“Abolish the family” is the title of a long one analysis in The new statesman by Erin Maglaque, who reviews the book of the same name by Sophie Lewis (Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation).
“Family is a terrible way to satisfy our cravings for love and care,” writes writer and scholar Sophie Lewis. The solution? Abolish them ”, writes Meglaque.
The central theme of the book is the “liberation of nursing and care”:
“The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, is privatizing treatment. The legal and economic structure of the family unit transforms love and intimacy into abuse, possession and scarcity. Children are privately owned, legally owned and economically totally dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – childcare, cooking and cleaning – is hidden and devalued, done for free by women or domestic workers with shockingly low wages ”.
The author thus joins the classical demands of Marxism and socialism: the nationalization of children.
“The abolition of the family challenges us to take seriously the idea that children are everyone’s responsibility, not just their parents. This idea has a long history, which Lewis traces in the disordered stories of activists who try to live according to emancipatory family policies ”.
Furthermore, Meglaque lets other extremists who indulge in the ideology of abolishing families have their say:
“In the 1960s, radical feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that the liberation of women and the liberation of children are inextricably linked and can only be achieved by ‘translating the role of pregnancy and child rearing in society as a whole'” .
At the time, it was one of the first LGBT lobbies to demand the same thing: “The gay rights movement organized a leaflet campaign at the United States Democratic National Congress in 1972, calling for the abolition of legal parental rights their children and the establishment of ‘free childcare centers, open 24 hours a day, in gays and lesbians can share the responsibility of raising children’ ”.
Living in lies and persevering in lies seems to be the common moth of the enemies of family and education. Nobody – not even children – should be awakened from the sleep of their own delusion by the facts of biology, like B. that there are only two sexes, that the family is the best school of love and preparation for life, and that marriage between a man and woman is unique and sacred.
Meglaque is enthusiastic: “Both feminism and abolitionist politics challenge us to imagine the unimaginable: ‘changing the world’, as the philosopher Amia Srinivasan wrote, ‘beyond recognition’. An arduous task. It may be easier to get started in your country; easier to get started. “
