In this excellent study of how the family as an institution provides the foundation for multifaceted federal policies, Patricia Strach turns the spotlight on the way the private sphere of domestic relations is anything but separate from that of the public sphere of the state. As she convincingly argues, family policies are scarcely limited to welfare provision, child support, or family leave. Rather, they encompass a broad spectrum, which she illustrates by focusing on how they are central to immigration, taxation, and agricultural legislation. In her view, it has been a mistake for political scientists, therefore, to underestimate the way family norms permeate federal laws because lawmakers consistently use the family as a means for achieving policy goals. Thus, the objectives of her book are to answer two main questions: 1) How do policymakers employ family in the policy process? And 2) what are the consequences of employing family broadly in public policy?

Strach defines the family in terms of kin relations, leaving it up to policymakers to decide whether those relationships are determined by biological connections, marriage, adoption, or social parenting. She argues that to implement policy goals, federal policies in general rely on nongovernmental actors, such as corporations, nonprofits, organized religion, and last but not least, families. The latter have slipped under the radar in the analyses of most political scientists, however, because the family typically is viewed as a “natural,” prepolitical institution, universal in some form to all societies, and as an almost sacrosanct sphere of personal life that policymakers aver disturbing or intruding upon. This is a mistake, however, Strach argues, because the family is the “means” rather than the “ends” of most policy processes (p 11).

One of the most valuable dimensions of Strach's analysis is her use of a policy-feedback model to explain the centrality of the family to the policy process and her references to historical institutionalism perspectives. Drawing in particular upon the work of Theodore Lowi, John Kingdom, and Paul Pierson, she examines the consequences of public policies, once they are in place, showing how their consequences often have an impact far greater than might have been anticipated. Using the family as a means for achieving policy goals, therefore, has policy-feedback effects on key elements of the policy process, including the definition of who is eligible for benefits, how the administration of policies will be implemented, and how decisions will be made about normative ideals (p. 14). As she notes, for example, if one consults the Federal Register, which is the publication of rules and regulations for the enactment of public policies, family words make up 9% of the entries, occurring at a rate of approximately 55 entries per week. What is more, these references to the family extend far beyond such family-specific policies as family health and well-being (p. 33). The consequence of using the family as a means for achieving a wide range of policy goals is that those public policies then have serious effects on virtually all American citizens and residents, given the universality with which people are identified on the basis of their familial statuses (p. 17).

The core of Strach's book is her case studies of how family definitions are used as a means for defining immigration, tax, and agricultural policies. As she notes, family status is an accident of birth, totally opposite to the American principle of individual equality and individual merit as criteria for participation in society. Yet when it comes to immigration policies, for example, as she points out, the family has been the basis for determining membership in America since 1924 when Congress passed the first permanent numerical restriction on immigration. As she discusses in Chapter 4, after this law was in place, “family became the primary criterion by which foreign nationals qualify to immigrate to the United States,” a principle that remains little changed to this very day (p. 61). So, too, is the family basic to the way the American state collects taxes, though this is a more recent phenomenon, not in place until World War II, according to Strach (p. 93). The individual income tax, as she argues, today is much less about individuals and much more about family households, much to the chagrin of the “true” individuals, those residing as one person in a single household. The tax code, for example, subsides the education of children and relies on the family to administer tax benefits for members of the military and other defense entities, such as the National Guard. As she points out, the tax code allows armed forces personnel to exclude from their taxable income those expenses incurred for the education, evacuation, and separation costs of family members, which amounts to almost $3 billion a year. In this way, not only does family status define eligibility for tax breaks, but servicemen/women also get a tax break on their income solely on the basis of being a family relative to someone else who had financial expenses.

Strach's analysis of the “family farm” (Chapter 5) brilliantly illuminates the way norm, ideal, and symbolic policymaking converge to determine agricultural policies. As the author notes, the family farm entails in the minds of legislators and the public much more than an economic enterprise. Rather, it is viewed as producing better citizens, as Thomas Jefferson is famous for asserting at the very founding of the American state. To get at the meaning behind the family farm, she coded the first hundred years of electronically available stories in the New York Times (1851–1950) for citations to family farm. She found that it is a concept that refers to a specific locale, an occupational background characteristic of a person, and as a distinct category of agriculture. The latter emerges as a political precept, a valuable type of farming to be preserved. However, too often market forces erode that goal, even while legislators preserve the language of the family farm. The result, as she shows, is a growing policy gap between “larger and larger business-oriented (family) farms and the normative ideal of the family farm” as originally conceived (p. 157).

All in the Family is an important addition to the field of policy analysis, particularly for those having an interest in the policy-feedback model. Strach's unusually careful and thorough analyses of three major policy areas—immigration, taxation, and agricultural policies—are excellent case studies that support her contention that it is time to focus on the family as a foundation of a wide array of policy areas. This view complements feminist scholarship that has long challenged the separation of the private sphere of the family from the public sphere of the state as artificial in the first place. At times there is a somewhat tedious exposition of the literature and at other times a somewhat simplified summary of major books in the field. Such minor concerns, however, in no way overshadow the overall value of the way this book draws attention to an understudied and extremely important perspective: the use by policymakers of the family to achieve policy goals and the consequences that this has for us all.