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<h1 id="reader-title">We Made a Village for the Kids:
Reflections on the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">January 26, 2017 - <a
href="https://viewpointmag.com/author/mickey-ellinger/"
title="Posts by Mickey Ellinger" rel="author">Mickey
Ellinger</a> </div>
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<p>When I tell other activists in the San Francisco Bay
Area that I was a member of Prairie Fire Organizing
Committee (PFOC or PF) in the 1970s and 1980s,<sup
id="rf1-7252"><a
href="https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#fn1-7252"
title="After the then-popular quotation from Mao
Zedong, “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”"
rel="footnote">1</a></sup> they often say, “Oh yeah,
you’re the people who always had child care at your
events.” People who knew us better knew that we also
shared child care among our members and had a
political kids group that was mostly our children but
included a few others. Our small organization was a
village that raised almost forty children over twenty
years. We didn’t do a perfect job —our grown kids are
quick to tell us where we blew it, but also to
acknowledge how it made their childhoods richer, more
meaningful, and more secure. At the same time, we made
it possible for parents to participate fully in
our collective life and for all of the adults to have
meaningful relationships to children,
relationships that translated our commitment to
feminism into the practical work of social
reproduction.</p>
<p>In this period, when progressive activists are
trying to figure out how to organize ourselves to
deal with the challenges ahead, it’s important to
think about where children fit in. How can we nurture
our communities’ children while ensuring that
parents, and especially women, are able to
participate fully?</p>
<p>For much of recorded history, children have grown up
in villages or towns with tight-knit social
relationships, where everyone knew them and had a
role in their upbringing. The kids knew the
boundaries, and expected to be supported and
chastised by everyone. The myth of the idealized
nuclear family, two parents and one or two children,
was widely propagated in United States after World War
Two. My generation, born in the 1940s and 1950s, were
parented by that generation of nuclear family
parents.</p>
<p>My generation became active supporting civil
rights, opposing the war in Vietnam, and developing
a feminist consciousness. <a
href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/index.htm">Like
many other radicals</a>, we organized a small,
disciplined organization of a type that flourished
in the 1970s but is rare on the Left today. We
considered ourselves communists, an organization
of dedicated cadre for whom overthrowing the US
empire was our highest priority. We studied the
Marxist, Leninist and Maoist classics, but were not
aligned with any formal communist tendency, and
looked to neither the Soviet Union nor China for
direction. Most of us were members of Bay Area public
activist movements. Some ended up in prison for our
actions and beliefs, and others were underground
for years.</p>
<p>We were united by an anti-imperialist politics
that saw white supremacy as foundational to the U.S
empire, shared the rudiments of a strategy for
overthrowing U.S. imperialism, and adhered to a
high level of collective accountability in our
personal lives that included a commitment to raising
our children.</p>
<p>We hated how the nuclear family foreclosed women’s
opportunities, and when we founded PFOC we wanted to
do it differently. It was the 1970s. We were mostly in
our 30s and had dedicated our lives to overthrowing
the U.S. empire, but we also intended to raise
families. We were mostly first generation
homegrown radicals and some Red diaper babies,
looking for new ways to live in the world. As one of
our members explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We didn’t want to replicate the experience of the
Communist Party, where women were either completely
overburdened or they were never around and the
children felt abandoned. There are many children of
the Communist Party who felt that their parents
were lunatics, or women who felt like they couldn’t
participate in political activities, because,
of course, it was their job to take care of the
children.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Women’s liberation was central to our politics.
We were led by women and saw fighting male supremacy as
essential to overthrowing imperialism. We wrote
these ideas into our <a
href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC501_scans/Break/501.break.1.march.77.pdf">founding
political statement in 1977</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Under imperialism, women’s oppression has become
defined within the framework of their double
function: as unwaged reproducers, socializers and
maintainers of the labor force in the home; and as
super exploited members of the wage labor force,
primarily in the reserve army of labor. These
oppressive functions are maintained and reinforced
by male supremacist institutions, ideology and
privilege which extend into every area of women’s
lives: political, social, cultural,
psychological, and sexual (p. 29).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our women’s caucus was both a political and a
personal support. We supported gay liberation when
much of the left considered being gay a disease of
empire. We always supported, argued with, and
participated in the autonomous women’s movement.
