Inside the Castle provides a comprehensive account of family change – and the legal regulation of the family – over the course of the twentieth century. It is a good read. Most chapters center on a case with a compelling story that makes the legal issues understandable and encourages readers to stay interested. The book covers what a traditional family-law course would cover and then some. The chapter on “heart balm” litigation is one of the book's more novel topics. It describes the importance of a cause of action in seduction for jilted lovers and the gradual abolition of such actions as attitudes toward women's sexuality changed. The book adds a chapter on death and probate that lay readers are likely to find informative. It covers the standard topics on marriage, cohabitation, increased recognition of same-sex couples, divorce, custody, parentage, adoption, sexuality and the broad-based social changes that underlie the legal changes. The book consistently reminds us of changes, such as the forty percent American non-marital birth rate, that would once have been unthinkable and offers suggestions for why the changes happened. Yet, despite its breadth, the book is accessible and the length manageable.

The considerable strengths and occasional weaknesses of the book reflect its approach. It is scrupulously evenhanded. It gives mainstream, consensus accounts of the changes it describes. As with any volume of this kind, it is possible to point to topics that merit more coverage (e.g. child abuse or the foster-care system) or statements that seem simplistic. The book, for example, summarizes a four-hundred-page opinion as a defeat for the homemaker spouse because she did not receive fifty percent of the family's assets without explaining that the decision turned more on the valuation of the assets than on the percentage awarded to each spouse. I suspect, however, that few lay readers will care. Selectivity of coverage is inevitable in this type of work; the choices the authors make are defensible.

Of more concern is the book's overarching description of the nature of twentieth-century changes. The conventional account describes the change as one from the separate spheres that emerged from nineteenth-century industrialization, to more companionate relationships in the twentieth century, to increasing emphasis on expressive individualism by century's end. The authors' description of these changes is more balanced than most accounts. Unlike most sociologists, they avoid calling expressive individualism “soul mate marriage,” which means exactly what it sounds like – the dewy-eyed view of a seventeen-year-old that finding the ideal mate will guarantee happiness. And unlike many progressives, they do not describe traditional marriage in terms that sociologist James Q. Wilson concluded ended with the Enlightenment. Instead, Grossman and Friedman provide a more nuanced picture of a multi-step process that gradually gives individuals greater freedom to form, define and leave relationships.

The difficulty arises when the authors use this template to characterize the changes in the family over the course of the twentieth century and to suggest, as most authors do, that these changes explain the greater family fragility at the century's end. This view is misleading because of the failure to acknowledge the growing role of class differences. The authors note at the outset of the volume that they are chronicling “middle class family law”; that is, they acknowledge that the law they discuss disproportionately addresses the circumstances of middle-class couples. Yet the statistics they present often apply to the country as a whole. For much of the century, the compression is appropriate. While the working-class divorce rate, for example, might be slightly higher, the trend lines were parallel to those of the middle class. Only the disproportionately minority underclass stood apart in the matter of family structure. Starting in 1990, however, the trend lines diverge. The divorce rates of the college-educated steadily drop back to the levels before no-fault divorce, while the divorce rates of everyone else continue to rise. Non-marital birth rates follow a similar pattern. This story cannot be the one the authors tell of the earlier changes – a middle-class-led embrace of expressive individualism producing looser and more fragile family bonds. Instead, the middle class is re-creating more traditional and stable family structures while working-class families increasingly resemble those of the underclass. The story of this transformation is still unfolding and it is unfair to fault the authors for failing to guess at its denouement. It does mean, however, that the dominant narrative effectively stops in 1990 rather the book's chosen date of 2012 and that the emerging story of family divergence has yet to be written.