Sharing the care — the mothering — of children is the basis of the article below. Written by Lee Mackay as part of a book Children and Feminism, the article proposes sharemothering as a means of making motherhood — and childhood — less oppressive.
We will not succeed in making fundamental changes in our culture's child rearing pattern — a pattern that has each child revolving in an isolated orbit around an individual mother — until many women, seeing how effectively this pattern blocks progress towards feminist goals, become willing to dedicate a good deal of thought and effort to making changes.
In her novel Motherlines*, Suzy McKee Charnas coined the term "sharemothers" for a group that assumed special responsibility for seeing a person safely through childhood. Sharemothers would be collectively responsible for their group's children.
The sharemothering concept could be extended to the care of the old. It is hideous that we leave old people to die as drugged and neglected wards of the state. Many of our parents and grandparents, and many older radicals, would probably like to have a place in one of our communities where they could have a part in our work and have their special needs met.
Since our experience with present child care patterns indicates that leaving our nurturing responsibilities with some subgroup in a community leads to the isolation and oppression of both that subgroup and their dependents, our aim would be to have everyone involved in some way with nurturing task
Sharemothering groups would not simply replace single parent or other nuclear families in feminist communities as they now exist. Our communities would be very different, because almost all of their members would be mothers, and thus vividly aware of the needs of children. When we held educational events, we would make sure that the children learned as much as the adults, and when we had celebrations, we would see that the children had as much fun as we did. We would develop many
resources for our children — resources such as children's buildings, children's conferences, radical children's newspapers, children's clubs, children's therapy groups, and children's summer camps. Collectives would alter their structures to make it easy for mothers to work with them. Because children would understand feminist issues and see themselves as part of a feminist community, formerly adult collectives might find themselves with full members as young as nine or ten years of age. Since the communities in which we sharemothered would be so different from the communities in which some of us now mother, sharemothering would be far less onerous and isolating than mothering is at present.
A sharemothering group would achieve full effectiveness as a liberating social structure only if it were embedded in a supportive community of people who understood and valued the group's work. If many feminists are gradually changing old child care patterns in accordance with an analysis which we have developed together, we can support each other in making changes, and learn from each other's experiences. We can develop more community resources for our children at the same time as we learn to work together in caring for them at home.
The most harmful effect of the Industrial Revolution is that working for wages has become separated from the work of nurture. Wage work is no longer done at home. On the job, there is no place for the young or the old. Extended families no longer work together to produce the things they need. Instead, individual workers get paid to labour over products that have no meaning for them. They must follow the bosses' directions, while technology makes the tasks they perform ever more trivial, uncreative, and mindless. To endure such working conditions, it is necessary to deaden one's emotional responses. While at work, one neither nurtures nor is nurtured.
The problem we now face is finding ways to combine the best features of the old social consciousness and the new. We need to remember the heritage of our species, and re-create intimate nurturing social environments in which to live and work. At the same time, we must keep our commitment to work not just for a small group, but for the well-being of all of humanity. We must hold fast to the new insight that each of us is an autonomous individual, and not merely an animated social role. If we can build deep and enduring relationships with companions who share our values, without so submerging ourselves in our groups that we give them the authority to make moral and political decisions for us, and if we can regain our fore-mother's faith that all work is an extension of the responsibility to nurture — to take care not only of ourselves
but of one another — we will have created for ourselves the sort of society we are struggling to bring into being for everyone.
* (New York; Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1978)