I love your categories. I’ll get about re-organizing them soon.
Sacha/Gayle,
While I do not question the accuracy of your description of gender roles in a traditional tribal social structure, and while I recognize those gender constructs as valid and healthy ways to organize a society, I take major issue with the idea that it is categorically advisable/wise for a group of people to rewild along similar gender constructs, and that anybody who rejects gender roles (in the manner of modern feminist thought) cannot know a tribal way of life.
I am not interested in modeling my behavior after the traditions of a culture that I do not identify with and have no experience living in, and for good reason. To do so would not only be racist and appropriative, it would also be untrue to myself. I have experienced firsthand the social and psychological damage that gendered behavioral expectations can do in a hierarchical society, and I desire to avoid gender constructs if at all possible. Many of my friends in Seattle strive to live without defined gender roles, and from their perspective (and my perspective) they are not “missing out†on anything because they don’t follow any precedent based on gender division. Many of the people I know in civilization are so deeply socially conditioned into a model of gender inequality that I believe the responsible way to avoid relapsing into that hierarchical conditioning is to consciously choose a non-gendered social organization. I would be extremely uncomfortable rewilding with anyone who has grown up in civ and who doesn’t reject gender roles.
A rewilding society (comprised of people who have lived most or all of their lives under the regime of civilization) looks very different from a traditionally intact indigenous society. People who rewild, who choose to move out from civilization, have to find a way to go forward, starting from the lasting imprint of their experiences (not to mention the lasting imprint an industrial society has left upon the world). So by default, rewilding looks very different in its material culture (as discussed in the section on transition tech, for example) as well as in its adaptation to the realities of a post-industrial world (such as the introduction of non-native plants into an ecosystem). The possibilities are more wide open to people who are totally new to an intentional lifestyle of tribalism. They are not obligated to follow any particular aspect of indigenous tradition if it doesn’t work for them or if they are prevented from doing so because of systemic changes that civilization has invoked. I understand that any rewilding culture I personally undertake will not look exactly like a traditional indigenous society that has already been done, and I wouldn’t want it to. I believe that for any rewilding culture to assume it can go back to a pre-industrial world, to pretend civilization never existed, is dangerous, ignorant thinking.
I can think of an analogy: Let’s compare the growth of civilization to the development of an alcohol addiction in an individual. If a person with alcohol addiction gets sober, they still can’t go back to the life they had before the addiction. Before the addiction, they may have gone out for drinks on the weekends without a problem. But now, after coming out the other end of addiction, they can’t drink a single drop. The addiction has changed them. They have gotten rid of the addiction, and, as in their past before the addiction, they are no longer abusing alcohol… but they haven’t gone back to the same life they had before the addiction.
So it is with people coming out of civilization. My worry is that by blindly and irresponsibly copying indigenous cultures, we will behave like the alcoholic in lifelong recovery who denies that ever-present reality and says one day, “I haven’t had a drink in five years, I can control myself, I don’t see why I can’t have a drink every once in a while like I used to do‖and then falls right back into full-time drinking. It would be a similar kind of tragedy for a rewilding culture to say, “We know what is wrong with civilization, we hate it and we have every intention not to repeat it, we don’t see why it should be so impossible to organize a tribe after indigenous models like our ancestors lived thousands of years ago‖and then fall right back into civilized pathological relationship patterns.
Some people (for example, people in your situation who can still remember and/or retain aspects of a traditional indigenous culture) may choose to follow traditional tribal gender models of the types you outlined. Some people may find it easier and more internally defensible to take what we’ve learned doesn’t work (civilized gender roles) and invent something new that escapes the notion of gender altogether (just as a recovering addict escapes alcohol altogether, even though other people may have a healthy relationship with alcohol). I have learned in the course of my discussions with people on this very forum that it is perfectly acceptable to bring what we have learned from living in civilization into a rewilding scenario… whether we’ve learned knowledge we want to keep, or whether we’ve learned simply what we want to avoid.
