Often when considering the topic of women and associations, we are put in mind of women’s associations as comprised of women for the sake of women’s unique interests. This chapter, however, emphasizes major changes within the institution of marriage and thus the voluntary initiation of the family in order to provide a more complete picture of women’s experience of free associations. This pivotal change in the condition of women must be highlighted prior to considering the women’s associations that ultimately brought about serious political change for women through the vote. In some ways, these associations appear to rebel against the confines of family life, but they also relied upon an earlier re-imagining of women’s position in society that was realized through the reimagining of the family association in the nineteenth century. Two great political thinkers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexis de Tocqueville, are highlighted in order to examine these shifting social norms and offer readers a way of thinking about family life as a free association for women. The chapter then turns to women’s associations, which proliferated during the nineteenth century, as this significant democratic reconceptualization of the family took place. In particular, the temperance movement in the United States is highlighted as an exemplar of nineteenth-century women’s associations. Temperance associations had strong links to the suffrage movement, and women began to fight for the vote. The chapter concludes by noting that women’s enfranchisement marked another major shift in family life, with every family now represented by two voting adults. It also marked the public formalization of women as citizens and, importantly, enshrined their right to freedom of association. This chapter ends where many discussions of women and associative civil society begin—in the early twentieth century. This perspective on women’s experience of free associations proposes that a revolutionary change in the nature of family life is valuable to our understanding of women’s unique engagement with free associations.