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In this scholarly book, Donzelot, a psychoanalytically oriented sociologist, traces the historical development in France of attitudes, customs, practices, and laws involving the family. He makes a central point that psychoanalytic concepts have prevailed because they offer regulatory but noncoercive approaches instead of the heavy-handed solutions proposed by other groups like the Marxists and feminists.
In the first chapter, "The Preservation of Children," the author notes that beginning in the eighteenth century, physicians and other authorities questioned the educative customs of the century, particularly the utility of foundling hospitals, where 90 per cent of the children died; the rearing of children by nurses; and the artificial education of rich children. Investigation of the widespread neglect of children by the middle and upper classes who turned the care of their offspring over to nurses, who often resented their work and mistreated their charges, played a part in the publication, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, of books concerned with the rearing,