As with all of the social sciences, the study of marriage and the family began long before it was distilled into an academic specialty. Socrates mused about the family, and Plato, in what was perhaps man's first venture into "family policy," argued that the family would have to disappear as the price for estab- lishing his Republic. Plutarch, Chaucer, Milton, Marx, and Freud each spoke his piece on the subject.
It was not until the 1920s, however, that, thanks largely to the pioneering...