FEMINISM, FAMILY, AND COMMUNITY

...This is a serious charge and I intend to defend it...

...I began these reflections on feminism, family, and community by honoring the integrity of my grandmother, recalling, as I did, Virginia Woolf s prescient cry to the women of her generation that the education of their uneducated mothers and grandmothers must have had "great virtues as well as defects" and that "we should be extremely foolish if we threw away the results of that education or gave up the knowledge that we have obtained from it for any bribe or decoration whatever...

...Our people's" way of life was threaded through and through by a populist pietism—a deeply rooted animus against experts ("big shots" to my grandma), the too powerful ("Pride goeth before the fall, and some of them guys are gonna fall hard, just you wait"), and the too rich ("It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God...

...the absorption of childrearing "functions" by everybody, or by a public bureaucracy, or by a private sector whose enlightened entrepreneurs would meet a social need and garner a profit by going into what one Marxist critic nicely dubbed the "Kentucky Fried Children" business...

...The feminism I have in mind bears little resemblance to that "major shift" in thinking on the family some claim has taken place in Betty Friedan's The Second Stage...

...In a widely circulated essay by Laurel Limpus on "Liberation of Women: Sexual Repression and the Family," the family was declared "the central agent of repression," inculcating "both the subservience of women and sexual taboos...

...But that is precisely what feminist and radical protest grounded in "possessive individualism" refuses to recognize...

...Contract theory is a static view: it presents a picture of consenting, rational adults—a world in which no one is born and no one dies...

...In affirming the dignity of the human subject, beginning with the needs of children, social feminism challenges irresponsible corporate power and a politics of group self-interest, for both run roughshod over the needs of families...

...I write as someone who has been involved in the politics of the feminist movement since the early 1960s, someone who characterizes her own work as made possible in part by the intellectual ferment feminism has generated...

...Ordinary citizens see in all this yet another assault on those social forms that help their lives make sense...

...And this is why notions of a social compact that are different from the dominant public ideology in a bureaucratic state, whether capitalist or communist, hold out the possibility of radical critique...

...Only then can we set about recasting a vision of the family as central to any humane way of life...

...The solution to this dilemma is not to join Friedan's chorus for more day care, which implicitly accepts an economic system that cannot provide decently for its families, but to challenge 448 that system...

...Thus far feminists and radicals have failed to provide a compelling vision of an alternative society to grip the imagination and gain the adherence of these citizens...

...Cults moved into the vacuum created by the "thinning-out" of community and family ties, even as they further eroded those ties to preclude any outside locus for human relations...

...443 fact that a major thrust of early feminist rhetoric was a dramatic insistence that the family was "the enemy...

...As more and more areas of social life are subjected to decisions made along the lines of a narrowly construed theory of policy science, it is families and the remnants of traditional communities that can preserve meanings and embody relations that cannot be settled by impersonal standards...

...For women, the promises of liberalism were slow to come, including their incorporation into the reigning definition of "the person" as a being with an identity separable from that of others—whether one's spouse, one's family, or one's community...

...My aim is to contest, not to abandon, the grounds of tradition, a terrain thus far handed over to the right...

...The unhappy history of the past several decades tells a different story...

...A compact is no contingent agreement but a solemn commitment to create something "new" out of disparate elements—a family, a community, a polity —whose individual members do not remain "as before" once they become part of this social mode of existence...

...They do not love you...

...Children, old people, ill and dying people who need care are nowhere to be seen...

...And we could cite many other examples...

...But, as I begin, I find that the image of a strong woman, my grandmother, supplants all other visions, wipes out abstract ideologies and theoretical models...

...But this will not do, finally, for there is no way to make a community out of "possessive individuals...

...None of the values of "our people" mesh neatly with the "needs" of capitalism, nor with market images of human beings...

...I see her instructing her grandchildren in the crafts that create things of beauty and utility to provide envelopes for our bodies, warmth for our beds, and food for our tables...

...it is, instead, the reaffirmation of moral imperatives and their insertion into the heart of feminist politics...

...There was instead, waged by these pietists, many of them pacifist, a struggle that "began and ended in the privacy of people's homes...

...But, to repeat one of Freud's favorite quotations, "La theorie c'est bon, mais ca n'empeche d'exister...