Further, we were determined to practice feminism in
the daily life of our organization. Parents,
especially women, were full participants in our
collective’s very demanding array of tasks and
activities. Collective child care was a practical
expression of our feminist politics and a
political responsibility, as important as
participation in our strenuous schedule of
meetings and actions.</p>
<p>Our collective child care was more than a practical
matter, and more than just a belief that “the children
are our future.” We saw social reproduction, “women’s
work,” as the work that knits human communities
together. We wanted all of our members to
participate in work that we saw as crucial to
building revolutionary consciousness and making
revolution.</p>
<p>As a new generation of activists is wrestling with
questions of organization and strategy, I would
argue that we need to look at how to build our
movements to prefigure the world we want to see while
we are fighting for racial justice, immigrant rights,
women’s liberation and the rights of gender
non-conforming people. This essay describes what we
did in PFOC in the San Francisco Bay Area and reflects
on its relevance to today.</p>
<h2>Child Care Teams</h2>
<p>Child care teams were organized for every family, and
every member of PFOC participated. Our practice
evolved over the two decades of our organizational
existence, but the basics stayed pretty much the same.
A child care shift, usually weekly, could involve
picking up one or more kids from school or after school
activity, helping with homework, making dinner,
overseeing bath and bedtime. The teams usually had
from three to five members depending on the
adult/child ratio at the time, which meant that parents
were free three to five times a week to go to meetings
or other activities of our lives. We helped manage
weekend activities; when we had programs or
activities we always provided child care, not only
for ourselves but for anyone who participated.</p>
<p>The childcare teams were our effort to create a
village for the kids. When I picked up my charge from
school or day camp I would joke that I was part of her
“vast entourage.” We wanted the kids to know that they
had people they could call on, talk to, ask for help.
The testimony of the grown children confirms that
most of them felt that support, felt welcome in the
world. They criticize us for our shortcomings, but
also recognize that they had more support than most
of their peers. They are a pretty confident,
competent bunch, most have warm relationships with
their parents and have kept friendships with many
members of their child care teams for more than
30 years.</p>
<p>For the twenty years PFOC was part of the Bay Area
Left, about fifty of us raised almost forty kids. Today
the oldest are approaching fifty, the youngest are not
yet in their teens. We have a handful of
grandchildren, and in a lot of ways resemble any
other crew of aging white radicals. Many of us are
teachers, writers, and still activists. We still
participate in solidarity work with Haiti and
Palestine, march with Black Lives Matter against police
terror and for women’s reproductive justice and
LGBTQ liberation.</p>
<p>As a participant in today’s movements, I see that
parents, especially women, are facing the same
obstacles to full participation that we saw in the
1970s. Left groups do not have a perspective that
includes child raising.</p>
<p>Although I was convinced that our efforts at
structured collective child raising were positive,
I wanted to find out what all of us, adults and
children, thought of our child care practice. How did
the kids understand what we were doing? How do the
adults remember their years of parenting in a
collective or being on child care teams? I
interviewed everyone I could find who was willing to
talk to me for an hour, about fifty interviews in all.
There were a few adults who I could not track down, and
a few who declined to be interviewed. I was able to
interview most of the grown children. This informal
style of inquiry raised three themes to which people
kept returning: the kids mostly liked their child care
teams and hated it when people left them; the parents
appreciated the help, although were often ambivalent
about sharing decision making about the kids; and the
non-parents were personally transformed by building
relationships with children.<sup id="rf2-7252"><a
href="https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#fn2-7252"
title="Although I talked to many former members of
PFOC and our children, this is my personal summary
and not a collective assessment." rel="footnote">2</a></sup></p>
<h2>Impact on the Children</h2>
<p>The kids mostly loved the child care teams, although
they were less thrilled with how many grownups felt
entitled to know what they were doing and to have
opinions about it. From one of our older children, the
third of four raised in a big collective house in San
Francisco’s Haight Ashbury:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the great things about having a child care
team was for kids to hang out with adults that are
going to expose them to things and talk about things
with them and take them on adventures and have energy
for them that their biological parents might not.
