Daily Inspiration Quote by Ann Oakley

Oakley’s line cuts with the cool impatience of someone who has watched “family values” get invoked less as comfort than as a disciplinary tool. Calling families “nothing other than” an “idolatry” is deliberately abrasive: it treats duty not as a quiet virtue but as a god we’re trained to worship. The word choice matters. “Idolatry” implies misplaced reverence, ritual, and moral intimidation; it’s not just that people feel obligations, it’s that obligation is sanctified, insulated from critique, and used to demand sacrifice.

As a sociologist who helped reshape feminist thinking about domestic labor and gender roles, Oakley is needling the sentimental story that families are naturally nurturing units. Her target is the way “duty” gets unequally allocated: care work, emotional management, and self-erasure are often framed as love, when they function as unpaid labor and social control. The quote’s provocation is to treat the family less as a private refuge than as a public institution where power reproduces itself quietly, through expectation rather than law.

The subtext is not “abolish families” so much as “stop treating them as morally untouchable.” Oakley’s skepticism lands in a late-20th-century context where second-wave feminism was interrogating the home as a site of politics, not neutrality. The sentence works because it flips the usual hierarchy: instead of duty serving people, people serve duty, and the family becomes the altar where that bargain is made to look holy.