Freedoms and Possibilities
Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
Verso, 128pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781839767197
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
It felt almost subversive, reading Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family in my little hetero-family-centric enclave of east Bristol with my newborn in tow. In the coffee shops I frequent or the children’s library sessions I attend, the very sight of me with this book may very well have ensured that I am banished from future play dates or baby yoga sessions. Lewis, picking up where she left off with her previous book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), acknowledges as much in the opening paragraph: ‘So! The left is trying to take grandma away, now, and confiscate kids, and this is supposed to be progressive? What the fuck?!’ I could see this question in the looks of anyone who saw this book’s title as I read it in my neighbourhood. Abolish? The family?! A crazy idea surely, and not one which any vaguely competent mother should be seen associating with.
Yet radical feminist arguments such as those that Lewis presents here are slowly gaining more track in mainstream thinking. Abolish the Family is a welcome addition to a growing set of feminist texts that provide a more interesting counterpoint to the Girl Boss, Lean In, sanitised feminism of recent years. Indeed, the concept of abolition, as Lewis points out, has increasingly entered mainstream political lexicon. Abolish ICE, abolish the police — these are well established rallying cries on the left in the US, gradually filtering across to the rest of the western world. Lewis’s book does important work in reminding us of the long history of abolitionary thinking within feminist thought. As Lewis explains, the family has long been a site of, not only violence, but the repression and subjugation of women, the emotional and physical isolation of mothers, and the valorisation of the heteronormative exclusionary norm. Her argument is persuasive: once cast in this light, why should we want to save the family?
Abolish the Family is not a prescriptive text — there are no policy suggestions here, no point-by-point solution for how we might go about breaking down the family. This makes for a frustrating read in some respects: those staring down the barrel of a four figure monthly nursery fee, as I soon will be, might be looking for more immediate answers to the inequities of the nuclear family. But this is not the point here. The book is a thought experiment, encouraging us, as Hannah Arendt (a philosopher who probably would have had little truck with Lewis’ line of thought) would put it, to ‘think without bannisters’. What if we pulled at threads of this most fundamental of societal structures? What would a world without the family look like? What if the loyalty and love you have to your family were instead owed to everyone you met? What freedoms and possibilities might this bring about?
The book poses such interesting questions but its strange structure sometimes inhibits their answer. It is written across four short chapters, but engages with critical arguments against abolitionism in the second chapter before providing a history of the idea of family abolitionism in the third. This seemed backwards to me, with Lewis not providing the foreground to the argument she makes prior to jumping into its critiques. On the whole, however, it left me wanting more. It reads like a brief tract which has been turned into something longer, but at the same time isn’t quite given the space to fully explore all of the ideas it presents. As Lewis points out, the Covid-19 pandemic and the return to the domestic sphere that it forced upon us all for so long makes the questions she raises here even more important. Now, as we seem to be sliding back into a pre-Covid world where flexible working and childcare concerns are once again relegated to the political back-burner, we need more discussion of the alternatives Lewis argues for.
Reading this book, I kept returning in my head to science fiction author and feminist Ursula Le Guin (who Lewis quotes extensively in the first chapter) and one of her most famous works, The Dispossessed. Two of the main characters in the novel raise a child in the kind of utopic structure that Lewis points towards, an alien planet in which children are raised collectively, with no monogamous relationships and little adherence to the private family structure. Despite this, still the central couple bring their child out of the communal nursery, daring occasionally to wallow in the bonds of the nuclear family that their society shuns. Even utopias struggle to do away with the bonds of the heart. The logical argument for abolition might still find difficulties accounting for parental love. At least that’s how I explained this book away to anyone who caught me reading it in my neighbourhood.
Yet radical feminist arguments such as those that Lewis presents here are slowly gaining more track in mainstream thinking. Abolish the Family is a welcome addition to a growing set of feminist texts that provide a more interesting counterpoint to the Girl Boss, Lean In, sanitised feminism of recent years. Indeed, the concept of abolition, as Lewis points out, has increasingly entered mainstream political lexicon. Abolish ICE, abolish the police — these are well established rallying cries on the left in the US, gradually filtering across to the rest of the western world. Lewis’s book does important work in reminding us of the long history of abolitionary thinking within feminist thought. As Lewis explains, the family has long been a site of, not only violence, but the repression and subjugation of women, the emotional and physical isolation of mothers, and the valorisation of the heteronormative exclusionary norm. Her argument is persuasive: once cast in this light, why should we want to save the family?
Abolish the Family is not a prescriptive text — there are no policy suggestions here, no point-by-point solution for how we might go about breaking down the family. This makes for a frustrating read in some respects: those staring down the barrel of a four figure monthly nursery fee, as I soon will be, might be looking for more immediate answers to the inequities of the nuclear family. But this is not the point here. The book is a thought experiment, encouraging us, as Hannah Arendt (a philosopher who probably would have had little truck with Lewis’ line of thought) would put it, to ‘think without bannisters’. What if we pulled at threads of this most fundamental of societal structures? What would a world without the family look like? What if the loyalty and love you have to your family were instead owed to everyone you met? What freedoms and possibilities might this bring about?
The book poses such interesting questions but its strange structure sometimes inhibits their answer. It is written across four short chapters, but engages with critical arguments against abolitionism in the second chapter before providing a history of the idea of family abolitionism in the third. This seemed backwards to me, with Lewis not providing the foreground to the argument she makes prior to jumping into its critiques. On the whole, however, it left me wanting more. It reads like a brief tract which has been turned into something longer, but at the same time isn’t quite given the space to fully explore all of the ideas it presents. As Lewis points out, the Covid-19 pandemic and the return to the domestic sphere that it forced upon us all for so long makes the questions she raises here even more important. Now, as we seem to be sliding back into a pre-Covid world where flexible working and childcare concerns are once again relegated to the political back-burner, we need more discussion of the alternatives Lewis argues for.
Reading this book, I kept returning in my head to science fiction author and feminist Ursula Le Guin (who Lewis quotes extensively in the first chapter) and one of her most famous works, The Dispossessed. Two of the main characters in the novel raise a child in the kind of utopic structure that Lewis points towards, an alien planet in which children are raised collectively, with no monogamous relationships and little adherence to the private family structure. Despite this, still the central couple bring their child out of the communal nursery, daring occasionally to wallow in the bonds of the nuclear family that their society shuns. Even utopias struggle to do away with the bonds of the heart. The logical argument for abolition might still find difficulties accounting for parental love. At least that’s how I explained this book away to anyone who caught me reading it in my neighbourhood.