...If it is the case, as Carol Gilligan has argued, that women have a distinctive moral "voice," emphasizing concern and responsibility for others, feminists should be among the first to preserve the sphere that makes this morality possible and to determine how best to extend its imperatives to serve a less-than-humane public world...

...The presumptions that in order to have a revolutionary or feminist consciousness one must disconnect oneself from particular ties, from what Jane Addams called "the family claim," are correctly perceived by members of working-class and traditional communities as destructive of their way of life...

...Yet the ties of such organic communities have been seen by those progressive movements that grew out of Enlightenment rationalism and liberal myths of historic progress as precisely what we all need to be "liberated from...

...This is a recognition Antonio Gramsci seems to have come to toward the end of his life when he wrote, in a passage of exquisite pathos: How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's parents...

...Feminism of the sort I propose recognizes that there is no final resolution to the twin goals of individual freedom and social good...

...To recover what Simone Weil called our "need for roots," we must first give up the 446 hollow notion that all families or religious institutions reinforce the ideology of the wider society...

...the single parent exhausted by the double responsibility for home and a job...

...For there, and at great risk to themselves, Le Chambon's men, women, and children did just the opposite...

...Unfortunately, the prevailing norm for public identity in liberal America has become almost indistinguishable from its predatory variant of "possessive individualism...

...the husband and wife, now grandparents, who have spent 40 years of their lives together...

...If, finally, the aims of a feminism guided by the values of current society, the needs of individuals for long-time intimate ties, and the attainment of some notion of the social good are all compatible, what has all the fuss been about...

...they clash at nearly every point...

...Feminist protest that sought the elimination of this sphere of traditional femininity was understandable when it was a response by women to conditions of their identities that had grown problematic under the pressures of modernization and capitalism...

...Then it is worth pondering the proposed solutions: creating some unspecified "higher form" of the family...

...That, historically, has been the mission of women...

...Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), pp...

...A kitchen is a private, intimate place...

...My now-yellowed copy of Women and Revolution, a "newspaper of revolutionary women's liberation," dated May–June 1971, outlines in bold letters its "program" on family, education, and production: The institution of the family is inherently reactionary and helps to maintain the capitalist system...

...The vision I propose opens the way to a transformed notion of community that repudiates the unacceptable poles of narcissistic self-absorption, on the one hand, and single-minded, overweening commitment to "the Cause" on the other...

...The Jim Joneses of this world prey on persons who have fallen into despair or confusion...

...It would be tedious to repeat in detail all the charges against the family, but a reminder is necessary...

...instead, human beings who were frightened by a world increasingly out of their effective control, concerned to preserve what they saw as traditional values imperiled by liberals and radicals, got caught up in an ideology that sought to return to some imagined Good Old Days when men were men, women knew their place, children kept their place, and all was well...

...Already weakened by market forces that eroded community ties and severed work from community life, the American family, by the 1960s, was a vulnerable target for social criticism and personalpolitical protest...

...The right has been able to portray itself as the defender of family life in part because of the early and dramatic hostility of many, though not all, feminists and radicals to all traditional social forms...

...My body, my self' is a necessary corrective when communities overwhelm the individual or stifle dissent...

...The standpoint of "possessive individualism" —a term I owe to the political theorist C. B. Macpherson—dovetails perfectly with markets and fails to consider the emotional and social needs the family continues, however fitfully, to fulfill...

...Feminists who reject the terms of our society are in the best position empathically to assay the powerful symbols that inspire familial, religious, and community loyalties...

...and the four college kids who have rented a house together for the fall semester...

...It is important to remember that militant right-wing reaction did not create our current troubles...

...It indicts an economic system that denies families a living, family wage and that forces both parents into the labor force, often against the will of the woman who would prefer to be with her children but must, instead, work at a low-pay, dead-end job just to make "ends meet...

...so was Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference with its base in Southern black churches...

...This free-market model, translated into feminist protest and cultural revolt, becomes either the ideology of the "how to get yours" versions of feminism or, more "radically," the ideology that proclaims all constraints on individual expression to be coercive...

...I shall argue that things that exist—such as the family—incorporate values that implicitly challenge corporate power and antidemocratic, managerial elites, and that this potential can be strengthened...

