Chapter 2 recounts how social scientists were already fretting about the family early in the century. The institution, according to sociologists through the late interwar period, was especially vulnerable to the disorganization wrought by modern social change. Concern for the family's fate took on a new, international cast in the early Cold War period, in conjunction with the rise of demography as a cross-disciplinary field. In the contest with the Soviets, the drive to modernize the “new states” had, as its demographic dimension, a concern for large family size. The claim that economic development, and insulation from socialism, hinged on fertility control was advanced by demographers, many but not all housed in sociology. By the mid-1960s, a domestic-facing research landscape was gathering momentum, supported by government and foundation interest in the family's role as transmitter of inequality. The domain of family demography, a resource-intensive specialty clustered in cross-disciplinary centers, spread throughout the remainder of the century—dwarfing other claimants, including Gary Becker's economics of the family.

This chapter reads the feminist fiction of the 1970s through its interrogation of the relationship between gender and the credit economy. The first section offers a theoretical account of the ways in which the languages of credit have been deeply gendered, in both the anthropological traditions of Mauss and the critical traditions of Marx. The second section explores the ways in which these gendered languages of both money and the gift were played out through liberal and conservative feminism of the 1970s, as women were being trained to understand the limits of their own place in a system of exchange. The final two sections examine how feminist fiction offered a counter-narrative. It explores both the rejection of accounting as strategy of selfhood in the consciousness-raising fiction of the 1970s and the articulation of a more radical alternative in the feminist science fiction of the decade.