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PARTISAN REVIEW
ought to get together and discuss things, but we don't want lawyers and
politicians mixing in" (a twice-married woman with adult and young
children, who works by looking after elderly disabled and sick people
who live alone). The answers vary according to the situation, naturally;
but the surprising thing is the readiness of the answers.
It
could not
have happened like this a few years ago. The lastnamed woman had
read a few pages of Germaine Greer's book "The Female Eunuch" and
had been enlightened by the idea that "you are a real person; too many
personalities are lost behind the kitchen sink" (not a quote, that is
what this woman said).
My experience is limited because of the wandering life I led, living
in a number of countries of which I was not a citizen and for the better
part meeting married couples of modern ideas in great cities. So I must
speak only of the little I see now. In several countries I have seen a
solution to the problems of surburban loneliness and the man–
dominated family. Young couples, married or unmarried, with or
without children, are living in communities, sharing everything,
(including poverty and unemployment), work and child-care and all
domestic problems; and a number of middle-class families, for exam–
ple, in university setting are forming communities of three or four
families. They buy a plot of land, build a house or houses and go there
as often as they can-weekends, holidays; and there the craftsmen and
women among them have their own workshops; they build, construct,
weave, paint, and have vegetable gardens and fruit-trees, go berry–
picking together, do everything together; and there is a move even to
"adopt grandmothers," that is, elderly women willing and able to
enjoy the children's company and the communal life. This is thought
to encourage sympathy for the old. In many families the married
children with their own children gather in their mother's homes on the
weekends and children are exchanged during holidays. Sometimes
neighbours become such good friends that when one moves the
nextdoor people move too to keep up the friendship. This camp or
longhouse idea is at least one attractive solution
to
the apparently
outmoded one-man family. The men can have company and beer
without having to go to the pub, the women can talk together without
exciting the jealousy and suspicion of the husbands; the children are
spared the outbursts of domestic misery which spring from the com–
mon unhappy marriage where the wife is the husband's only serf.
As for female homosexuality: Lesbians sometimes wish to better
women's lot and they may do so, as any other woman; but their
inclination often is to separate women from men and discourage
