Good morning,

Lots of feminist treats for you today. I found the first article and it reminded me how fascinating communal living and non-standard family structures are, and that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Enjoy!

When you read The Feminine Mystique, you imagine Betty Friedan living in a flyover state, in ten square miles of identikit houses with picket fences, dogs, etc. It turns out she and her family actually lived in a forward thinking community in a New York borough. This is an account of the formation and decline of the community from someone else who lived there:

These couples—young, liberal, and creative—formed a kind of quasi-commune, sharing meals, creating a babysitting pool, children running in and out of the shared yards. “I loved the concrete daily life of that community … the politics of it, the bonds we formed with other parents at the nursery school,” Friedan wrote in her memoir Life So Far.

http://www.theawl.com/2015/05/friedans-village

How is it possible that I’ve only just found out about a Women’s Liberation communal living movement that surnamed all of its children Wild? In this article, there is a weird and pointless focus on the fact that one of the children wears high heels as an adult woman, I hope you can see through that to this wonderful pullquote:

In 2003, Shelley married a Tory-supporting civil servant. "Al came to the wedding and, as mother of the bride, spoke. Apparently, she had this massive speech - a feminist rant, actually, but two of my mums got to it first and crossed out loads." Last summer, the couple separated. "I should never have married a Tory," she says.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/04/feminism-communes-children

This article about a building designed to release women from the chains of housework (it never really got off the ground) is interesting, as are Lenin’s opinions on housework:

[C]ommunist values were not the only ideals behind the Narkomfin: women too were set to be emancipated. “Petty housework crushes, strangles and degrades … chains her to the kitchen”, wrote Lenin in A Great Beginning. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins … against this petty housekeeping.”

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/moscow-narkomfin-soviet-collective-living-history-cities-50-buildings

Enjoy yr Friday!

Alex.