I am not out to deny the validity of gendered organization in traditional native societies or to suggest that they need to change, as you claim is a danger inherent to contemporary feminism. My brand of contemporary feminism is a response to the society that I live in and a guide for the society that I envision for my rewilding future, but as for the choices of societies outside of my own, I am content to leave them well enough alone as long as they pose no direct threat.
If you can prove that a society without gender roles will either A) fall apart or B) repeat the calamities of civilization (in other words, if you can prove that a society without gender roles is categorically in conflict with the principles of rewilding), then by all means I would like to hear about it. If you can’t prove it, then I would implore you not to be so quick to invalidate contemporary feminist theory & practice simply because some of its practitioners (with whom I personally do not identify) have applied their own standards onto another culture. I’m willing to bet money that most of the feminist activists who have criticized indigenous gender roles are not familiar, or in agreement, with rewilding thought and practice. As such, their actions do not concern me and have nothing to do with me. I share common ideological roots with modern feminists and a common goal of wanting to be rid of our society’s gender inequality, but I have chosen a different way to proceed from that foundation. If rewilding cannot give me the freedom to choose my own path as it may differ from the paths of other rewilding or indigenous cultures, then rewilding is of no use to me. I can’t believe that to be possible, rewilding as useless. Can you?
You basically hit all those points I wanted to get at, BlueHeron. We’re not part of old growth, traditional societies with gender roles. We don’t need to, nor should we, imitate those.
Building on that, we need to find our own way(s) to organize ourselves and distribute work and activities. I don’t just mean gender roles. I can’t really guess exactly what that will mean right now. It might mean more men than women hunting, and more women doing plant gathering, or perhaps vice versa. Maybe we’ll just do better if everyone does a bit of everything. Maybe fire-keeping will only be done by certain age groups. Maybe this, maybe that. We’ll just need to find what works for us, and perhaps it’s just my feminist sensibilities, but I think it’ll end up with few or no gender roles in our tribes.
Dan,
The way I imagine a society I’d choose to live in as organizing itself is by a mix of individual choice and group consensus according to considerations such as:
- What needs to be done? What are the priorities?
- Where can I be most useful? What are my talents/skills/knowledge?
- What do I like to do? Who do I want to work with on this task?
etc.
BH, I am startled at the way you seem to be hearing things that I did not say:
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“the idea that it is categorically advisable/wise for a group of people to rewild along similar gender constructs”
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that “anybody who rejects gender roles (in the manner of modern feminist thought) cannot know a tribal way of life”
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that you should be “modeling my behavior after the traditions of a culture that I do not identify with and have no experience living in”
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that rewilders are "obligated to follow any particular aspect of indigenous tradition [even] if it doesn’t work for them or if they are prevented from doing so because of systemic changes that civilization has invoked.
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that "any rewilding culture [you] personally undertake… [should] look exactly like a traditional indigenous society that has already been done
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that "any rewilding culture [should] assume it can go back to a pre-industrial world, to pretend civilization never existed
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that rewilders should “blindly and irresponsibly copy indigenous cultures”
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that, in contrast to you, “as for the choices of societies outside of my own, I am [not] content to leave them well enough alone [even if] they pose no direct threat”
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that I wish to “prove that a society without gender roles will either A) fall apart or B) repeat the calamities of civilization (in other words,… that a society without gender roles is categorically in conflict with the principles of rewilding)”
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that I am “quick to invalidate contemporary feminist theory & practice simply because some of its practitioners … have applied their own standards onto another culture”
I did not say, suggest, or imply any of the above.
I dd not suggest that rewilders should adopt a particular set of gender roles, or any gender roles at all.
I did talk about women’s community, women’s culture, and my opinion that the lack of a sense of sisterhood may weaken some intentional communities, but that isn’t about gender roles. In fact, I barely mentioned gender roles (except indirectly in talking about how women used to share the mothering of all the children, but communal childrearing need not depend on gender).
Can you point to a single sentence in my post that says [b]any of those things you attribute to me??
I do not agree with BH’s apparent conviction that a feminism based on tribalism has no relevance to rewilders and no place among the schools of feminist thought. There are some key critiques of civilization that tribalism-based feminism offers, that mainstream strains of feminism seem to touch on almost not at all.