...it is a refusal to embrace the standard liberal agenda of more provision of social services to ameliorate the destructive effects of a socially irresponsible corporate structure...

...Another manifesto depicted the new mother as a pitiful creature descending into a condition of terminal social decay, imprisoned in the home, which "is perhaps the basis of all evil...

...that it inhibits wholehearted political and social commitment...

...Within such a perspective, 445 all human ties, including marriage, must be construed as starkly contractual—supplanting marriage and communities as social compacts...

...Yet the tradition that ties these people to the land also makes them profoundly suspicious of the "progressive" force represented by capitalism...

...Unless we recall at least some of these charges, we will fail to appreciate the complex interaction between protest and reaction...

...For the need to write this piece derives from my discontent with the way "the family" has been treated in much feminist and radical argumentation since the 1960s, and with the way "community," while celebrated, has remained mostly an empty term—for there is no way to create real communities out of an aggregate of "freely" choosing adults...

...But this world view remains willfully blind to the phenomenon, documented by social historians, that anticapitalist struggles have been waged by human beings determined to defend their particular historic identities, not by "homeless" masses in the grip of such notions as "sex-class...

...Friedan's vision of the family embodies an accommodation with the corporate and political structures most deeply implicated in the breakdown of family ties in the first place...

...In an argument that eerily replicates radical claims that attachment to the family vitiates commitment to "the Cause," Jim Jones rejected a request by two members of his doomed cult for a Thanksgiving visit to the family of one of them in these words: "It's time for you to cut your family ties...

...There were no macho heroes, no Maquis members engaged in guerrilla tactics...

...Those who find any analytic comparison between certain sorts of radical protest and the theory and practice of cults unsavory, should reflect for a moment on the similarities between the views of the family propounded in each instance—that it is part of an oppressive structure inimical to liberation and the Cause...

...To throw the honorable mantle "family" over every ad hoc collection of persons who happen to be under one roof at the same time is to diminish the genuine achievements of family men and women who have retained their commitments to and for one another...

...So we get an ideal of nonbinding commitments, with particular appeal to the uppermiddle class, the mobile, and the well-educated, served up as a radical repast...

...in it there are no uniforms, no buttons or badges symbolizing public duty and public support," writes Hallie...

...Families are a part of the enemy system," one of Jones's henchmen declared...

...An untempered liberalism would be unendurable...

...For my grandmother, the "I" of the self was always a "we," located within a dense web of human ties...

...But the obsession with "self' that is one hallmark of much radical protest offers no opposition to the terms of market society...

...They don't understand this Cause, and therefore you cannot trust them...

...Instead, I shall embrace a revitalized form of family life and community as one way to break the destructive hold of market images on feminist protest...

...The entire community committed itself to resist the Nazi occupation of France by rescuing Jews, giving them food, shelter, and safety at risk to their own lives, providing them with false identity cards and helping them escape into neutral Switzerland...

...In the concluding section of this essay I shall draw feminism and traditional notions of family life into a mutual relation in a manner that does not see earlier terms of women's oppression as the only way to restore family life...

...She could no more think of herself outside the tissue of "unsere Leute" than she could fly...

...Feminist critics of family life were joined by a variety of (mostly male) cultural radicals...

...The editors of No More Fun and Games reduced childbearing and rearing to terms of crude possession...

...Those feminists and radicals who have faced the fact that they have failed to gain allegiance to their cause from the very people in whose behalf their struggle is ostensibly being waged should consider this world and understand its potential for social opposition...

...The feminism I seek is not reducible to a clever strategic move...

...Orthodox Marxist feminism, according to Jane Humphries, in her critical essay "The WorkingClass Family: A Marxist Perspective,"* views the family through a lens labeled "functional requisites of capital" and depicts mothering as a kind of hapless mimickry of production, the "reproduction of a future commodity labor power...

...Mocking the efforts of parents to provide security for their children, often under such difficult conditions as those depicted by Sennett and Cobb in The Hidden Injuries of Class, Laing denounced parental action as a debased "protection racket...

...The Solidarity movement in Poland is animated by profoundly communal and religious values...

