Sumitra Shah said:  
>Twenty-five years ago, Gary Becker published Treatise on the family (1981),   
>based on his 1965 paper "A Theory of the Allocation of Time". It gave a strong  
>impetus to the feminist critique of the neoclassical tool kit.  
  
  
Why did it do that?  It seems quite straight forward and never claimed to be   
an actual description of how families behave or make decisions but some sort   
of "engine of analysis" to mix schools of thought that could be used to help   
rationalize specific "facts" about the world in which we live.    
  
Laurence Moss