Neglected Stories: The Constitution and Family Values

In a powerful challenge to the belief that the Constitution has nothing to do with the individual freedoms that comprise family rights, Peggy Cooper Davis argues in Neglected Stories that the constitutional amendments after the Civil War reflect a profound appreciation of the political, social, and personal worth of family autonomy.

She draws upon what she calls the "motivating stories" of the Fourteenth Amendment to show that the Reconstruction legislators who sponsored it understood family...