...this protest has failed to demonstrate convincingly how intimate social relations are to be sustained if individualism continues to erode the social foundations upon which individuals are nourished in the first place...

...This family concerns itself with those who have gone before and those who are to come after...

...Another frequently sinister alternative to family and community is presented by dozens of cults and cultlike groups...

...Males did not dictate these decisions...

...In defining the family simply as the place "you come home to," Friedan defines it out of existence...

...Most American citizens see themselves, first and foremost, as family men and women and members of communities, and much of their energy is devoted to keeping these families and communities alive...

...197-222...

...There were, of course, always feminists who had deep reservations about these arguments, but they were made by such influential theorists as Kate Millett, for whom the entire society was but the oppressive, patriarchal family writ large, with women cast as universal victims and an oppressed class, or by Germaine Greer, who enjoined women who would be "free" to leave their homes and families in pursuit of the untrammeled life...

...Unlike social-contract theories, the compact ideal revolves around the varying needs of human beings over the span of their life cycle...

...The kind of family arrangement Friedan celebrates as exemplary (dual-career professionals on flexi-time, but often requiring paid help) is possible, at best, for the top 10-15 percent of the American population...

...It was a quiet struggle...

...What oozed into the vacuum created by the breakup of community and the breakdown of families were the forces of right-wing reaction and a bewildering smorgasbord of cults, human-potential movements, and therapeutic options for those who could afford them...

...This family stands as one barrier between human beings and the flattening out of their social world under the demands of untrammeled selfinterest...

...Such sleight of hand blunts the edges of conflict and diffuses political debate...

...The social compact is a different notion from that of contract...

...A second luminescent image also asks that I "attend" to it...

...It would be inaccurate, and self-serving, for feminists and radicals to see all this as no more than thousands of Americans being manipulated by the right around such issues as the family...

...She could never see herself through the lens of some abstract universalism like "class...

...One sign of hope is the attempt by many men and women, not all of them professionals, both to sustain strong family ties and simultaneously to struggle toward more egalitarian relations between husband and wife...

...Now, in practice, contractual society remains linked, in ways that go unacknowledged, to older notions of the social compact...

...Women are especially oppressed by the family...

...It sees human beings as social but not as so oversocialized that they emerge as passive reactors to external stimuli...

...So far, feminists and other social critics have failed to tackle the moral issues posed by the crisis in American institutions, most importantly in the family...

...Let Freud have the final word: "La thivrie c'est bon, mais ca n'empache d'exister...

...Even a liberal feminist such as Betty Friedan, in her "first-stage" incarnation, referred to the home as a "comfortable concentration camp" and celebrated, as an alternative to suburban housewifery, not a transformed vision of the human community but women's absorption into the exciting world of those "able, ambitious" men who went off to the city and "kept on growing...

...The most widespread reaction to the crisis of the family is the embattled retreat embodied in such groups as the Moral Majority...

...The book includes an extensive bibliography of political treatments of the family...

...forming a cult, a commune, or a postrevolutionary society, in which no one has an "exclusive" relationship with anybody...

...Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant, has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of intellect, of mere magical calculation...

...Each nuclear family exists in isolation from the rest of society and, thus, weakens the class consciousness of the workers...

...Harry Boyte observes that "the basic theory that saw revolutionary consciousness as an abstract universalism, a rootless cosmopolitanism, and that saw anticapitalist insurgency as growing from radical deracination continues to hold sway over the left...

...The term my grandmother uses to describe her people is unsere Leute, "our people," a people without a country but with an authentic historic identity, the Volga Germans...

...The terms under which individuals act in the public world are thoroughly permeated by market values that undermine possibilities for a shared life of civic virtue...

...Social feminism of the sort I propose places children in the center of its concern—children surrounded, as they need to be, by parents or their permanent, not temporary, substitutes...

...It may be that none of this commitment to family and traditional community should persist, not in 1982, not according to certain ideologies...

...Behold, the new woman as the old man...

...Orthodoxies holding that this village and its families, like all villages and families, are merely performing decreed functions for the larger social order cannot explain Le Chambon...

...But family critics failed to come through on what should have been an essential part of their agenda: they did not articulate viable, humane alternatives to replace what they proposed to reform or "smash...

