In their editors’ introduction to Stating the Family: New Directions in the Study of American Politics, Julie Novkov and Carol Nackenoff provide an overview that contextualizes, previews, and summarizes the claims made in the assembled eight chapters. The introduction, prefaced with a forward by Joan Tronto, is an energetic call to political scientists to study the family as a site of political development and a locus of political power. The family, these authors argue, is neither natural nor prepolitical; rather, the family is structured by and in relationship to the American state.

The assembled chapters cover several generations of American political development, focusing on key areas of family-state engagement: immigration law and policy, marriage law and policy, and equity-related law and policies like women’s suffrage and Title IX. Asking severally about the relationship of marriage to family, and how the presence of children makes a family, these chapters examine the relationship of family to democracy, the state, citizenship, and economy. Each helps to situate the family as central within American political development, as a way of understanding how both family and state react to and with each other in the creation of policies, norms, and values.

Two chapters focus on the extension of marital status to same-sex couples. Tamara Metz’s examination of Obergefell v. Hodges provides an excellent close reading of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in that case. Metz argues that Kennedy’s language reinforces sentimentality and romantic partnership as at the heart of the marriage arrangement yet does so in ways that reinforce a decidedly unsentimental neoliberal order. Following closely behind that chapter, Ellen Ann Andersen’s contribution shows how public opinion around same-sex marriage supports precisely this sentimentality. Polling prior to Obergefell showed higher voter support for same-sex marriage accomplished for “love and commitment” rather than to achieve “rights and benefits” (Andersen, p. 74). Andersen explains that same-sex couples who sought access to marriage had a more complex view than the average voter. It is especially telling, she notes, that those couples in the most restrictive state legal regimes sought marriage access because they understood the rights and benefits that would accrue to their relationships, spouses, and children as expressions of love and commitment. These couples recognize what Kennedy would eventually write into law: It is within marriage that, absent a state interested in providing it, we access care. As a result, “neoliberal marriage is a vigorously inclusive choice that no responsible person would refuse” (Metz, p. 47).

June Carbone and Naomi Cahn’s contribution to the volume takes a different approach to understanding the emotional valences at the root of neoliberal marriage. They examine how the values of “red traditionalism” and “blue modernism” come into conflict precisely in the understanding of family that underpins conservative and progressive policy preferences. It is not that one party corners the market on “family values”; rather, the family is a site where those values are worked out and worked on. Similarly, Alison Gash and Patricia Yamin’s exploration of Trump era immigration policy shows how conservative rhetoric of the family could not easily coexist with conservative policies that separated women and children from each other at the US–Mexico border. “Images of ICE agents commandeering crying children as they are removed from the arms of their parents,” they write, “are incongruent with the widely accepted belief that Americans value families over all else” (p. 241).

Looking at the values that fathers mobilized on behalf of their daughters in pro–Title IX activism, Elizabeth Sharrow’s chapter argues that “familial relationships, evolving in light of feminist policy, have altered men’s relationships to sex equity concerns.… Rather than pitting men against women, familial relationships give fathers a new understanding of the need for, and the potential consequences of, a future with greater equity for their daughters” (p. 148). She further demonstrates that men entered into equity activism through three primary frameworks: fathers as caretakers, fathers as protectors, and fathers as advocates, each with implications for policy activism. Sharrow’s analysis sheds light on the way that the fathers-as-protectors framework has recently been mobilized in anti-trans activism around Title IX.

Those of us who write about family understand from our scholarly experiences that the work we do has not been central to the field. As Nackenoff and Novkov show in their introduction, using keyword data from American Political Science Review, work about family and motherhood is not frequently published in our flagship journal. When such work is done, it is produced primarily by mid-career/tenured women, often those who align themselves with feminist political theory; work that centers the family is not often the focus of scholars interested in transitions to democracy, in economic policy making, or in social movement mobilization. In large part because scholars have adopted the “separate spheres” ideology—wherein the state and the economy are “public” and the family is “private”—the family is an understudied unit of political life, as is the relationship of politics to the life of the family. Such an approach marks the family as unreachable by the state, while beholden to it.

Notably, Ellen McDonagh’s chapter argues that until women’s suffrage was achieved through Progressive Era politics, “women’s political rights [had] regressed at every period of reform marking the expansion of political rights for men,” specifically because the “separate spheres ideology … located women solely in the feudal family, an institution based on maternal identity, in a private sphere separated from and founded on principles opposite to those of the liberal state located in the public sphere” (p. 187). Beyond the substantive areas addressed by the authors, all the chapters in this volume highlight the fallacy of this public/private split, often using the shifting configurations of family life in response to state policy to illustrate their points.

In their substantive chapter, Nackenoff and Novkov write a stunning paragraph that lists all the ways a Chinese woman’s citizenship status could change depending on the laws of marriage and laws of immigration. The paragraph resonates with much in the chapter on interracial unions and the color line in Antebellum Louisiana by Gwendoline Alphonso and Richard Bensel. These two chapters, in their lists of variabilities relating to marriage, family, and citizenship, show clearly how vulnerable, contingent, and precarious these matters of status are. Family, often felt to be natural, basic, and foundational, is really just a status that rests on precarious grounds of socioeconomic class, legislation that changes with party control, and shifting public opinion.

This variability and vulnerability is a central concern of the contributors to this excellent volume, and the subtext to Nackenoff and Novkov’s call to study the family. There isn’t a coherent vision of the state through time articulated in these chapters, nor a pat story of family formation over the past 200 years of American political development. Rather, the collection speaks a complicated truth: Understanding our political lives and institutions is a messy affair. The family isn’t simple; neither are our politics. Therefore, and importantly, political science approaches to studying and understanding the family—and the state—must be able to sit with contingencies, examining them from multiple perspectives, and through the passage of time. This “new direction” for the field has the potential to help us even better explain what we study.