Join Us! The Motherhood Revolution

Off Our Backs, 2006 by Seelhoff, Cheryl Lindsey

There are many successful home business stories in the home schooling community, where families have created books, magazines, pamphlets, curriculum materials, support organizations, or have offered various kinds of services to their communities. There are also home schooling families in which both parents work, as well as families in which single mothers home school. In single-parent families, mothers sometimes care for and teach one another's children while the others are at work.

Then, too, in general, home schooling is conducive to a very simple lifestyle. The pressure for school clothes and ongoing expenses of activities and school projects is eliminated, along with transportation expenses and the expenses of school lunches. Where moms work from home, the same is true; there is no need for a wardrobe for work, for bus fare or carfare, and of course, there are no daycare-associated expenses. Where families are home- and community-based, via food co-ops and other kinds of sharing and co-operating, many kinds of expenses can be kept to a minimum.

Radical Feminist Separatism

This lifestyle offers amazing opportunities for separatist feminists interested in creating intentional communities. It is possible given this kind of lifestyle to organize all of one's life, activities, and spending around women, women's concerns, women's politics, woman-owned businesses and organizations. One of the most-often-heard objections to the kind of lifestyle I have described is that it might not prepare children "for the real world." My response, always, is to ask, with Sonia Johnson, whether this is something that, as feminists, we really want to do, whether raising children who fit in nicely with the "real (male supremacist) world" is consistent with our feminism, or just with our deepest values as feminist mothers.

I have been in the process of raising six daughters and five sons over these past 35 years. I have three children still at home, eight grown now, and I am a grandmother to four, two of whom are being unschooled as their parents both were. One of the most gratifying outcomes of my experience of motherhood is the determined radical feminism of every one of my daughters and the support for feminism of my sons.

Conclusion

Ending her book, Wildfire, Sonia Johnson writes prophetically and timelessly:

When women ask me "What shall we do?" I don't think they are really asking me to tell them what to do; they know I can only answer "Live today as you want the world to be."...the women who ask that question know that absolutely nothing is working for women "out there," that all the passion and effort, all the promises, all the hopes have essentially come to nothing for women as a global caste. Even the minute reforms we thought we could make have turned out to be pipe dreams. And as patriarchy reigns undaunted, the words "feminism" and "feminist" are scarcely heard any more...When they are heard, they refer to women who are passing in men's world...

My dream is that women will create the world again... originating now what we need for ourselves...More and more of us are realizing that nothing we were told to expect, none of the great reformations feminism was going to make in society and in women's lives has come to pass, or indeed can come to pass in the patriarchal system. Every woman who wakens to the knowledge that we have not yet moved patriarchy so much as one hair off its destructive timetable is that much closer to joining with her sisters and taking the world into her own hands.