system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is There Any Argument for the Family

I have been reading feminist philosophy and it is talking against family structures that ultimately are bad for women. Personal I find it  pretty convincing about how ultimately many things in the society such as the family structure with monogamous parents and children is responsible for a lot of the problems and oppression of women. Thus I was wondering if there was any argument against this feminist take on the family, since it seems that arguments for the family rely on tradition and thus are myopic to the problems that women face. Thank you.
gpt
There are many arguments for the conventional, monogamous, nuclear family that is typical of modern Western countries. The fact that this arrangement is taken as commonsense by almost everyone, but those infected by modern academic and social theory find themselves asking whether there is *any* argument for it, tells us quite a bit about the ideological state of social theory.

Standard arguments for the family include that it is natural therefore good, that it provides a protective environment for the most vulnerable in society (children), that it is a haven from the ravages of civil society and industrial capitalism, etc.

Hegel is probably the most notable philosopher to provide an extended treatment of the family, in his *Philosophy of Right*. For Hegel, the family is a form of consciousness, in which the mutual recognition of partners in love acquires a substantial unity. Because the family is the ethical idea in its immediacy, it is constituted on the basis of subjective feeling (namely love, which Hegel regards as natural and essentially heterosexual in this context, because a unification of diverse elements). It is the first moment on the path through civil society to the state, and it ultimately depends upon the state, because its unity, in respect of its basis (subjective feeling of love) is contingent, and requires the necessity of law as support. As the initial locus of *feeling*, the family is indispensable for the education and protection of children, who are the expression of the love of the parents, and whose maturity is the ethical dissolution of the family.