I focused on work, motherhood, leadership, intimacy, and citizenship and suggested that adopting some socialist policies could more effectively promote women’s autonomy and happiness in the twenty-first century.
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skeptics and haters have always scoffed at visions of a better world, especially if they might benefit women.
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the “status quo bias.” People prefer things to stay the same so they don’t have to take responsibility for decisions that might potentially change things for the worse.
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Patrilineality denotes a set of social customs that confer primacy on the father’s family line.
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Patrilineality is why fathers still “give the bride away” to the bridegroom during the traditional Western wedding ceremony, and it’s why about 70 percent of American women in 2015 and 90 percent of British women in 2016 still took their husband’s name after tying the knot.
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Patrilocality means that a new bride must leave her family and move into her husband’s household, usually with or near his family (think of Elizabeth Bennet moving from Longbourn to Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice).
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our deeper history of patrilocality means that men are expected to be breadwinners because a patrilocal culture assumes that the father must be the head of the new household and therefore primarily responsible for its provisioning.
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and passionate friendships,
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the social psychologist Eli Finkel challenges the idea of the “all-or-nothing marriage,” highlighting the importance of having “other significant others” in our lives.
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“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” said Albert Einstein in 1931. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”47
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Instead of paying a premium for privacy, what would happen if we chose to reorganize our lives to maximize our social connectedness?
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co-living keeps rents low by increasing shared livable space. Bedrooms and sometimes small bathrooms remain private, but living rooms and dining rooms are communal. Building one large kitchen costs less than building dozens of individual kitchens and these savings get (at least theoretically) passed on to residents.
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in Paris, a group of twenty older women created a néo-béguinage called the Maison des Babayagas,
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In general, American cohousing often retains a more explicit commitment to autonomous, owner-occupied households, with fewer obligations for collective labor, distinguishing itself from the much derided idea of “communes” or “cults” that populate the American imagination of cooperative living.77 As of 2017, more than a hundred and fifty cohousing communities flourished across the United States, many of them like the community at Two Echo in Maine, where people built their own homes on a property that they purchased in common with their neighbors.
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Not everything was rosy; other kids who grew up in American cohousing communities complained about the lack of privacy, the constant gossip, as well as of the racial and economic homogeneity.
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Imagine the advantage if those we lived near agreed beforehand on a set of protocols to handle any future conflicts. In a cohousing community, residents move in knowing the rules and come with a commitment to a more collective ideal of living together.
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Some might find it easier to buy a shared house or property and live together with a group of close friends, Golden Girls style. In
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pairs. A growing number of women now (anonymously) admit that they regret having kids, despite the social outrage they face for challenging pervasive stereotypes about motherhood.
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By making early childcare a socially provided good, we can ensure that children born into all families—no matter what their economic situation—enjoy the education and the emotional attention necessary to build a more harmonious society.
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In my earlier chapter on housing, I looked specifically at various utopian visions for cohabitation with nonconsanguineous others and how living together with larger groups of people can bind us in quasi-familial types of relationships, or what some people call “chosen families.”
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While many of us freely join our finances and intermingle our possessions upon marriage or in order to demonstrate our status as domestic partners, this practice only rarely occurs with our friends, neighbors, classmates, or colleagues with whom we maintain clear boundaries.
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If a wealthy firstborn son died without leaving a male heir, his money and properties automatically transferred to his younger brother, and thereby regularly to the Church. This led the historian Laura Betzig to propose that part of the reason the Catholic Church strictly enforced monogamous marriage was to further its own financial interests.
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non-monogamy still
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For millennia, women and girls—who are not the source of the problem—have been cut off from their kin networks; bartered, traded, or sold; rendered dependent on their fathers and husbands by legal codes and religious injunctions depriving them of opportunities to support themselves; and prevented from exercising basic control over their own bodies, so that one class of men can hoard resources that might otherwise be shared. Once these underlying dynamics are exposed, it is only reasonable to begin wondering whether there might be a better way of doing things. This is why utopians have long considered the nuclear family an important site for challenging the political and economic structures that produce status and resource hierarchies in the first place.
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we have to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions: Are we still perpetuating the monogamous nuclear family out of the illusion that biparental care is optimal, out of the fear of potential male violence or the perceived need for male resources, or because our religious traditions and state institutions define it as “normal”? Are we clinging to an outdated model of the family that served specific economic purposes because we are on autopilot? Or because we feel uncomfortable deviating from society’s expectations of how we should or shouldn’t arrange our most intimate lives? And what would a better kind of family look like anyway?
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August Bebel, who also viewed the monogamous nuclear family as a prison that trapped women by making them economically dependent on fathers, husbands, or sons.
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Rather than treating significant others as the sole source of affection, validation, emotional support, and sexual satisfaction, Kollontai hoped that young Soviets would collectively evolve beyond the need for socially imposed monogamy once they lived in a more equitable and cooperative society. Kollontai recognized the ubiquity of jealousy and possessiveness that people felt when they fell in love. Kollontai also accepted that infidelity, abandonment, and unrequited love caused people great emotional distress, and that passionate romantic love could drive people to do outrageous things. But she believed that people would be less wounded by betrayal or rejection if they received affection and support from a wider network of colleagues and friends.
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Kollontai wanted the Soviet state to promote a culture of robust platonic relationships. “Friendship is a more sociable emotion than sexual love,” Kollontai once said. “You can have many friends at a time, because there are different strings which vibrate in contact with different people.”