Being around adults who said I have energy for you and
I have time for you and I want to focus on you and
take you places and hang out with you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Most of the former kids I interviewed concurred,
remembering particular members of their team who
they enjoyed. For example, another grown child shared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Annie would tell these epic stories about the Roman
bourgeoisie who were gluttonous and would go into
the vomitoriums and throw up so they could eat
more. And then the maids had to go in and clean up
these horrible vomitoriums and found these
precious jewels and ran away and lived forever on
these rings. Really creative wonderful stories
that were very political that I just ate up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course there was a downside to having so much
adult attention. The same person continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A lot of people talking about how you did on your
math test and whether you can tie your shoes or the
age you were potty trained, it puts a lot of pressure
on you. The level of awareness of other people’s
opinions about me from a very early age. I’m a very
private person because I’m very aware of other
people’s opinions and criticisms and judgment. I
really keep things very close. I don’t expose myself
very readily. Privacy that I’ve clung to as
security.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On the other hand, they hated it when people went
away. As adults the kids mostly praise us for our
efforts to support them. But they all have memories
of loss, of people leaving the child care teams, some
of them of people going underground. They hated
people going away and hold us accountable for not
finding a way to help them understand what was going
on. When someone left our tight-knit political
circle, they often left the kids as well:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We lost [one person] because he left the
community. I remember asking about it. I remember
my mom saying he’s not going to be a part of PFOC any
more and her saying he wanted to be more with the gay
community. Some part of me got that, but I asked if
he was going to be around for us. And she said yes,
but I don’t think he was very welcome in the scene
any more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the kids knew they had something special. Our
kids knew the teams were an asset their friends did not
have. Even when they did not know how to say it, they
could tell that their connections ran farther and
deeper than a “traditional” two parent household and
that their team were not babysitters. More than one of
the kids noted that it was their friends of color who
recognized our extended family style arrangements:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I grew up with a lot of black kids, and this way of
having family wasn’t that dissimilar from the way
that their families were. The people I felt most
uncomfortable with were other white kids, because
there was still such a pressure for hetero
families. But the black kids I hung out with would
say, oh this is my play cousin. And I could say I have
some of those too. It was a language for me to
express what you all were. I remember begging my
parents, ‘what are these people to me because they
are not just my friends?’ I couldn’t use the word
comrade, but that was another way to say it. That was
my play sister.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The partner of a woman close to us interviewed some
PFOC parents and children for her master’s thesis in
social work. She summarizes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The kids I interviewed had a sense of being welcome
in the world. Their confidence arose from their
sense of being welcome in multiple households.
They had a sense that by and large they were raised by
people who listened to them, that were in their
business. Some kids didn’t like that there was a lack
of privacy at times, but they also learned how to
speak their minds with adults at a young age because
they had to. And there was actually support for them
speaking out. The folks who raised them were rather
remarkable people in themselves, and I think that
some of that rubbed off.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Children’s Political Education</h2>
<p>We organized political education for our growing
pack of school-age children. They called it the Red
Dragons. We showed them movies like Roots and Eyes on
the Prize. The kids disrupted Toys R Us during the
holiday shopping season with a demonstration
against war toys. Red Dragons was our effort to engage
the kids in our political work, led by PFOC members
who worked in child care centers or the public
schools. When we look back on it now, I think many of us
agree that we were pretty top down and dogmatic, and
that if we had it to do over again we would have
listened harder to the kids.</p>
<p>Our most successful campaign with them was Pennies
for Pencils. People had just returned from a
delegation to El Salvador in 1984 and told the kids
how poorly equipped the schools were, mentioning that
the kids there didn’t even have pencils. Our kids
responded: “We brainstormed what we would want to give
the kids in El Salvador, and we probably got help
with that. Somebody helped us learn about the lack of
school supplies … I remember being really excited
about that.” We mounted a campaign with the idea of
collecting money for pencils. They had a booth at
neighborhood fairs (pin the tail on Reagan) and
canvassed door to door. The kids raised more than
$1,500 in three years and sent tens of thousands of
pencils to El Salvador.</p>
<p>The reactions of the grown children to their
memories of the Red Dragons ran the gamut from
negative to positive, with polite ambivalence a
common response.</p>
<p>The most negative:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I do understand the parental compulsion to give
children a worldview that incorporates one’s own
values, and you guys had solid ones, for the most
part. I just don’t think most of the adults involved
knew how to handle the responsibility in a way
that was conducive to a child’s understanding and
development.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Other assessments were more ambivalent:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No one on my child care team was part of Red
Dragons, so nobody was invested in my emotional
well-being except to make sure I came home with all my
teeth and wasn’t hauled off to juvenile hall. I don’t
blame them. We were thrown together in ways that
weren’t very organic. I have really fond memories of
playing with all of these kids; we have some great
pictures of all of us. But as we got older it got a
little meaner. And as we perceived the larger social
setting we were in, we also reflected the social
structure of the organization and of our parents.