A foundational principle of all civilization is the separation of the domain of family from the “real world,” and the separation of families (and women) from each other. The domain of family is secondary and marginalized; what happens within the family has little effect on the important domain of the “outside world,” and each family is in its own little box pursuing its own fortunes, separated and competing from other families. (This is one of the forces of civilization that causes population growth.) So each home-and-family box in effect becomes a prison, and a person (usually a woman) whose life is spent inside the home-and-family box is isolated, often confined to some degree, treated as of lesser value, and rendered powerless with regard to the outside world.
In civilization, family is secondary, and separated from the business of “real life,” because the main purpose that family serves in civilization is to create lineages for the inheritance of private property. Family itself becomes a kind of private property, owned by a man.
In a tribal society, however, family is not something secondary and separate from the “important real life” business of society. In a tribe, family IS society, because the society itself is an extended family and deals with itself as a family. Everyone in the community is related in some way (and so are all the other beings who support life). (Kinship does not depend on blood relation – kinship is a human instinct.) And this is why tribal societies can work without mechanisms of coercion (police, governments, etc).
All successful anarchist, egalitarian societies have been kinship based societies. There have been no successful anarchist experiments not based on this principle.
In a tribal society, the center is the children and the generations to come. The society is organized around a sense of an axis of continuity from the ancestors to the unborn ones.
In tribal societies, yes, there is a role called Mother. In the larger community of life, the Earth is the Mother, and in a tribal society, the community of mothers collectively plays the same role for the community as Mother Earth does in the community of life.
One need not be biologically female, nor does one need to biologically bear a child to share the role of Mother for the coming generation. (Collective mothering helps keep birth rates down – it is one of the ignored reasons for low birth rates among hunter-gatherers.) Nor does being biologically female oblige one to be part of the community of Mothers.
These roles are Kinship roles. Kinship roles in tribal society are something like Jungian archetypes – like archetypes of Mother, Father, Grandmother, Grandfather, Nephew, Cousin, Wife, Husband, etc. But the spirits have ways of keeping the energies alive and changing, not hardened and automatic: the Trickster, who brings the unexpected and things that don’t turn out as you intended; the Clown, who caricatures, and the Heyoka, who does things in reverse; and the Shaman, who lives half in the spirit world and may be compelled by the spirits to do things in very uncustomary ways.
But the “roles” are not gender roles (like the ones civilization dictates) as much as they are kinship roles expressing relationship to one another. Brother’s relationship to Sister is not the same as Grandfather’s relationship to Grandson or Wife’s to Husband.
But Mother is the only indispensable kinship role. Mother is the kinship role upon which the survival of the tribe depends, the axis of the coming generations. So Mother is the one kinship role common to all tribal societies, and is usually central to the tribal community, the way Mother Earth is central to the community of life.
Kinship can be very informally defined, as it is usually in societies of small nomadic bands of up to a couple dozen people. Just a strong, generalized sense of being kin (and a general sense of who was too close relationship to marry) can be enough in a very small band. The entire community can play the essential role of Mother to the next generation.
To respond again to your question, BH, “gender roles” are not necessary to rewilding. What is essential to rewilding and retribalizing is that the walls that separate individual families each in their own little civilized boxes break down, that kinship bonds interconnect families, and that caring for the next generation become communal and tribal and the central focus of the community – which, as among hunter-gatherers, ensures lower birthrates, better care, and much less burden on adult caregivers, while giving the children many siblings to play with, and much more freedom and space to play because everyone is keeping an eye out for them, and because, as tribal children, they also know how to keep an eye out for each other.
You are never going to create tribes by just getting together with your friends and saying “Let’s make a tribe.” A tribe might be born, though, if you and your rewilding friends are struggling together and then, somehow, some parentless children fall into your care, and suddenly you and your rewilding friends have a reason to live beyond just preserving your individual survival: suddenly you are all bonded together with the common purpose of making good lives for these children in this precarious world.
THAT is when a tribe would be born.
Imagine a tribe of say, ten adult rewilders tribally raising four children.