...Within this frame, where the individuals are "free" only insofar as each is the sole "proprietor" of self, the only acceptable human relations are those calculated to yield maximum utility...

...That my grandmother's image emerges so powerfully is appropriate...

...The pity is not that women reflect an ethic of social responsibility but that the public world has, for the most part, repudiated such an ethic...

...Women's world arose on a template of concern and care for others...

...But the end-point of this feminist argumentation, whether radical or liberal, is ironically self-defeating, for it requires that women, in the name of feminism, embrace the terms of a public life that was created by men who had rejected or devalued the world of the traditionally "feminine" with its "softer" virtues...

...Unless or until this happens, the right will retain a powerful opening wedge into popular consciousness, for ordinary people love and fear for their children...

...the young couple struggling to raise their family and to make ends meet in an inflationary recession...

...In Michael Walzer's words, "What made liberalism endurable for all these years was the fact that the individualism it generated was imperfect, tempered by older restraints and loyalties, by stable patterns of local, ethnic, religious, or class relationships...

...If we dare to hope for a future, one coherent way is to articulate a vision of feminism and a radical politics that does not require that either feminism or radicalism be feared or despised by decent, ordinary people...

...Instead, they tended to reiterate as dogma the notion that if people were no longer dependent on families, they would get together to demand radical social change...

...Her logic 447 dictates that she put on a par with one another the swinging single in an "adult residential village...

...An alternative to the feminist protest that seeks women's full absorption within the market society must make contact with women's traditional social sphere...

...Conservatives addressed themselves forcefully (though often dishonestly) to those cultural issues posed most dramatically in the 1960s...

...Right-wing defenses of the family can only be countered by a feminism that agrees that the family is a prerequisite for any form of social life and that a particular ideal of the family is imperative to create a more humane society...

...By "family" I mean the widely accepted, popular understanding of the term as having its basis in marriage and kinship, involving links between particular persons that cannot be reduced to instrumental terms...

...if it is possible to love a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself, by individual human creatures...

...Theory is good, but it doesn't prevent things from existing...

...I know that what keeps the fires of her life burning is the drive to pass her heritage of wisdom, piety, and goodness on to her great-grandchildren...

...If a feminist case for the family is to bear any critical weight, important conflicts between popular understanding of the family and attempts by a variety of groups to redefine it in a way that accepts nearly any social arrangement human beings conjure up as "families" must not be evaded...

...Yet through this "kitchen struggle" a few thousand human beings were changed, irrevocably, by their resistance, as they spared hundreds the ultimate terror of nazism...

...The family, as a socioeconomic unit, is oppressive to its members...

...In their understandable preoccupation with the status and role of women, feminists, until recently, were too little concerned with the impact of social change on whole families...

...The ideal was that free individuals, in pursuit of self-interest, would also be mindful of higher duties as citizens of a political community...

...To reclaim the best in America's traditions and history is to rediscover the popular democratic heritage: our nation's civic idealism, our practices of mutual aid and self-help, our religious wellsprings of social justice...

...In retrospect, much of this criticism has the air of "hit and run" and is made by radicals who refused to acknowledge any of the legitimate human needs for intimacy and security imbedded and answered, however imperfectly, within the traditional family...

...I mark her pride and her intensity, her conviction that she has lived a good and a productive life...

...Nor is this an argument against day care...

...My call, finally, is for a rethinking of terms that have tended to overschematize the world as one of either/ors: either traditional family life or careerism, and so on...

...Rather than denying women the meaning their traditional world provided, even under conditions of male domination, feminists should move to challenge a society that downgrades femalecreated and -sustained values...

...For the remaining 85 percent we get the reiteration of a pretty standard liberal agenda—more day care, more reliance on socialengineering "experts," and, mirabile dictu, the final "transcendence" of any conflict between "self-realization" and "social good...

...Liberal society opened up possibilities for persons to "relocate" themselves, as civil society grew more open-textured, to move away from older ties and constraints toward personal identities that are self-defined and chosen...

...Calls for "smashing" the family, or its dramatic transformation in order to bring it in line with a feminist or left-wing revolution abstractly conceived, helped to invite the reaction we now face...

...From the moment of birth," he declared, "when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love . . . . " Families were a bunch of "gangsters" and homes were sites of "reciprocal terrorism...