It wasn’t that we were friends and had a play date. It
was that our parents were doing political work, and
we were doing political work.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The most positive assessment of our kids group came
from people who themselves became organizers as
adults:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I loved the Red Dragons. I remember a lot of kids.
Me and [my sister] would tease each other, oh boy are
they really training us for something,
indoctrination, contrary to what our parents
might say now. I loved being around all these kids, I
felt like we were a family, we were learning
something in a pretty fun way. We went on camping
trips, we did all this pretty cool stuff.</p>
<p>We learned really important things about race and
gender in the Red Dragons, and about what it meant.
We didn’t have to unlearn the myths about the perfect
U.S. democracy later on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We visited political prisoners on a regular
basis and took the kids as a matter of course. We were
close to a cohort of Puerto Rican, Black and white
political prisoners: militant activists for Puerto
Rican independence, Black nationalist
revolutionaries, white anti-imperialists
convicted of armed actions. As I interviewed our kids,
I realized that without my asking they were all
telling me about going to visit political prisoners
and how important those visits were for teaching them
about injustice:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Visiting prisons and visiting the people that I
knew in prison were probably some of the most
powerful experiences I had when I was a kid. It
made me really angry because they couldn’t walk out
with us at the end.</p>
<p>I think kids really want to figure out what’s fair
or not, and it didn’t seem fair that these people who
were so amazing and who either did nothing or did
something that I thought was justified were in
prison for the rest of their lives instead of out
with us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Talking to the grown kids convinced me that our child
care practice gave them an overall understanding of
social justice and confidence in their capacity to
participate in social change. None of them has wholly
rejected our political perspectives, although they
are not all activists or organizers by any means. And
as they have their own children, they echo some of our
child care arrangements, although they tend to be
structured along more traditional lines (calling on
us as grandparents, etc.).</p>
<h2>Impact on the Parents</h2>
<p>The parents were of course glad to have the support
of child care teams. Some felt they didn’t get enough
support, especially the ones who had children later
when we had more kids to take care of and were less
tightly organized. And some admitted to wishing they
could spend more time with their children and
resenting the children having other significant
adults. As one parent put it, “I wanted those little
arms reaching out for me.” Everyone talked about the
challenge of finding a balance between collective
discussion of the kids and the need to make final
parenting decisions.</p>
<p>A long time member, a child care professional,
sums up:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I knew that in the long run most of those parents
were going to be with those kids, but that many of the
people on the child care team were there for this
year or that year, as long as their assignment lasted
and as long as they were involved with Prairie Fire.</p>
<p>It’s what I understand about my role as a
professional child care provider. I can be with kids
40 hours a week, but I’m going to be with them for a
couple of years. It’s their parents who are going to
be with them for the long term.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On the other hand, our child care teams were an
opportunity for both parents and children to have a
broader view of the value of relationships between
adults and children. One of the parents explained it
this way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I became a parent kicking and screaming. But then
I got to the point where I didn’t want our daughter
to go to another house, I didn’t want her to go for
two weeks to Maine with people on her child care
team. I wanted to be with her. But that wasn’t what
people signed up for. If I wanted this to be a child
care team, I had to give up my privilege or my power
or my position as primary parent. Letting go of
that was hard, it wasn’t something I wanted to do,
but I knew it was what was best for her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These unique familial units had other unintended
effects. For instance, they mitigated the pain for the
kids when parents separated. Because we tended to
couple within the collective, our kids did not
usually lose a parent when the parents separated.
