"Eventually," Gayle Rubin wrote in 1975, 'someone will have to write a new version of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, recognizing the mutual interdependence of sexuality, economics, and politics without underestimating the full significance of each in human society."² But historians of the development of the family, if not of its origin, have for the most part passed the last fifteen years without paying much attention to this challenge; and in these days it perhaps sounds somewhat quaint. Is there anything profitable for historians of family life in the Marxist tradition? And if so, how might it best be appropriated?