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This article analyzes functionalist and normative assumptions about marriage, divorce, family, and gender in developmental models of family life cycle. An interdisciplinary review of the literature in family development, family sociology, and family therapy reveals how a deficit comparison model implicitly informs the discourse in the study of single‐parent families, women who are alone, and the adjustment of women and children to divorce. A feminist critique of family life cycle as the prevailing conceptual model in family development and therapy is presented, and postmodern definitions that deconstruct the concept of family are discussed. Future perspectives for research on family life and form are considered in terms of new action theory that considers divorce as a mode of resistance and change for women and families.

A critical review of the current status of low-income women reveals how patriarchy, violence, and discrimination mitigates against their employment and contributes to their poverty. Myths that fuel prejudice against the poor have led to public policy and welfare legislation based on individualistic rather than structural assumptions about the causes of poverty. Research on the effects of welfare reform reinforces the conclusion that changes in social welfare and policy are necessary for income parity and improvement in the employment opportunities, access, and status of low-income women. A human-capital model and recommendations for macro-level changes in public policy and programming that address the systemic causes of women's poverty are presented.In every nation of the world, the burden of poverty falls most heavily on women and children. Welfare is a gender issue, but so is poverty. In the United States, 19.8 million or 57% of the 34.5 million people living in poverty are women, and 13.5 million or nearly 40% are children under age 18. Today there are significantly more poor families headed by single women than there were 30 years ago. In 1968, 35% of all poor families were headed by single women, but that figure was 53% in 1998 (U.S.

The therapy working group consisted of 12 women who were clinicians and academics with many years of experience in teaching, writing, research, and practice with and about women. We engaged in a very active, intense dialogue for 4 days and struggled to develop a document that would reflect our collective opinions regarding the definitions and tenets of feminist therapy. We had various theoretical orientations (cognitive-behavioral, humanistic, gestalt, crisis intervention, psychodynamic), types of practices (individuals, families, groups, couples), and specializations (abused women, older women, adolescents, minorities, etc.

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