(Collective support and pressure for the grownups
was also a factor; our breakups were for the most part
very civil.) If anything, the child care teams grew and
changed as the kids rotated between houses. But to a
remarkable extent, the security of our children was
not dependent on the personal relationships of their
parents.</p>
<p>One of our former members:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The child care team was an invaluable asset in
managing divorce. Not just because we saw other
people break up and still have this family
structure, although that’s a big thing that I got out
of the whole thing, but also because you need help
sometimes. My breakup with [my partner] was in part
a product of some of the dysfunctions within
Prairie Fire. But in the same way that a collective
structure put a lot of pressure on a family, the
sense that we were a family even if we weren’t
together was never questioned for us because we had
this structure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And one of the grown children:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I definitely noticed that my parents getting
along better after they were separated was very
beneficial and that was the most important thing.
They seemed to get along better after they were
separated than when they were together. I remember
as a young child, 7 or 8, other friends saying I was
rich because I had two houses, especially since they
were living so close to each other.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Collective child care posed challenges for the
parents, as people not biologically related to
their children formed relationships with them and had
opinions about them. We did not have clear
guidelines, so one team might decide it was
appropriate to argue about what middle school a 12
year old should attend, while on another team, the
parents might be completely in charge, with the rest
of us viewed as helpers. At a minimum we relieved our
parents of the burden of being the only adult models
for their children; some parents actually
constructed families of a new type with non-parents,
families that have lasted to this day.</p>
<h2>Impact on the Non-Parents</h2>
<p>The most surprising transformative impact of our
child care practice was for the non-parents. For me,
as for many of the non-parents, collective child care
not only deepened my feminist politics, it changed
my life. I come from a big family, saw my mother give
up her personal ambitions to raise us, and was
unwilling to be some child’s only or even primary role
model of motherhood. Nor was I interested in
becoming a preschool or elementary school teacher.
But I like kids, care about them, and knew that raising
children was vitally important work in the world. I
did childcare for several of our older kids, and
became a third parent for our daughter, who I have
known since she was conceived almost 40 years ago.</p>
<p>Early in the interviewing process for this project, I
realized that many of us non-parents had our own
versions of my transformative experiences. Some of
us made new families that included the non-parents
(at least three such families). Others went from the
childcare teams to bear or adopt their own children: a
dozen heterosexual couples, and half a dozen
lesbian couples in and around PFOC. Two single men,
on straight, one gay, and one woman adopted.</p>
<p>One man, now a parent of two children, describes his
transformative experience:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I took the step of joining PF I knew this would
be part of my duties, and I saw it as a duty. …It
takes about half a second before you realize this
isn’t a duty, it’s about developing a relationship
with this kid, with children. Once that shift
happened, it’s magical. Once you make that shift
and you’re really relating to a kid, then you can
relate to any kid…you can become a teacher!</p>
<p>Where’s the payback [for us]? PF’s not around any
more, I have these two young children, but really the
payback, the reward was intrinsic, at the moment.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A gay man who became a parent as well as a leader of
the Red Dragons offers this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It didn’t occur to me to have a relationship to
children, because one of the things about being a gay
man is that you didn’t have a relationship to
children…. One of the great things that Prairie
Fire’s collective child care and the Red Dragons
gave me was the knowledge that I loved kids. I didn’t
know that because that wasn’t a thinkable thing
before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He attributed his own eventual adoption of a
daughter to his time with kids in the PFOC:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I highly doubt that it would have happened if I had
not had the experience I had with kids in PF and
learned, a. I liked it, and b. I could do it. …A lot
of people I knew were dying. A whole set of gay men
that I had come to find myself with were dying. And in
that way that death and new children are part of
a cycle….</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A straight man who went on to be one of the three
parents of our daughter explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had zero experience of kids before PF… had no
interest in being around kids and no experience
raising or helping with that.…One of our agreements
[in my relationship] was that we weren’t going to
have kids, because I didn’t want to have kids. She
agreed politically but not personally…I couldn’t say
no, but my condition was that we were going to live
collectively. I don’t think I would have wanted to
have kids in a different context at that time.
Having the collectivity allowed me to be open to
that possibility…It wasn’t just the political line,
the project, we all do child care.</p>
<p>It wasn’t just opening up time for women to be out
in the political world because they didn’t have to
be with the kids all the time. It also allowed me to
not be taking such a personal risk to the rest of my
life goals.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our child care model worked because we were dedicated
to a larger political goal and childcare was a
condition of membership. Many of us were not
ourselves parents, and we subscribed to a feminist
politics that defined collective child raising as
essential feminist practice. Our model became a
challenge as more of us decided to become parents and
there were fewer non-parents to populate the teams.
