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institution of all. He who will still argue that one mother at home alone is the
best, healthiest environment for children is hiding from reality. Shall we go on
like this, our main jobs as women to be the purveyors of neurosis into the new
generations?

We must search for a new way, new forms to live in, for children to bo born
into. The search for this is crucial to women’s liberation. Those who want
to attack us constantly ask accusingly, do we want to be rid of children altogether?
Are wo trying to shunt thom away? Who will bear and raise them?

Our answer for how women are to be liberated must never be that free women
will simply not bear children. While we must affirm the right of those who choose
not to have them, this solution for 211 is simply absurd for the future of the
species. But more than that, if this is all the creativity wo bring to our
struggles for social change we cannot win. We must bo able to formulate viable
answers to the questions “what do you want (all of us troublemakers) what do you
want to replace it with?”

And we find that the answers, as always, to all of our problems are not
found individually. They are found only by poople in similar situations coming
together to take common action to satisfy their needs. The answer is obviously
not in each individual woman who happons to be so privileged paying for a
substitute mother.

The answer lies in many mothers and fathers and children oxtending once again
the boundaries of the human family to create an expanded universe of love and care
for children.

We must expand the world of both mother and child, open it up to find
self-reflection in many others until it becomes ultimately vested in the self
and in autonomy. This has been our experiment at SFU---an onlarged family wherein
many parents take real responsibility for children not their own in the biological
sense. Our goal has been autonomy for each child, that is, a sense of himself, a
confidence in his or her ability to make choices, to be with others, to meet
new people. In this sharing of responsibility, each of our children soe 20 parents
and perhaps 40-50 other children each week, a world tremendously expanded from
the 2 or 3 they would have seen. (Principles: 1--no supervisor, no authority
figures, 2--equal sharing of work regardless of necd).

I want to say a few words about dependency and its moaning in our society.

In the nuclear family the child’s first perception is that his mother is the only
safety and that all the outside world is the enemy. This small world might
expand to include father, brothers, sisters, but so used are we to this state of
dependency that we expect tears and terror on the first day of kindergarten.

And it is not only the chiidren who are devendent. It is the mothers also.

This dopcndeney makos alclesea:ce.the a cnicing fight to the death between
parents that it is in our culture, not so in many others. The mother knows, having
built her whole identity around this child, that when he goes she will be nothing.
Search for identity. Not for inen.

“his dependency is transferred to the teacher, authority figure, then to the
professor, perhaps, or the boss, and people’s whole lives are spent in passivity,
feeling inferior, sure that they cannot make decisions that offect their lives, but
that these must be made for them by experts above them.

It must be understood that women’s main function in the top=dow society we
live in is to socialize peoplo for acceptance of this stato of affairs. Thoso of
us who call ourselves revolutionarios, that is those of ws who understand that we
cannot achieve liberation for women, or for anyone without vast social upheavals,
and who see the need so urgently for that change that we will risk everything to
achieve it--those of us who are so precisely because we have at last stood up, have
stepped at last outside of that dependency to realize that we no longer need to be
told what to do by “experts” and authorities. We have at last stood up and affirmed
our confidence in our ability to be autonomous people, to make decisions for our~
selves, to determine our own life choices.

These are the kind of people we want to raise for the new generation.