There are benefits to thinking about extreme proposals—suggested utopias and radical restructurings of institutions. However unlikely it might be that such proposals are ever put into effect, they help us to think more clearly both about what needs to be changed and about what might yet be feasible. The particular extreme or utopian (or perhaps dystopian) set of proposals Susan Frelich Appleton and Albertina Antognini consider in their recent work is, as their title indicates, “abolishing the family.” While family, in conventional social and political ideologies, is often presented as an ideal, it has also for a long time been the subject of sharp criticism by many feminists and more than a few family law scholars. And, from the perspective of such critics, moderate reforms have turned out to be frustrating, teaching us (as the authors put it) “not only that inequality and its counterpart, privilege, continuously find ways to reassert themselves” (P. 60, fn omitted), but also that many suggested reforms “have failed because they defy core pillars of what families are assumed to be or do.” (P. 61.)
As the authors note (P. 4), the analysis of family abolition broadly evokes the discussion of abolishing marriage associated with Martha Fineman in work such as The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies and others (see, e.g., the contributors to Anita Bernstein (ed.), Marriage Proposals: Questioning a Legal Status and Elizabeth Brake (ed.), After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships). During the later stages of the same-sex marriage movement, some more conservative voices also urged getting the state out of the business of recognizing marriage (so as not to be forced to give official sanction to same-sex unions). Despite such right-wing arguments joining critiques from within the LGBTQ+ movement and older left-wing arguments against marriage, civil marriage, now expanded to include same-sex couples, is still with us, and with little likelihood of imminent abolition.
In any event, what does it mean to want to “abolish marriage”? Appleton and Antognini discuss a range of ideas and proposals from other disciplines that fall under that label, and show how the proposals tend to aim at certain problems with families and family law: “keeping dependency private, devaluing care, policing families that depart from the prevailing norm, and camouflaging legal constructions as ‘natural’ facts.” (P. 46.) As the authors note, “family law’s participation [in privatizing support] is often difficult to see because it consistently hides its involvement by appealing to nature or how things are.” (P. 20.)
The advocates of those proposals have generally been clear that they were not trying to tell people whom to love or with whom to live (the authors quote one activist in the area, Sophie Lewis, as emphasizing that “‘[m]ost family abolitionists love their families’” (P. 61, brackets in original.)). However, some of the proposals summarized do prescribe certain aspects of family structure, in that they would determine how children were to be raised (according to some proposals, this would be done collectively (Pp. 32-35.)).
One obvious theme to these proposals is that the alternative to delegation to families tends to be a greater role for the marketplace (for example, removing legal penalties for prostitution and greater legal recognition for surrogacy (e.g., Pp. 27-32)) and/or a greater role for the state (e.g., Pp. 42-43). The latter may seem especially dystopian to many these days, as we watch with horror what is being done by and in the name of the federal government and some state governments.
Ultimately, Appleton and Antognini conclude that, as with many utopian proposals, the approaches seeking to remove the special status of families or to remove current requirements and prohibitions in the interactions of partners and parents with their children, tend either to be entirely unworkable or to carry problems even worse than the status quo. The article notes that past experiments with communal care for children “offer[] a cautionary talk about the viability of an arrangement built on the forced separation of parents and children.” (P. 35.) As Appleton and Antognini point out, some of the abolitionist theorists seem unbothered by hard issues left unresolved by their proposals: Sophie Lewis is said to “reject as a ‘bad question’ any inquiry about who has responsibility for care of a dependent or vulnerable individual.” (P. 45.)
The authors conclude (again quoting Sophie Lewis) that “it remains near impossible to ‘imagine the end of . . . the family.’” (P. 61.) Appleton and Antognini praise abolitionist proposals for the way they “expose the family as contingent, and contestable” and undermine rhetoric portraying current practices as natural or inevitable. Such proposals also show, indirectly, “why reform efforts have proven so difficult to implement.” (P. 60.) Given how we think about families and the role the state gives to families within society (like privatizing care), these pre-existing conceptions make it hard to change just one aspect of family law and family life. Abolitionist proposals may be the necessary “first step[s] in being able to even consider alternat[ive] structures.” (P. 61.)