Imagine how much the focus would change from “how’m I gonna survive” (a mentality which I think is a great impediment to true rewilding) when the group shares a common purpose of ensuring the survival and well-being of this next generation with whose lives you are entrusted.
It’s not “gender roles” that is essential for retribalizing. It is kinship and the central focus on the next generation.
Edit: I recently saw a video in which Onondaga chief Oren Lyons told about a meeting he had with a conference of business executives. One said that he would like to “go green” but as a CEO he had to show the highest profit to shareholders or he would be replaced. Oren Lyons asked: “Are you married?” The man said yes. “Do you have children?” Yes. “Do you have grandchildren?” Yes. “When do you stop being a CEO and start being a grandfather?” The man was speechless at this question. This one exchange summarizes perfectly the difference between the position of the family in civilization and in a tribe.
Sacha, I like your explanations of tribalism and civilization as relationship oriented. It is different from my way of looking at the same situations through subsistence and food getting. I think they both cover the same ground, but from different directions. It gives me some things to mull over in how I look at social systems.
Sacha, your post about our unfortunate lack (and tribal people’s use/practice) of a “women’s community” recapped a good bit of a conversation I’d just had with a couple of my housemates the night before. (That sort of explains why we all live in the same house! Support rocks.) Amazing timing.
Regardless of “feminism”, “gender roles”, “identity” or any of civilization’s misleading constructs that provoke us to run screaming in the opposite direction out of fear and self-protection, putting together ways for people to live that nourish and support everyone, from soup to nuts, oldest to youngest, and all possible sizes and shapes, while oppressing no one, pretty much defines what I want from rewilding.
I just saw this in a Tom Brown book–“Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men [sic] of old, but seek instead what they sought.”
I’d say rewilding encourages us to take a look at what has worked for others, and particularly at why it worked, and allow that to influence the shape of our new culture, to make it work for us. No reason we have to take anything in direct translation that doesn’t work for us and doesn’t derive from our particular context of people and place! Like Reverse Transition Tech. 
Yes! I feel that the feminism of civilization (please ignore if this doesn’t fit you! I realize many flavors of feminism flourish out there) that seeks “equality” sociopathically manipulates women to want the same thing men have, the money and power and career status that our culture identifies as wealth, while (forgive my pun) throwing out the baby with the bathwater by stigmatizing and de-valuing vital functions like hearthkeeping and raising the kids, outsourcing these precious roles, giving them away, trading them in (in part by splitting them up into separate house/box/cubicles a la June Cleaver, as Sacha mentioned, a potent recipe for insanity and dysfunction. Or by making daycare and school the “normal” place where kids to spend their time, putting the whole family into separate boxes like a plastic lunch tray).
The whole thing feels divisive to me. As long as folks focus on reacting to the last failed cultural movement (x-ism, post-x-ism, etc.) and feelings of scarcity (“I want what he has! Not fair!” like kids in the sandbox), how can we move beyond choices a and b to find c, d, e, f and all the combos in between? Think of the yin and yang symbol. Maybe a good new thing has room for traces of the thing that didn’t work, instead of just boxing itself into the farthest opposite corner?
Doesn’t equality and sameness fly in the face of rewilding? Don’t we value diversity? Uniqueness? Particular qualities that make us special? Yes we all have human bodies and can do many of the same things. But I’d rather celebrate the differences than pretend they don’t exist.
Maybe rewilding feminism itself (whoa, did I just hijack this thread? sorry BlueHeron. maybe we need a new thread? 
) means taking a hard look at what we really need and want and value, taking a step back from just reacting to what we’ve had. The very existence of feminism implies the context–> a patriarchical society, otherwise, duh, we wouldn’t even have to come out and say that we value women and all things feminine, we’d just all know it!
And when I say we, I don’t mean each individual, I mean what does our whole culture want and need? What about our grandchildren? what if that includes those grandchildren who don’t carry your blood and DNA? what about their grandchildren? How do they need for us to live?
Yes! I feel that the feminism of civilization (please ignore if this doesn't fit you! I realize many flavors of feminism flourish out there) that seeks "equality" sociopathically manipulates women to want the same thing men have, the money and power and career status that our culture identifies as wealth
There are many different theories or strains or schools of thought within feminism, but they can be classified several ways.
