The Anti-Social Family Quotes

“The feminist position on abortion is a woman's right to *choose*, and feminists would defend to the hilt the right of any woman *not*to have an abortion irrespective of the grounds she gave for making this choice. The anti-abortion position is in fact an anti-choice position, imposing, or attempting to impose, particular beliefs on all women.”
― Michèle Barrett, The Anti-Social Family

“The world around the family is not a pre-existing harsh climate against which the family offers protection and warmth. It is as if the family has drawn comfort and security into itself and left the outside world bereft. As a bastion against a bleak society it has made that society bleak. It is indeed a major agency for caring, but in monopolizing care it has made it harder to undertake other forms of care. It is indeed a unit of sharing, but in demanding sharing within it has made other relations tend to become more mercenary. It is indeed a place of intimacy, but in privileging the intimacy of close kin it has made the outside world cold and friendless, and made it harder to sustain relations of security and trust except with kin. Caring, sharing, and loving would be more widespread if the family did not claim them for its own.”
― Michèle Barrett, The Anti-Social Family

“Page 18
Indeed, all the main writers on this topic – Marx, Engels, Bebel, Lenin, Trotsky, Zetkin and Kollontai – more or less imply that when women are engaged in wage labor on equal terms with men, and when housework has been socialized, we shall have arrived at the nirvana of proletarian heterosexual serial monogamy.

Page 47
We have chosen to start at a very general structural level by showing how the family serves to pass on privilege and disadvantage from one generation to the next. We have done this partly because it highlights very clearly how the family embodies the principle of selfishness, exclusion and pursuit of private interest and contravenes those of altruism, community and pursuit of the public good. Society is divided into families and the divisions are deep, not merely ones of slight antipathy and mild distrust.”
― Michèle Barrett, The Anti-Social Family

“Page 78
The family sucks the juice out of everything around it, leaving other institutions stunted and distorted.

Page 75
Deep-seated differences between the sexes do tend to be reproduced from generation to generation by the fact that children are reared by a pair of differentiated parents and the parameters of their sexual orientation are set in the context of their early relations with those parents. But our unbalanced pattern of sexuality is also an integral part of a thriving marriage system that still enshrines male power and female dependence. Until that form of family disappears, sexual enjoyment will continue to be a male privilege and it will continue to take the form of sexual possession. Clearly, then, it remains necessary, as the early socialists recognized, to separate sex love from these economic ties and allow it to flourish in its own right.

Page 52-53
The Oneida community, founded in New York State in 1848, consciously rejected the family and marriage as being inimical to a full communal life. The biblical text, ‘In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage’, was taken as justification for ‘complex marriage’ in which all the men and women of the community were joined. Heterosexual relations between any of them were encouraged; long-term pairing was discouraged. Children were cared for in a children’s house soon after they were weaned, visiting their own parents only once or twice a week. Their founder John Humphrey Noyes saw a very clear contradiction between intense family feelings and community feeling. He believed that ‘the great problem of socialism now is, whether the existence of the marital family is compatible with that of the universal family, which the term “community” signifies.”
― Michèle Barrett, The Anti-Social Family