...The hard truth we have now come up against is, simply, this: to the extent that reformers and radicals see family and traditional community as reactionary by definition and repressive by nature, to that extent they have bought into a one-dimensional image of human beings...

...Familial love and parental concern got redescribed by Laing as devious forms of violence...

...The evidence we have of what happens to children deprived of attachments to specific adults bears out that we are talking about a prerequisite for authentic human existence...

...Within the social compact, community members, ideally, share values that are sustained by moral suasion, not enforced by coercion...

...Blood 444 ties are dangerous because they prevent people from being totally dedicated to the Cause...

...American history and tradition," writes Boyte, like that of any nation, embodies contradictions between rapaciously individualist, democratic, and authoritarian elements...

...If Gilligan learns that women now have a greater ability to identify with others, to sustain a variety of personal relationships, and locates those qualities and capacities in women's involvement with children, friends, and communities, feminists must think about what would be lost if we gave up this realm altogether in the name of an abstract ideal of liberation...

...Decisions that were turning points in the struggle took place in kitchens...

...The right's portrayal of feminist and radical antifamilialism is of course drastically overdrawn, but there is just enough truth to make the charges seem plausible...

...But this should not obscure the * Humphries' essay appears in The Family in Political Thought, Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed...

...This pietism cautioned against judging things by appearances only, stressed responsibility to and for one's life as a social life lived among others, advocated going the "extra mile" (the Good Samaritan parable) and tempering justice with mercy (the Prodigal Son...

...449...

...for her, always, "peoplehood" was paramount...

...women and children were centrally involved...

...Married women were called dishonest "prostitutes" for, unlike real prostitutes, they were in bad faith about what they were up to...

...They sometimes even recognize in such views an extension of those market forces that have nearly annihilated older forms of social existence and replaced them by atomistic ways of life...

...A woman choosing motherhood signifies that she has not "achieved sufficient maturity and autonomy and is seeking a hopeless fulfillment through neurotic channels...

...We know—the evidence on this score is overwhelming—that children incur an assault to their humanity if they suffer from neglect, from the uprootedness that comes from being "cared for" by no one in particular...

...The overall effect of all this "actualizing" of selves is supposed to be a wider good, for modes of radical protest indebted to classical liberalism implicitly embrace a notion of an "invisible hand," operating to transform self-interest and personal freedom into a social benefit...

...First, a few reminders of the way in which the family was singled out by powerful voices 442 within middle-class movements for social change—feminist, radical, "psychological"— as the institution most deeply implicated in the oppression of all people but of women in particular...

...Within the family of which I write the nourishment of humanity takes place at every point in the life cycle...

...It is inseparable from ideals of civic virtue and retains a hold on working-class, religious, and rural culture...

...Any viable human community must have, in its ranks, an important segment devoted to the protection of vulnerable human life...

...True, there were, and are, feminists of all sorts who refused to jump on the antifamilial bandwagon...

...To skip over these matters by celebrating widespread social breakdown as evidence of vital social change is to trivialize profoundly important questions...

...Psychological radicals found in R. D. Laing a guru who proclaimed that all human beings, having been raised in families, were "half-crazed creatures...

...My version of a feminist perspective that makes a case for family ties, unlike Friedan's, refuses to build either familial or feminist alternatives on the shaky sand of accommodation to the status quo...

...These ties of community were altered forever by the twin forces of liberalism and capitalism, emerging historically in tandem and realizing, in practice, awesome possibilities for both good and ill unthinkable in older social formations...

...But responsibilities for children are paramount...

...Counterculture protesters sought escape from their uptight families in drug experimentation and communal living that soon ran ashoal on its own inner contradiction—a simultaneous commitment to individual freedom (to "do your own thing") and total community...

...If we fail in this effort, we are likely to see more of the defensive reactions of right-wing movements and the destructive possibilities of cults...

...To Marx and• his orthodox followers she and her people are "rural idiots," for they formed a peasant society and most of them remain farmers...

...Several months ago, I read a remarkable book by a moral philosopher, Philip Hallie, who told the story of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the "goodness" that happened there during one of the darkest moments in Western history...

...that it exists to perpetuate an "enemy" system...