Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation

We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive pamphlet, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.

Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, from nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai, radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists of the '60s, to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This short, exhilarating pamphlet looks at the rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and asks: what if we could do better than the family? Only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after. If abolition means changing everything, we cannot leave the family intact.