This essay looks at some aspects of the effects of liberalization on rural women and the family in Asian societies, with a particular focus on India. The author maintains that the “era of liberalization” has neither fulfilled the extravagant promises of liberalizers nor has it been as much of a burden for women as opponents of structural adjustment programs have argued. The author's perspective is that to move ahead from the stagnated development seen especially in South Asian societies, we need to transcend the sterile and politically deadend debates that brand either the state or the market as the enemy and engage, instead, in a clearheaded and value-oriented examination of how and in whose interest to use the market, and what the state should be doing. The author concludes that efforts to change the family in India as elsewhere should move in the direction of democratization. The question is not one of rejecting wider kinship networks and the “extendedfamily aid” that often comes with them, but of ensuring human rights to all family members, so that the cooperation and solidarity shown in family activities becomes a voluntary one, not one enforced by the sheer lack of alternatives (as is the case for so many women).The official “Year of the Family” (IFY) in 1994 was not marked by any major conference such as the women's conferences held in Cairo, Beijing, and Copenhagen, in spite of the fact that the “family values” issue is, if anything, more politically potent than the topical themes of the earlier conferences, namely, population, women, and equality. Perhaps it was more difficult to find a progressive consensus around this topic. As one feminist noted:The IFY jingles about building the smallest unit of democracy at the heart of society...struck discord in the hearts of those for whom marriage is no more than slavery, as slavery is defined in modern dictionaries. The privacy maintained around family life allows the perpetuation of a whole range of violent acts against women, from stripping them of an identity to brutal physical abuse.