[Haymarket; 2025]
Amongst the furor of the 1970s movements for women’s liberation arose another social movement that was parallel and interlinked: the movement for children’s liberation. As middle-class white women across the USA and western Europe sat in crowded living rooms in consciousness raising circles, vocalizing for the first time the frustration they felt with being relegated to the sub-human identity group of “mother,” children like Sonia Yaco, Keith Hefner, and the Youth Liberation organization were in their schools and bedrooms expressing these same discontents. To be a child was to be surveilled, restricted, belittled, and unable to make decisions about your own life and future. Witnessing the rise of the women’s and civil rights movements, children in the USA were inspired to identify their own structures of oppression and organize against them. The connections between the movements for children’s rights and women’s rights were natural—both groups were repressed by patriarchal family structures and not permitted to exercise their own agency or make decisions for themselves. Their destinies were often tied, since women were generally the primary caretakers for children.
As women gained more economic freedom, they began to fight for their right not to bear children. They wanted more agency in how they structured their life, to be unshackled from the kitchen sink. Feminists’ fight for liberation from children distracted them from their fight for liberation for and with children. Drawing on the recent tide of family abolitionist theory, Madeline Lane-McKinley seeks to reconnect that division. Lane-McKinley is a writer, teacher, and parent engaged in work on feminist and queer theory, anarchism, Marxism, and utopian studies, themes that intermingle in this book. Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy is their third book, following Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times, and the co-authored fag/hag (2024), with Common Notions and Rosa Press respectively. This essay interweaves critical theory, history, and media analysis drawing from film and literature to question our assumptions about our patriarchal and adult supremacist conceptions of family, and perhaps begin to dismantle them.
Solidarity with Children picks up discussions of family abolition and asks how this abolition can liberate children alongside women and those repressed by the patriarchal structures of family. In abolitionist fashion, this essay begins by questioning the concept of childhood itself. The notion is ambiguous and shifting, and its definitions are often politicized, gendered, and racialized. Think of how mainstream media discusses transgender youth in the USA and UK, murdered Palestinian children in Gaza, or child workers mining precious metals in the Congo. Childhood is not defined by children themselves, but socially constructed to various adult interests. As Lane-McKinley aptly observes, “histories of childhood should not be mistaken for histories of children themselves. Childhood is an idea constructed, quite clearly, from the outside.” They invite us to consider a more collaborative and optimistic vision of childhood, asking us to “reencounter the idea of adolescence as a process not of individual loss but of shared transformation.” This is a transformation shared in solidarity by children and the carers and adults around them, including, but not limited to, their mothers. Some of the most radical social movements of the last hundred years have been built on solidarity with children. Many of the Black Panthers social programs were built around supporting and educating children. Lane-McKinley also invokes the Peruvian movement for working children as an example of how we can engage in genuine critical age consciousness and unlearn our adult supremacist notions. The colaboradores, adult comrades of the children organizers, work with the young people in horizontalist organization where they work together to learn solidarities and unlearn adult centrism. These colaboradores are not necessarily parents or teachers; they are simply comrades, come together to support the campaign.
Lane-McKinley also questions the notion of motherhood, or mothering. Mothering presents a dual definition: to mother, as in to take care of, as well as the process of becoming a mother- being labeled mother, or in other words, mothered. Liberation from the work of mothering is something feminism has been seeking since its early days. However, many approaches towards this, such as the Wages For Housework movement, have not been sufficiently critical towards the capitalistic notion of hierarchy and ownership between mother and child. Wages for Housework was a feminist movement in the 1970s that called for women to receive a wage for their domestic labor such as cooking and homemaking, or as Marxist feminists refer to it, “reproductive labor.” The movement was spearheaded by British, Italian, and American feminists like Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Echoing Adrienne Rich, Lane-McKinley calls for mothering to be universalized, the “institution of motherhood destroyed.” To me, this is the essay’s most striking critique, a critique of motherhood as a property relation. Motherhood has presumed the mother’s legal ownership of children. We have constructed the institution of motherhood as inextricable from the labor of gestation and birth and made it biologically essentialist. Solidarity with Children muses on how to disentangle these, so that mothering becomes a practice of care. Lane-McKinley writes,
Children do not exist at the margins of this political project; rather, they are its absent center. And while I find moments of child liberationist thinking, especially from Dalla Costa, I wonder whether this framework relies, however uneasily, on staging a conflict between mothers and children. As opposed to helping us to find solidarity, this critique of work may instead pit us against each other even further, hardening these roles of caregiver and care receiver.
Rejecting the tension Wages for Housework raises, Lane-McKinley turns to a different radical approach proposed by Sophie Lewis in her book Full Surrogacy Now, a manifesto that calls for babies and children to be collectively raised. If we were to think of every person who gives birth as a surrogate for their community, how would that change our notion of what it means to mother? What if the labor of gestation did not mother the gestator? Could this process//activity be de-gendered and de-privatized? Lane-McKinley argues for a “dialectic of anti-anti-maternalism,” wherein we can abolish motherhood by all becoming mothers. In this imagination motherhood is something we all can, and must, learn to do.
This radical reimagining of adult-child relations continues in their chapter on pedagogy and education. In an era of book bans, school shootings, and the school-to-prison pipeline, how can we imagine schooling as a sincerely child-centric endeavor? Lane-McKinley astutely critiques the authoritarianism of mainstream education, especially boarding schools and faith schools. These institutions offer the backdrop for most of cinema’s most iconic depictions of youth rebellion, from Catcher In The Rye to Ulrike Meinhof’s Bambule. As with many other children’s liberationists, Lane-McKinley offers homeschooling, particularly unschooling, as an alternative. Drawing on the principles of John Holt’s Escape from Childhood and Ivan Ilyich’s Deschooling Society, this vision of unschooling is collectivized and community-based. It calls for a total abolition of the school system and a world in which children are free to independently pursue their interests and learn what they would like to from those around them. This vision shows more promise than the socially atomized and isolating model of home unschooling, but it does still leave some questions to be answered. Children deserve input and autonomy in their education, but is it still possible to have structure without adult authoritarianism? I can’t help but feel we all need some degree of structure, adults and children alike. Can we build structure without restraint?
Perhaps I am being too detail-oriented, too practical. This is, after all, a utopian project. As Lane-McKinley says, “adultism is the ultimate anti-utopianism.” We weaponize “childish” as an insult against those who dare to dream, the young, the politically progressive, those who choose nontraditional life paths like communal living or polyamory. How can you be an adult without a husband and a mortgage? Adulthood as we conceive it is about being ‘sensible’ and keeping your feet on the ground and your head out of the clouds. The liberation of children and abolition of adult supremacy might allow us to dream a little bigger and embrace utopian thinking.
Lane-McKinley’s argument is not about what we should do for children to give them a better future, but about what we can do with children to plot that route together. In rejecting the property relation of motherhood, we must work with children to create a new dynamic of mothering and genuine collaboration with children, against inherited patriarchal hierarchies. Children do depend on adults, but dependence need not entail domination. We all depend on each other, and we can do so without exercising power over one another. Despite some practicalities that raised my eyebrow, such as the suggestion of unschooling as a replacement for more structured education, I enthusiastically embrace Lane-McKinley’s radical vision for co-authorship alongside children for our utopian liberatory futures.
Kate Bugos is a writer and feminist historian in London. She co-convenes Re-enchantment, an interdisciplinary arts and literature network and London based reading series.
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