. She argues that women must reject that exclusion by entering the public sphere as free agents with equal intellectual capacities.

The question of liberation from patriarchy complicates family/society. The domestic sphere is a place of caring, nurturing, and supporting, but on the other hand it is an invisible place of unpaid labor, rape, violence, isolation, and exploitation of women reproductive abilities. On top of the problem of safety in private families is the concern about "equality." If women liberation requires abandonment of family for the social sphere, then this kind of equality positions society as above family. As Luce Irigaray argues "The demand to be equal presupposes a point of comparison. To whom or to what do women want to be equalized? To men? To a salary? To a public office? To what standard? Why not to themselves?" (1993: 12). It seems that equality as a liberation strategy further jeopardizes the familial sphere by clamoring to the public arena as the sight of comparison

Radical feminist, Shulamith Firestone argues for a revolution against biologically determined sex roles which restrict women to the home. Another view held by Kelly Oliver suggests rethinking the social as being able to incorporate the nurturing, caring domestic labor within the home in order to rethink the family as social. Not as a social unit, but as a set of social relationships which center on loving and nurturing rather then on distance, formality and violence. Feminists concerned with reevaluating the family as a social body argue that women, in being "liberated" from the family lose one of their only means of being cared for and nurtured. The family as a site of social interaction causes a rethinking of the social as well as the familial on the grounds that it suggests that the nurturing, caring, informalities of family life, are indeed social.

I look at two different feminist perspectives about the family. Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex holds that the family is largely at fault for restricting women's abilities. Her revolution calls for undoing gender in areas of reproduction, heterosexual love, and especially the family. Kelly Oliver, on the other hand, in Family Values discusses the way the family sphere is constructed through the nature/culture and public/private dichotomy as a constant rivalry between body and soul, mother and father, child and adult. She argues that in a time of "family values" rhetoric, we need to reconceptualize ethical ways to talk about families.

Firestone argues "The patriarchal family was only the most recent in a string of primary social organizations, all of which defined women as a different species due to her unique childbearing capacity" (1970: 74). For Firestone the nuclear family must be destroyed through revolution, as it is a secondary realm supported by mythologies about women and children and designed to benefit men,. She theorizes the way children and women are kept in the familial realm and continually oppressed through a series of myths. She argues that childhood should be added to the feminist project as women and children share common oppressions. Like women, children have no voice of their own and are condemned to being childishly silly and not taken seriously, much like women are treated as overgrown children still lacking in adult rational capacity. "The revolt against the biological family could bring on the first successful revolution, or what was thought of by the ancients as the Messianic Age. Humanity's double curse when it ate the Apple of Knowledge...that man would toil by the sweat of his brow in order to live, and women would bear children in pain and travail can now be undone though man's very efforts in toil" (1970: 242). Undoing strict sexual differences which exclude more then half the human, Firestone thinks will allow for another garden of Eden, paradise on Earth. If things stay as they are, it will lead to our own suicide.

Kelly Oliver, asks, as does Firestone, where do people receive love in the nuclear family? The family consists of an animal-body mother and a No-Body Father and children in between who seek the love of an abstract father and social knowledge only by avoiding the love of animal-body mother, because her love is that of nature and is secondary to cultural desires of man. Mother's closeness to bodily functions, the intricacies of menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause have positioned her within the realm of nature. She is all body and no abstraction. She is, then, empty of social knowledge, and becomes the very antithesis of culture. Her child must recoil from her, and from the body if he/she is ever to become social. "Our images of procreation and sex, and of maternal and paternal leaves us with an absent nobody father and an animal-body mother neither of which are capable of allowing the infant/child to feel love" (1997: 4). The family is a place of war, of sacrifice, and seems to contain more hatred and avoidance then love and acceptance. The family is a battlefield where children are unable to learn to feel loved because they are constantly disconnecting from Mother's antisocial body in order to get closer to father's social, abstract non-body.

Who takes care of women who work the double shift? Where is the protection in the private sphere from violence, rape and abuse? Women are left in their natural state of serving men. Women are excluded as all-body and no abstraction. The invisible boundary that keeps the private sphere a place of animal instincts with no hope for justice, and thus no safety or health for women isn seen by further excluding family life from public or social life as that place of exclusion.

Feminists positions towards the family differ, whether the family is a site to be reclaimed or destroyed are widely claimed and opposing feminist views. I here take on a possibility that might change the outcomes and developments of such arguments. Kelly Oliver, like Chodorow and Gilligan, argue that the family is not an institution that should be destroyed, but rather that it is one wherein the relationships need to be rethought. Rather then advocating the dismantling of family, we can consider renegotiating master narratives that suggest that sexual difference is a matter of biology. We should rethink assumptions which tie women to nature, body and matter, and therefore to the private household, and the ideas of social contract which reflect a perception of human nature. On top of all of these, we need to rethink the mother-child relationship as one that is social between two sentient, feeling beings.

Oliver's discussion of the war between the sexes is extended to the fetus and maternal body. Mom is the passive container taking the man's seed and existing as the house for the individual. Paradoxically, women as nature's hostile environment are threatening chaos and anarchy. The fetus is in constant struggle for its life as an individual. Oliver discusses the medicalized gaze, which passes over the mother as subject in and of herself, and locates her only as the carrier of an overtly important potential social being. Mother must be controlled: her reckless instinctual desires mean the destruction of baby's life, and thus the depletion of family life. The woman's life is viable and important for the sake of and only for the sake of the potentiality of the autonomous agents she might bear. The woman as a life giver becomes cultural destroyer. In patriarchy, the wombs must be controlled, defined and bounded by cultural, abstract ideas. Women's bodies, containers for healthy wombs, are, like nature, subject to relentless cultural exploitation and domination. Where does the love and tenderness felt between human bodies fit in the rigid hierarchical "cultural" family?

Oliver suggests that the mother-child relationship be rethought as the most primary human bonding that creates human sociality. She suggests that the entire notion of what it means to be social be rethought in terms of a family that is a site of growth, nurturing, and love rather then the violent sphere wherein subjects fight against nature to become individuals. Unlike Firestone's proposed revolution against the familial sphere, Oliver suggests revolution in thought towards those societal assumptions that isolate the family as a site of violence and fear where the struggle between body and no-body wrecks the lives of children.