Family
I feel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these, and all of them at once.
... (read more)Family: Stories of belonging edited by Alaina Gougoulis and Ian See
Broken: Children, parents and family courts by Camilla Nelson and Catharine Lumby
Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Come With Daddy by Carolyn Harris Johnson & Kangaroo Court by John Hirst
Liz Conor reviews 'The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women’s Choices in 21st Century Australia' by Anne Summers
‘Women who want to be equal with men lack ambition.’ This was the rather damning assessment of equality-based or liberal feminism scrawled on public walls in the 1970s and 1980s. It took a swipe at the strategy of achieving civil and economic equality on men’s terms. It sought a radical agenda of change that would bring about profound alteration to the deepest social, economic and psychic structures of gender identity, patriarchy and capitalism. It demonstrated, even then, that ‘equality’ did not have unqualified support among women. Thirty years later, Anne Summers is in a position to consider how this strategy has stood up to repeated attacks, and its overall gains and shortcomings.
... (read more)