First, they can be divided between what is sometimes called Liberal or Equity Feminism, which seeks “equality” for women within the existing system, and various kinds of feminism that seek to change the system in some way.
Equity Feminism, of course, has by far been the most successful brand of feminism. It not only does not threaten the system, but actually strengthens capitalism in various ways. First, the economy grows the more life functions are brought into the money economy. Growing food in the garden, cooking for your family, or trading babysitting with your neighbor do not increase the GNP, but buying microwave dinners and paying for childcare do. Secondly, movements for “equality” that promote individualism and the atomization of society help to break down social networks and lock people into dependence on money to survive. Libertarian Feminism also belongs to this school of thought.
The schools that hold that feminism should change society in some way include Marxist or Socialist Feminism, Radical Feminism, Anarcha-Feminism, Eco-Feminism, Goddess and Pagan Feminism. In turn, these can be distinguished by two orientations: Marxist and Radical Feminism focus on the oppression of women as the foundation of class oppression and exploitation (and the patriarchal nuclear family as the model for society as a whole) while Eco-Feminism and Goddess Feminism focus more on the civilized suppression of feminine values such as cooperation and sharing, and Anarcha-Feminism tending to combine both of these.
Another way that different schools of feminist thought might be classified is a “nature/nurture” division, with most forms of Radical and Marxist Feminism holding that gender differences are entirely cultural and should be abolished, while Gender Feminists hold that women have some intrinsic differences from men that should be respected. (The theory that all gender differences are culturally programmed is fading away.)
There are other differences and schools of thought in feminism, but all of them take for granted certain civilized assumptions that a Tribal Feminism would not.
One key characteristic of civilizations is that kinship becomes linear, a line of inheritance from parents to children, and each line is separate. This makes the nuclear family (father, mother, offspring) the kinship group, and separates each family from each other (even if you keep in touch with your cousins, you and they do not take care of each other as in a tribe). Each family is private property (through most of civilized history, women and children have more or less literally been the property of the patriarchal male).
I talked about the burden this places on women in my other post, but here is another aspect of it. With the nuclear family (dad, mom, kids) the basic kinship unit of society, the foundational kinship bond upon which the whole family depends is the bond between husband and wife. And if the bond between husband and wife is broken, the family goes into a crisis. The children often pay a great price, and they often become a burden to the single parent left raising them… or left paying for their childcare while he or she works at a job.
Before the women’s liberation movement, the stability of marriage and family was ensured by not giving women any other choice than staying in the June Cleaver prison-box. In US society, fifty years ago, divorce was a disgrace, out-of-wedlock children an even bigger disgrace, and a single or divorced woman would have a difficult time making a living. Now divorce is easy, bearing children out of wedlock is accepted, and women have plenty of alternatives to staying in a relationship that is a prison.
So the one kinship bond that this society is built on, the marriage/spousal bond, breaks easily now, and so socially this society is falling apart.
This is one of the internal contradictions that is bringing this civilization down. For the capitalist economic system, the more that social systems disintegrate, and the more that each individual is left floundering for himself or herself, the more the economy benefits. An atomized society both has higher consumption rates (every house has its own television or three) and locks people more securely into wage-slavery. But on the other hand, social breakdown leads more crime, drug-addiction, and other social problems, as well as to people questioning their situation and rebelling against it. (The rise of fundamentalism came out of fear of the social breakdown.) Police, prisons, and all the instruments of coercion and repression unknown to tribal society become necessary to keep control.
I don’t have a ton of time today to say everything I want to say, as I really haven’t had a ton of time lately in general.
But a few things:
Sacha, I think we may be talking past each other. I have come to the conclusion that I misread your original intention, and for that I apologize. But I think you have put some words into my mouth, too. At some point later if I feel I still want to point them out, I will go over it in more detail.