Our later parenting models look more like today’s
parent co-ops and play dates. By the mid-90s our
organization had failed to grow; we disbanded in the
Bay Area.</p>
<p>Yet some of the next generation of parents in the
Bay Area radical movement were directly inspired by
our model to construct something similar involving
support for the parents and a bigger circle of
adults for the kids. An environmental justice
organizer in her 40s told me how her observation of
the PFOC childcare teams influenced her to try
the model:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We lived with someone on a PFOC child care team. The
child spent the night at our house once a week and we
got to know the whole extended family, her mom and
all of them. They introduced us to the Prairie Fire
model of the child care team, so we had a little
gathering of folks who were interested in this
idea. Some of the Prairie Fire folks told stories
about what it was, what they did and how it worked.
Then we started a child care team for our first child.</p>
<p>We had a fairly big crew in the beginning, that
whittled down to four or five. Many of them have
stayed really close in our lives. They would take her
out for walks, or come over and spend time with her.
That would give us time; it was a foundation for us.
And also for her. It was a way to provide her with
other adults.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another couple that had been part of one of our teams
organized a team of their own when their child was
born, and improvised some other collective childcare
ideas on that basis:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the baby was born we didn’t cook for a month.
People would come over, hold her, do our dishes. It
was about people coming over and being helpful, but
also having a relationship.</p>
<p>It started with organized child care, and as she’s
gotten older it’s transmuted into a large family.
She’s got a lot of aunties and an uncle. Some of them
don’t see her as much but they’re still her aunties
and uncle. They will take her and a friend and go do
stuff with them, so that they have become part of her
family.</p>
<p>The other thing that we did was … [at her preschool]
she became friends with these girls and we became
friends with their families. We have supported
these girls since they were two years old to continue
their friendship and to continue our relationship
with these families. We helped one family when her
dad died. The girls go to different schools but they
see each other every summer. They have birthday
parties together.</p>
<p>I recruited the families to start a cooperative
day camp. Since kindergarten we have spent one to
three weeks each summer taking turns having a day
with the kids in a model that’s not so
fundamentally different than a child care team.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Still, for most activists, the decision to become
parents tends to drive them out of the movement. And
yet, these parents are precisely the ones who come to
understand the need for new ways of thinking about
childcare. A veteran activist in her 40s with a
teenage daughter sums up the dilemma:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We all pay lip service to the importance of the
next generation, the importance of education,
safety for children, blah blah blah. But it’s not
until we ourselves become parents that we actually
start to want to do things about it, but then because
it’s just us, we are peeled away from the mainstream
of the movement and have to figure it out on our
own. And that happens over and over again. It was
probably happening in your generation, it’s
happening with people younger than me.</p>
<p>And because we each decide to have a child when we
decide, the people who become acutely aware of the
need to change how we raise children are the people
who do not have the capacity to make that change
happen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A creative adaptation of the team approach was a
child care collective that flourished in the Bay Area
in the early 2000s, organized by a group of white
activists looking for a way to do concrete
solidarity work with organizations led by women of
color. Its members built relationships with
particular organizations, providing child care
for their meetings and activities. I interviewed one
of their organizers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the primary goals of the childcare
collective is to provide support for working class
women of color leaders in the movement through
organizations like People Organized to Win
Employment Rights (POWER), Causa Justa/Just Cause,
the women’s programs of the Day Labor Center, and
similar organizations that have their base in
working class communities of color.</p>
<p>Childcare is a way that people with different
forms of privilege around race or class or gender
could be acting in solidarity with communities
that are most impacted by heteropatriarchy and
capitalism and as a way to support families more
broadly to come into movement spaces, and to support
women’s leadership in particular.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Still, this particular childcare collective is an
exception within the broader movement landscape:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The flip side is that there is still a lack of
commitment to childcare in the left and in our
movement. Even some of the women that we would be
working with would have to struggle within their
organizations to get resources for child care.</p>
<p>Child care is the first thing that people cut out of
their schedule when they get “too busy,” and you
would have a lot of conversations with people
about well, you’re not too busy, it’s a matter of
priorities. You’re making a political decision
to deprioritize it. Once a month? Almost anybody
can do that. But it has to be a priority. And why is
this not a priority?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like many of the original PFOC activists I
interviewed, this organizer emphasized how this sort
of childcare work contributed to the strength of the
struggle in the long term:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was not just about solidarity work. It was
about building with these young people. I got to
work with young people over the course of many years
and then see them grow up and turn into youth
organizers. I learned a lot around how important it
is not just to support women’s leadership but to
create spaces where entire families can be a part
of movement work in different ways.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Building a Broader Movement</h2>
<p>If we want to build movements that are broad as well
as deep, and that reflect our communities, we have to
provide for our children in deep and meaningful ways.</p>
<p>Parents feel tremendous responsibility for
children, and will not lightly entrust them to a
collective process of any kind unless they are
confident that the children will be safe, nurtured,
appreciated. This means different things in
different communities, but includes safety from the
police, knowing about food allergies and other health
situations, and appreciating each child’s unique
mind and spirit. A sense of humor and willingness to
learn are a basic requirement.</p>
<p>What institutions can inspire this level of trust?
