PARTISAN REVIEW
151
does more than occupy women, it produces, condi:tions, and isolates
chern. But isn't there already in this country a plural range of relation–
ships, if not of institutions, which are very like the ones she recom–
mends? Single or divorced people, men and women, raising children;
people hired to raise or at the least care for young children who are
not their own, privately and in day care centers; black children raised
by grandmothers rather than by their biological parents ; adopted
children brought up by married and single people who have chosen
them; and perhaps a handful of communes with and without children
or marriages? And yet doesn't the question remain this one - under
what conditions will men change their working lives, will they risk the
convention of their jobs and their hours, or even the very definition of
themselves to reshape the families they cocreate, and more often than
not coinhabit ?
At the end of her lecture at Barnard College this year, I asked
Juliet Mitchell what was to be done now. I asked her that from my
own position, which is somewhat like the one she envisions for women
- I possess an independent and earned income, I am not isolated
within the home for I have a profession that I work at - and I am
married with young children. Well, she said, in England during the
last war there had been communal restaurants and laundries and child–
care available to women. They do not exist now, however. And I
thought, does it take the conditions of war to provide such services and
such social programs to free women? After the war women returned
to the home in even greater numbers than before, and they returned to
reproduce and not to work. Until the destiny of the family is worked
out - economically and in terms of its press upon our psychic identity
as women - we will stay within it.
Woman's Estate
does not really
give us a way out, it tells us instead why we are there and it urges us to
move "Out from Under .. . ," the title of her closing chapter. What
we need as women, as people, is a more complex exploration of bio–
logical motherhood. What we need even more desperately is the re–
evaluation of the patriarchal family, capitalist and socialist, which has
too often knotted and isolated us within our families, so that it will
end with no more damage inflicted upon its women, its children - and
even its men.
Nancy Milford