I don’t see feminism as a “I want what he’s got” mentality. It is not purely economic. And obviously, outside of our society’s economic system, economically-driven feminism is pointless. Mainstream culture has made many feminist movements into economic quibbling, true. But that is not where I come from. I think many people mischaracterize feminism because of how it has to adapt to our warped society instead of looking at its original impulse. I care about equality because when men and women are allowed to believe that they are inherently unequal, or should be unequal, horrible things are allowed to happen. Women and children are devalued, abused, raped, etc.
Well, the only words I think I put into your mouth were “I do not agree with BH’s apparent conviction that a feminism based on tribalism has no relevance to rewilders and no place among the schools of feminist thought.”
(And I was careful there to use the word “apparent”).
I would really like to hear what you have to say, especially if the above is a misinterpretation (or even if it isn’t).
I don’t understand how, where, or why you disagree with anything I have written here, but I do want to understand.
Sacha, you have neatly explained and put into a larger context something that has been bothering me for years: the way that our culture segregates children. We’ve created this “adults only” society in which most people have never even held a baby unless they are parents. Children go off to school, daycare, or playgroup so that they don’t disturb the adults (the important ones, anyway. The ones who care for the children are marginalized). This leaves some adults with the impression that they have a fundamental right to never be in the presence of children. Someone told me once about a wedding they were invited to where children were not welcome. A wedding!!! It blew my mind.
Collective mothering helps keep birth rates down -- it is one of the ignored reasons for low birth rates among hunter-gatherers.
I’d like to hear more about this, if you have more to tell.
the way that our culture segregates children. We've created this "adults only" society in which most people have never even held a baby unless they are parents. Children go off to school, daycare, or playgroup so that they don't disturb the adults ([b]the important ones, anyway. The ones who care for the children are marginalized[/b]). This leaves some adults with the impression that they have a fundamental right to never be in the presence of children.
Yes. And another effect of the segregation of children is they remain infantilized, even as adults. That is why most adults in this society depend on authority figures to tell them what to do.
I want to talk about the effect of age-segregation on children too (all eight-year-olds in one grade, all nine-year-olds in another) but that should probably go in the children section.
Quote Collective mothering helps keep birth rates down -- it is one of the ignored reasons for low birth rates among hunter-gatherers.I’d like to hear more about this, if you have more to tell.
Well, let us say that you and all seven women in your immediate family group all love children and you would like to have lots of them so that your children can have playmates and you can enjoy the laughter of playing children. You love babies and would like to have a new baby every year or two. So among the seven of you, you have a total of twelve kids in fifteen years. That means you all have twelve kids, because all of the kids belong to all the mothers, and you all get to take care of a new baby every year or so, and the children are never a burden to any one woman. But the total number of children is much smaller than if each of you created your own separate nuclear family.
I want to talk about population dynamics maybe soon. There are some serious and even harmful flaws in Daniel Quinn’s population dynamics.
Sacha,
I want to talk about population dynamics maybe soon. There are some serious and even harmful flaws in Daniel Quinn's population dynamics.
Since I don’t have the time to check out every thread here and I have dial-up internet service, could you please PM me when you decide to talk about this.
Thank you,
Curt
Very interesting discussion, thank you everyone! As an activist I have spent quite a lot of time fighting around women’s issues, so I am very interested in the subject of feminism & rewilding.
When talking about future rewilding communities, I see the key issue (regarding feminism) as one of freedom of choice for women. Whether or not gender roles exist in indigenous societies, and whether or not they constitute a healthy choice for future communities, to me is secondary to the question of whether or not women in our future rewilding communities will WANT to adhere to gender roles.
I personally do not have any problem with gender roles in any community, as long as no women (or men) feel compelled or constrained to abide by them. IOW, as long as women and men participate in them of their own free will.
While I would feel happy to participate in raising children, I have no desire to see my life limited to this activity. Nor would I accept it if only men were allowed to hunt, defend the community, or communicate with outsiders. In fact, I would refuse to remain a part of any community that attempted to dictate what I could and could not do with my time.
I think it really comes down to a question of freedom. I had the impression that one of the key qualities of primitive, tribal life is the ability of all its members to spend their time doing ONLY the activities they voluntarily choose to do. If no one wants to gather wood one day, then no one does - if they all instead choose to pick berries, then that is what they would do. I don’t understand how this jives with restrictive gender roles, for example, where if a woman decided she would like to go hunting one day, others would prevent her from doing so. The only way I could understand it is if everyone accepted the traditions of their society so completely that no one had any desire to do things outside the traditional gender roles.