First, there must be common goals besides care for the
children, some kind of collective intention to which
people feel and are held accountable. That is
necessary, but not sufficient. Many radical
organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had common
goals (the usual language was “principles of unity”),
but most did little or nothing to deal with child
raising as either a practical or a political
problem.</p>
<p>The lesson we take from our experience in PFOC is
that the collective intention must be feminist and
focused on community building as well as narrowly
“political.” Community building involves a lot of
taking care of each other and a lot of mundane work:
helping with each other’s living conditions,
dealing with unequal incomes, accommodating
disability. It’s a lot of the work that has
traditionally been “women’s work,” and it needs to be
the work of everyone in the community if we are going
to be practicing feminists— which is another way of
saying caring human beings. If our political work
makes us “too busy” to build our community, we can be
sure that taking care of the children will be seen
merely as one task among others, and that people who
are not parents will find themselves “too busy” to
fulfill their child care responsibilities. Yet if
we see the direct link between building strong
communities and our broader political goals, we can
appreciate the importance of collective childcare.</p>
<p>If the collective is committed to the kids, then
parents face the opportunity to let other adults into
the lives of their children. Some will welcome this;
for some it will be a challenge. Current “attachment
parenting” ideology reinforces parents’
understandable anxiety about their children and
dovetails with the pervasive climate of fear
fostered by our increasingly militarized/policed
society and its media minions. Parents may not
realize or prioritize how much shared child raising
means for the adult non-parents. The feminist
politics of the collective necessitates
discussion of how much non-parents and parents and
their children can gain from the support of a bigger
community.</p>
<p>And then non-parent adults have to sign on and step
up, to see ourselves not as “helping the parents”
(echo of men “helping with housework”) but as
establishing serious relationships with parents
and children, for ourselves as well as for them.</p>
<p>Our collective commitment to our children in PFOC
has made us all, women and men, gay and straight, much
more conscious of the importance of the work of social
reproduction and the value of community. We strive
for egalitarian relationships in our families. We
have a web of comradely relationships with each other
based on mutual respect. We are caring for
grandchildren and helping each other with the
hardships of aging; we do child care as solidarity
work with other organizations; and we see ourselves
as part of the project of envisioning a world worth
living in.<br>
</p>
<div style="[object Object]">
<article id="post-7252" class="hentry post publish
post-1 odd author-robertcavooris has-excerpt
format-standard category-blog">
<div class="entry-content">
<hr class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes">
<li id="fn1-7252">
<p>After the then-popular quotation from Mao
Zedong, “A single spark can start a prairie
fire.” <a
href="https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#rf1-7252"
class="backlink" title="Jump back to
footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn2-7252">
<p>Although I talked to many former members of
PFOC and our children, this is my personal
summary and not a collective assessment. <a
href="https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#rf2-7252"
class="backlink" title="Jump back to
footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
</article>
<div class="author-profile vcard">
<div class="author-co-profile">
<p class="author-description author-bio"> <a
href="https://viewpointmag.com/author/mickey-ellinger/"
title="Posts by Mickey Ellinger" rel="author">Mickey
Ellinger</a> is an activist in Oakland,
California. She has taught college classes and
worked in a print shop, as a system administrator,
and a freelance writer. </p>
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