Abolition at the dinner table: “You can’t have a feminist future without abolishing the family.” So goes the argument by feminist writer Sophie Lewis, a woman whose own life story was already incredibly likely to lead her to that conclusion. Lewis describes a father who dragged his family from one country to the next, who regularly lectured his daughter on the innate inferiority of women, and who along with Lewis’s mother “literally divided the house in half” when they divorced, “sealing off doorways and even creating a second kitchen, sectioned off from the original by an improvised partition.” Few things are more inimical to a good life than this kind of sick, perverse domestic destruction: When you’ve witnessed your family abolish itself, it’s pretty likely you’ll internalize that to a significant degree.
Modern feminism—that which has obtained from about the second wave onward—has always been at best suspicious of the family and at worst openly hostile towards it. The current reigning wave of popular feminism, post-third-wave or fourth-wave, increasingly speaks of the family as if it were the institution of slavery, hence the need to “abolish” it, as happened with slavery before it. Sophie Lewis speaks of family and all its trappings in the same way decent people now speak of slavery, viewing it as something not merely morally abhorrent but also repulsive in a very visceral way. “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she’s claimed at one point. Her ultimate argument is for “full surrogacy,” a system she defines as “caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations.”
That might work for some people, like Lewis herself, whose own nuclear family not merely fell apart but rotted from the inside out. Most people, however, prefer the nuclear arrangement, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who grew up in a decent one. Indeed much of radical feminism these days concerns itself with fighting against the thoroughly conservative trappings in which the majority of people seem to prefer to live. The life most feminists envision for women today is by-and-large one in which you pick a “chosen” family, live in an apartment, spend twenty-three years getting your PhD, have a few lesbian dalliances before settling down with a self-proclaimed “male feminist,” shop at vegan-themed bookstores and eat at anarchist-themed bars (which you refer to as a “pub,” just because), and adopt several pit bulls and feral cats before having a non-binary baby at age 37.
Yet in general people seem to want not the highly stylized, performative life of feminism but something arguably more traditional. Much to the chagrin of feminists, most women, if given the option, generally choose what the writer Jennifer Kingson calls the “mommy track,” in which they’ll abjure full-time or even part-time work in favor of raising children; this is true even in countries with extraordinarily generous maternity leave policies coupled with rigorous professional protections for mothers who return to their old jobs after giving birth. A majority of women still prefer to take their husband’s names when they marry (a scant two percent would want their husband to take theirs). Women apparently still prefer to marry men who earn more than them.
There are plenty of exceptions to these preferences, of course, and one of the nice things about our present-day social mores is that people don’t really care if a family deviates from one or any of these traditional markers. But it seems to drive hardcore feminists positively batty that people still choose the traditional path so often. This is why more than a few of them make silly demands for the complete abdication of the family structure, which they think will solve a lot of these other problems, among them what feminists clumsily call “gestational labor.” Lewis herself envisions a world in which the term “mother” is “no longer…a natural category, but instead something we can choose,” which she says will come about from “abolishing the family.” Try running that by a mom holding a newborn in her arms and see how far it gets you.
Trial of the Century - Daniel Payne
Modern feminism—that which has obtained from about the second wave onward—has always been at best suspicious of the family and at worst openly hostile towards it. The current reigning wave of popular feminism, post-third-wave or fourth-wave, increasingly speaks of the family as if it were the institution of slavery, hence the need to “abolish” it, as happened with slavery before it. Sophie Lewis speaks of family and all its trappings in the same way decent people now speak of slavery, viewing it as something not merely morally abhorrent but also repulsive in a very visceral way. “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she’s claimed at one point. Her ultimate argument is for “full surrogacy,” a system she defines as “caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations.”
That might work for some people, like Lewis herself, whose own nuclear family not merely fell apart but rotted from the inside out. Most people, however, prefer the nuclear arrangement, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who grew up in a decent one. Indeed much of radical feminism these days concerns itself with fighting against the thoroughly conservative trappings in which the majority of people seem to prefer to live. The life most feminists envision for women today is by-and-large one in which you pick a “chosen” family, live in an apartment, spend twenty-three years getting your PhD, have a few lesbian dalliances before settling down with a self-proclaimed “male feminist,” shop at vegan-themed bookstores and eat at anarchist-themed bars (which you refer to as a “pub,” just because), and adopt several pit bulls and feral cats before having a non-binary baby at age 37.
Yet in general people seem to want not the highly stylized, performative life of feminism but something arguably more traditional. Much to the chagrin of feminists, most women, if given the option, generally choose what the writer Jennifer Kingson calls the “mommy track,” in which they’ll abjure full-time or even part-time work in favor of raising children; this is true even in countries with extraordinarily generous maternity leave policies coupled with rigorous professional protections for mothers who return to their old jobs after giving birth. A majority of women still prefer to take their husband’s names when they marry (a scant two percent would want their husband to take theirs). Women apparently still prefer to marry men who earn more than them.
There are plenty of exceptions to these preferences, of course, and one of the nice things about our present-day social mores is that people don’t really care if a family deviates from one or any of these traditional markers. But it seems to drive hardcore feminists positively batty that people still choose the traditional path so often. This is why more than a few of them make silly demands for the complete abdication of the family structure, which they think will solve a lot of these other problems, among them what feminists clumsily call “gestational labor.” Lewis herself envisions a world in which the term “mother” is “no longer…a natural category, but instead something we can choose,” which she says will come about from “abolishing the family.” Try running that by a mom holding a newborn in her arms and see how far it gets you.
Trial of the Century - Daniel Payne