If historically the latter scenario holds true, then that right there means that any future society growing out of the ashes of civilization would of necessity NOT have gender roles, because the majority of women would not choose to adhere to gender roles because of tradition, since entrenched traditions would not exist yet.
Well, I can’t imagine anyone in this movement advocating restrictive gender roles. I think that a consensus for gender role freedom can probably be taken for granted.
But do you have any comments on the feminism based on tribal principles, discussed in this thread?
Mai group seems to be gravitating twards gender roles, rather than away from. This isnt becuase ai or another person thinks it should be so (on the contrary - ai think it might be nice to not have gender roles), but because the (so far only) woman in the group prefers it. This is how ai found this out: we were talking about hunting, when she said that she didnt really like hunting all that much and that she would rather just gather plant foods and trap small animals, while caring for the young folk. Ai was blown away! That was more or less exactly the typical gender role for women in many hunter/gatherer societies. But she hadnt studied anything mentioning gender roles in tribal humans at all! Ai think thats some major intuition there.
That’s why I said I think no one is “advocating restrictive gender roles,” not that no one is following gender roles. “Advocating” would mean saying that people should follow particular roles, and “restrictive” roles would mean those that restrict people’s choices. But in a natural intuitive way, a lot of people are going to just find certain inclinations expressing themselves without any prescription.
While I would feel happy to participate in raising children, I have no desire to see my life limited to this activity.In my experience, this scenario applies more to civilized mothers than the indigenous example Sacha described:
So among the seven of you, you have a total of twelve kids in fifteen years. That means you all have twelve kids, because all of the kids belong to all the mothers, and you all get to take care of a new baby every year or so, and [b]the children are never a burden to any one woman.[/b]I'm a stay-at-home mom. I don't have my parents, brother, in-laws, etc. living nearby. In the absence of a support network, I pretty much bring my kids everywhere, which means I can only participate in child-friendly activities. In Sacha's example, each mother is backed up by six other mothers, which would give the individual mothers greater freedom to participate in community affairs than I have. The scenario Sacha described sounds a lot less restrictive than what we have right now.
I agree, “civilized motherhood” has grown into an unsustainable scenario that sets the stage for burnt-out moms, hothouse kids, and young adults who can’t relate to kids at all. Starfish, I wonder how your situation–absence of support network–feels for you? I would give an arm and a leg to live in a world with a broader sense of kinship and certainty of shared values, where all adults present take responsibility for all the children, all the time. I think “mental health” and spirits of everyone involved would skyrocket.
I found this in a zine called: As Soon As You’re Born, They Make You Feel Small: Self-Determination for Children
[u]Endless Mothering[/u] ...Women are without question the primary carers of children in our society. They bear the brunt of this responsibility and yet the resources and assistance available to them are pitiful. . .Mothers are expected to respond to their child's every need be it emotional, physical or intellectual.They are, in short, entrusted with their child’s "normal’ development and suffer enormous guilt for any lapses or failures. The more needy and dependent the child, the more is expected from mothers, the more the terrain of motherhood expands. It is considered ‘healthy’ for a mother and child to have a vritually exclusive relationship during the child’s early years.
Clearly, the greater children’s autonomy, the less work for mothers. This can be witnessed where children have relationships with other adults, who are also ‘responsible’ for them, or where children have access to safe outdoor spaces. In societies where children work and care for younger children, they quickly become co-workers of mothers and fathers. It is only recently, in the west, that mothering has been conceived as full time job.
I think living in a rewilded culture with a healthier and more supportive expression of gender roles, such as care of children, than what we usually experience would dissolve the Terrifying Specter of Gender Roles quite a bit.
I find it really fascinating how so many topics bubbling up right now overlap and interlock–child care, age segregation, women’s community, population dynamics, gender roles, birth rates.
I think this underscores the deeply layered magic of cultures that work.