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In terms of our mating practices, we have a wide variety of potential models to choose from, models that all have long histories: including celibacy, serial monogamy, “complex marriage,” platonic pair bonding, polygamy, polyamory, and open non-monogamy.
consanguine and nonconsanguineous adults.
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An increasing number of single parents are also co-parenting with non-romantic partners, a trend often referred to as “platonic parenting.” Like platonic marriages, platonic parenting can involve two or more adults who agree to legally commit to raise a child together. Co-parents
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Daniela Cutas argues that platonic co-parenting or multi-parenting might actually be better for children because adults will tend to choose their potential co-parents more rationally than they choose their romantic partners.
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Militant Optimism
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“militant optimism,” a social and psychological commitment to imagining a better world and striving to make it real. Rather than thinking that historical processes lie beyond our control—that history happens to us—Bloch’s three-volume rumination on the politics of hope proposes that people actively produce history every day through the collective actions of those living through it as an ever-contingent present.
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In a similar way to how we collectively believe in paper money, many of us also embrace the fiction that the way we organize our private lives is the only way available to us. Even if we understand in the abstract about the pressures parents face, the strain that child-rearing places on romantic relationships, the high divorce rate, the prevalence of child abuse and intimate partner violence, and the very real possibilities of our own or our partner’s long-term unemployment, disability, or death, we replicate the domestic form that makes us the most vulnerable to these problems because it is convenient and because that’s what everyone expects of us.
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what matters most is taking the journey and considering the kinds of changes that might make our domestic lives less isolated, more flexible, and more ecologically sustainable: things like universal childcare, cooperative living, ethical education for self-reliance and critical thinking, shared property, and family expansionism. I’m not saying it’s easy to change these things, but the path to change lies in the continued struggle. As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once explained: “Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.”
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In terms of the architecture of our minds, hope is to the future what memory is to the past. If you have a good memory, you have the ability to remember specific details of events that occurred long ago.
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Hope, on the other hand, is the mental ability to imagine the future; to project forward a perception of what might come to pass and to orient yourself to those contingent possibilities.
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C. R. Snyder, one of the leading psychologists who did research in this area, proposed that “hope is defined as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.”
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people who are good at hoping are those who can set clear goals, can ponder multiple ways of attaining those goals, and muster the willpower to pursue them in the face of obstacles or the specter of disappointment.
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“hope training” can combat depression, anxiety, and stress.12 Most hope therapy originates from C. R. Snyder’s work and includes a variety of mental exercises such as hope mapping, guided daydreaming, hope journaling, and other techniques that allow people to clearly visualize specific goals (both great and small), to consider potential obstacles (both internal and external), and then unleash their imaginations to conjure up multiple pathways to how those obstacles might be overcome, not so different from the blue sky thinking that scientists do when faced with an intractable problem. One
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Hope differs from optimism because the latter is just a belief that everything will work out well, whereas hope is an active thought process that affirms our ability to influence the future course our lives or societies will take.
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This brings us to hope as an emotional state that exists on a spectrum from hopefulness to hopelessness. For Ernst Bloch, the opposites of hope are fear and anxiety.
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How many people in unhappy relationships stay because they are afraid of being alone? The fear of not meeting someone else overrides the possibility of meeting someone who might make them happier. Similarly, hopes for changing the world for the better get clobbered by fears of potentially making it worse.
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In a world of real or imagined scarcity, we arrange our domestic lives to protect ourselves against an uncertain future, hoarding as many resources and privileges as possible. In a society with less precarity and with resources more equitably distributed, we will worry less about hustling to make sure we have a bigger slice of the pie than those around us.
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If we lived in wider networks of people who shared their resources, we would become less precarious. Both processes are interdependent. It may be that we will geoengineer our way out of the climate crisis, and that one day we will all share unlimited, free solar power; enjoy universal basic incomes funded by our collective ownership of the robots and algorithms that will do most necessary labor; and live in real democratic societies where “material needs no longer exist,” but none of that is possible without fundamentally rethinking the basis upon which we organize our intimate lives to free us from selfish individualism.41
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This doesn’t mean that we will lose our individualism. It does mean that the ways we mark ourselves as different and interesting will be decoupled from how much those markers increase our value on competitive labor or marriage markets. Personal branding will be a thing of the past.
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Each one of us, right now, has the power to start building a different world, beginning with our own families and communities. There are countless things you can do to cultivate change in your daily life as it is. If you are in a monogamous pair, try to spend more time with your non-couple friends and make sure your partner does the same. Nurture all sorts of lateral relationships by finding novel ways to share with your neighbors and colleagues. Get back in touch with old friends. Chat with people at the grocery store. Daydream.
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If you have kids, let them spend more time with their grandparents, godparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends. Try to swap more childcare with other parents and create long-term parenting pods. Consider different housing arrangements or join a book club or some form of continuing adult education. And if you have the freedom and opportunity to do so, why not shake things up entirely? Start a free store or join an upcycling collective. Uproot and resettle in an intentional community or ecovillage. Explore different forms of cooperative living and working. Adopt a mononym. Try to meet new people way outside of your established circle of acquaintances. Make strangers into kin.
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We must imagine the future that we want, to think of it as a concrete goal, and consider the different pathways available to realize that future, no matter how outlandish or impossible this future might seem to us now.
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As the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman observes, embracing a positive vision for the future usually means “weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic.”45 That is why we need to hope together: out loud, with each other, every day.
