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101 When I talk about my family, I mean the one I grew up in. I have been married, lived with men, and participated in various communal and semicommunal arrangements , but for most of the past six years—nearly all of my thirties—I have lived alone. This is neither an accident nor a deliberate choice, but the result of an accretion of large and small choices, many of which I had no idea I was making at the time. Conscious or not, these choices have been profoundly in- fluenced by the cultural and political radicalism of the sixties, especially radical feminism. The sense of possibility, of hope for great changes that pervaded those years affected all my aspirations; compromises that might once have seemed reasonable, or simply to be expected, felt stifling. A rebellious community of peers supported me in wanting something other than conventional family life; feminist consciousness clarified and deepened my ambivalence toward men, my skepticism about marriage. Single women were still marginal, but their position was dignified in a way it had never been before: it was possible to conceive of being alone as a choice rather than a failure. For me the issue was less the right to be alone, in itself, than the right to take as much time and room as I needed to decide what kind of life I wanted, what I could hold out for. Intimate connections are important to me. I want a mate, or so I believe, and possibly a child. Before the counterculture existed I was attracted to the idea of communal living and I still am. Yet obviously other priorities have intervened: I haven’t found what I supposedly want on terms I can accept. The psychologist in me suggests that I don’t want it as wholeheartedly as I think, the feminist retorts that it’s not my fault if a sexist society keeps offering me a choice between unequal relationships and none, and I’m sure they’re The Family Love It or Leave It 102 THE SEVENTIES both right. Anyway, I wouldn’t take back the choices I’ve made. I would not wish to be a different person, or to have been shaped by a different time. Still, I can’t help being uneasy about the gap between the lessons I learned during that time and the rules of the game in this one. As the conservative backlash gains momentum, I feel a bit like an explorer camped on a peninsula, who looks back to discover that the rising tide has made it into an island and that it threatens to become a mere sandbar, or perhaps disappear altogether. If there is one cultural trend that has defined the seventies, it is the aggressive resurgence of family chauvinism, flanked by its close relatives, antifeminism and homophobia. The right’s impassioned defense of traditional family values—the common theme of its attacks on the Equal Rights Amendment, legal abortion, gay rights, sexual permissiveness, child care for working mothers, and “immoral ” (read unattached female) welfare recipients—has affected the social atmosphere even in the liberal, educated middle class that produced the cultural radicals. The new consensus is that the family is our last refuge, our only defense against universal predatory selfishness, loneliness, and rootlessness; the idea that there could be desirable alternatives to the family is no longer taken seriously. I’ve also noticed a rise in the level of tension between married and single people. Over the years family boosters have subjected me to my share of hints that I’m pathetic, missing out on real life, or that the way I live is selfish and shallow, or both; I’ve indulged an unworthy tendency to respond in kind, flaunting my independence and my freedom from the burdens of parenthood while implying that I see through their facade of happiness to the quiet desperation beneath. Lately these exchanges have become edgier; sometimes they explode into fights. As I said, I’m uneasy. Of course, “family” is one of those concepts that invite stretching. One might reasonably define a family as any group of people who live under the same roof, function as an economic unit, and have a serious commitment to each other—a definition that could include communes and unmarried couples of whatever sexual preference. But the family as it exists for most people in the real world—in a social and historical context—is...

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