Feminist academic Sophie Lewis, whose 2019 book on gestational surrogacy contained a call to abolish biological motherhood, is back with a new manifesto in 2022: Abolish the Family. A laudatory review in The New Statesman seriously considers that society as a whole should “feed, bring, up and educate the child,” and that “the narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great, proletarian family” – words spoken by Soviet revolutionary and theoretician Alexandra Kollontai, who embraced “emancipatory family politics” in large part because of her parents’ unhappy marriage. Kollontai’s intellectual successors – radical feminists and gay liberationists, for example – continually return to her thought, even as the Soviet Union came to see that its own attempts to replace biological ties with socialist kinship failed spectacularly. The notion that the family is a “terrible” place to expect love and care is really an old one, albeit recycled for a generation supposedly embittered by its own experience of dysfunctional family life. But will they choose revolution or reform in the coming decades? The answer depends in part on our response to Lewis’ proposal.
The Mother’s Labors of Love
A common thread that runs through each of the thinkers cited in the review – from Kollontai, to socialist architect Alice Constance Austin (who proposed building system of tunnels to outsource domestic housework), to the 60’s radical feminist Shulamith Firestone – is the notion that domestic labor is an inferior, and unnecessary, occupation for women. This “domestic labor” entails motherhood, which Marxist thinkers declare a sociocultural construct rather than biological fact. And yet, the concept of reducing or eliminating all domestic labor as the basis for women’s emancipation shows itself to be a surface-level reaction to the far more impactful eclipse of the oikos by industrial capitalism. With domestic and care work relegated to the “private sphere,” women were expected to tend to the home and children on their own while men left home to pursue (often equally or more difficult) work. In this context, radical feminists’ arguments are an overcorrection to the hard-lived reality that women were disproportionately saddled with socially devalued work. The solution to the historical dislocation of home and work is not some commune-like arrangement where “women’s work” is tidily concealed from view (and likely farmed out to a servile population) – it’s an embrace of biological parenthood as the basis for life and its wholehearted support by the community.
Community and Responsibility
Far from the assertion that only family abolitionists think “children are everyone’s responsibility,” the truth is that pro-family people recognize the value of the nuclear family despite the dissolving forces of modern individualism and social atomization. They are pro-family because they see that society has become less concerned with bolstering values and institutions which create healthy families. Far from being concerned only with “the narrowly bourgeois love of biological parenthood,” pro-family people, and parents for that matter, desire that families support their communities, and vice versa. Social atomization and fewer economic opportunities are more to blame than misogyny or patriarchy for this state of affairs, which breeds family conflict and trauma. Contrary to Firestone’s assertion that women and children can only be free when there is a “diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole,” it’s when society orients itself toward life that women, their husbands, and children are able to thrive. A society which regards parenthood as a privilege rather than a consumer choice, and children as gifts rather than burdens, will seek to bolster men and women in accomplishing necessary domestic labors while allowing them the space to participate in meaningful community. Seeing as domestic labors are a reality of every person’s life – from the nuclear family to the commune – the call family abolition seems rooted in resentment and the desire to escape responsibility.
Family Sustainability
In time, some members of the younger generation, burdened by workism, a vacuum of meaning, and negative family dynamics, will discover that they do want to start families in spite of their experiences. Those who do will work to reform family life from within. Younger generations who lean into their vocation to parenthood might come to share the outlook of writer Jim Dalrymple II, whose work we have cited here previously. His newsletter the Nuclear Meltdown valorizes the role of nuclear family while realistically observing its insufficiencies in our isolated, suburbanized society. His proposals for bolstering the family range from a reorientation toward the “village” mentality and a rediscovery of the true leisure of holidays. Most notably, he borrows the sustainability language of the green movement and applies it to the family, urging people young and old to view themselves as responsible for future generations’ physical and spiritual well-being. He calls for a focus of energies, funds, and time on building up thicker social networks, living simply, and investing in family life to counteract the consumeristic tendencies which eat away at social cohesion.
Seek True Justice for Children
Lewis and others who fight for a communistic utopia without the natural family have clearly failed to read the signs of history and understand family life as a mere theoretical construct. This is why they actively undermine the taking of personal responsibility for the raising of future generations by biological parents, whom they accuse of selfishness and narrow-mindedness, all while pushing for a top-down system which dehumanizes people and eliminates their first source of identity. Normal people have more at stake in this than the theoreticians who hold such notions: they have children whom they love, and who need them. They have parents to whom they are grateful and seek to help them in old age. Simply outsourcing labor and care work from the natural family removes the loving labors of mother and father voluntarily from the child whose physical and emotional health depends upon them, and deprives the parents of an opportunity to learn the meaning of love and community by extension. “Real justice” comes from restoring to man what is proper to him – his life, his family, his property, his identity. Likewise, it means restoring to a child what should rightfully belong to him: the devoted presence of his biological parents. Rather than shake our heads and scoff at the apparent absurdity of Lewis’ proposal, we need to denounce it for what it is – a dead serious justification for unjust cruelty.
