The Policing of Families

In The Policing of Families, Jacques Donzelot, a student and colleague of Michel Foucault, offers an account of public intervention in the regulation of family affairs since the 18th century, showing how this intervention effected radical changes in the structure of what had traditionally been a private domain. Treating the family as a focal point of a multitude of social practices and discourses, Donzelot examines the role of philanthropy, social work, compulsory mass education, and psychiatry in the contol of family life, and describes the transformation of mothers into agents of the state. Donzelot also provides a critique of Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist conceptions of the family and shows how the policies of the state and the professions moulded working-class and middle-class families in quite different ways.