Female-centred families attracted the attention not only of anthropologists but also of policy-makers and politicians. In the United States in the 1960s, as racial tension was growing and the Civil Rights Movement was increasingly drawing attention to the poverty in which many Black Americans lived, the ‘dysfunctional’ family was increasingly singled out as the cause of poverty. In the early 1960s Daniel Moyni-han’s now famous report blamed the ‘pathology of the Negro family’ on the absence of men in the family, the high numbers of single-mother families, and the failure of unemployed men to take responsibility for their families and to provide role models for their children. A study by Stack (1974) of kinship and survival strategies among Afro-American families on a housing estate in Detroit showed that rather than being ‘dysfunctional’, female-centred households and kin networks provided reasonable and rational responses to poverty and racial exclusion. Stack argued that the combination of high rates of male unemployment and a national welfare system which denied benefit to women who were cohabitating with male partners favoured the development of female-centred households. In The Flats, the housing estate studied by Stack,high emphasis was placed upon the sharing of both scarce resources and childcare and domestic responsibilities among female kin and friends. Long-term affective relationships between men and children were encouraged and maintained, but the female-based extended family formed the core of economic activity, resource-sharing and consumption. While this type of kin and household interdependence was in many ways contrary to the dominant American ideology of the conjugal nuclear family, Stack showed that rather than being ‘dysfunctional’ it was a highly effective, strategic response to a situation of poverty and exclusion.