Recently, journalist Louise Perry wrote a piece for The New York Times about the unconventional household I live in. She sent me her first draft to check, and one phrase stuck out oddly. She described our house as a “self-consciously feminist project.”

It brought me up short. We are soon to be eight people living together—my husband and two children, another couple who are pregnant, a single person (and a cat). It was a long, difficult road to get here. At no point in all our years of planning and plotting did we mention feminism. Loneliness, yes, and housing crises, and the climate emergency, and our shared faith. Gender, never. I asked Louise what had given her that impression, and she said,  “Well, you are distributing caring and domestic load. All of you are working. It seems fairly…equal.”

She isn’t wrong. Which of the housemates are working more, earning more, caring more at any one time hasn’t seemed especially connected to gender. Some of the distribution of responsibilities has mapped vaguely onto “traditional roles” (one male leads on DIY, the other on finance, while the female housemates gravitate towards grocery shopping, gardening, and hospitality) but this isn’t a problem. We do the things we enjoy. We are all pursuing our vocations and most of us, most of the time, earning some money.

Being described as “self-consciously feminist” made me furrow my brow, because while I wouldn’t reject the label (I know myself the beneficiary of freedoms feminists fought for), I’ve been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the currently available options under that banner.

Care makes clearer our irreconcilable interdependence and undermines the project of making humans as close to frictionless, mobile units of machine output as possible.

On one hand is the narrative that a better life for women requires liberation from providing the intimate, unpaid care that has long defined our sex and often been coupled with economic precarity and restricted political agency. This kind of feminism is shaped by individualism and the association of status and freedom with public, paid work. Mary Harrington calls it “the feminism of freedom” and I think of it as individualist feminism. It often results in women becoming more useful to the market economy and less financially dependent. Because interdependence or physical limitation tends to undermine that usefulness, this strand of feminism often treats the female body’s reproductive capacities as a problem to be solved. Functioning more like a man has often seemed the only viable route to equality. Care makes clearer our irreconcilable interdependence and undermines the project of making humans as close to frictionless, mobile units of machine output as possible.

It isn’t just economics that drives this kind of feminism. Being solely a provider of care makes many women miserable. Feminist theorist Sophie Lewis goes so far as to call the family “a prison for adults—especially women—[made] out of their own commitment to children they love.” Or as Philip Larkin puts it in “Afternoons”:

Young mothers assemble 

At swing and sandpit 

Setting free their children…. 

Something is pushing them 

To the side of their own lives.

Freeing up others by taking care of them, mainly alone, behind closed doors, has pushed many women to the sides of our own lives. We are reduced to being, in the words of one pastor, “the kind of people that other people come out of.” Individualist feminism is a response to real injustice. It comes from a view of women, repeatedly visible throughout history, that sees us as source of unpaid sexual, domestic, and reproductive labor. It is an entirely understandable reaction to the curtailing of our full dignity, the shrinking of our particularity, the limiting of our ability to use our wide range of gifts in the service of the world. 

In societies which repeatedly seek to narrow our role, of course some women with the means to do so will free themselves from the trap. But freedom in its fullness is not simply the absence of constraint. For many of us, eventually, the way the human race reproduces itself becomes unavoidably salient, and the individualist illusion which denies or disguises the differences between males and females falls apart.

I came fully into a feminist identity during my first pregnancy, when the stark chasm between my experience and my husband’s, mine and my male colleagues’, could be felt in my bladder, my dislocating pelvis, my foggy brain. I was leading an organization and was roundly patronized by older men who made no secret that they saw leadership and motherhood as incompatible. One funder threatened to pull their support because they “didn’t want to fund [my] maternity pay.”

Female biology primes us for interdependence and has inbuilt vulnerability. This is particularly acute for, but in no way limited to, those who bear and care for young children. 

The life experiences of males and females tend to diverge, partly because the potential to bear children is central to the female experience. You may have tensed up at that line, and I understand, because it’s sentiment is often heard from people I suspect neither like nor respect women. Let me, then, be clear about what I mean. I do not mean that a woman who does not have children (through choice or circumstance) is any less a woman. I do not mean that child-free lives are any less meaningful. What I mean is that, as Leah Libresco Sargeant says, “Women’s bodies and relationships are shaped by dependence, which makes us exceptional and unwelcome in a world that expects men and women to be autonomous.” Female biology primes us for interdependence and has inbuilt vulnerability. This is particularly acute for, but in no way limited to, those who bear and care for young children. 

It also shapes the lives of those who do not want to be mothers but are at risk of it, of those trying and failing to conceive, of those who menstruate or go through menopause. This interdependence and vulnerability is also central to the lives of young, the elderly, and those living with disabilities. This vulnerability is also, perhaps especially, present for men who cannot force themselves into the physically strong and economically independent mode of being they’re told is required of them. And even those who do conform often do not flourish—they end up all alone, in their “tiny skull-sized kingdoms,” as David Foster Wallace puts it. I’d link the increased “deaths of despair” among men to the fact that an autonomous, independent vision of the person is working for none of us. 

We are made by each other, made for each other, and much of our suffering comes from denying this. The lie of individualism is slowly choking the common good. 

Autonomy should not and cannot be the endgame. An emphasis on it has been a necessary starting point, in some historical moments, in some cultures even today. Long term, a feminism which centers individual freedom is grounding our flourishing in a faulty anthropology. There is no such thing as a free individual. Sociologically, neurobiologically, theologically, we are entangled. This isn’t a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived. We are made by each other, made for each other, and much of our suffering comes from denying this. The lie of individualism is slowly choking the common good. If we are to flourish, we have to find a way to do so, together.

Care is fundamental to this flourishing. No human is born being able to feed or protect themselves, and most of us die in need of care again. Your life is a result of the sacrificial care of others. Leah Libresco Sargeant again: “No one comes into the world except through radical dependence on a woman, an overwhelming need that renders her, in turn, more dependent on those around her.” This fact is relevant for feminism because (at least) half the population cannot cosplay the autonomous, independent, male-coded model of a desirable human life as well as the other half. It is a charade for both, a trap for men too, but their own reliance on and calling to care is easier to hide and more socially permissible to avoid.

This awareness of the centrality of interdependence and care to female experience can, and increasingly is, leading to another, photonegative kind of “feminism.” Catholic philosopher Carrie Gress also sees the limits of a homogenizing, individualizing anthropology: “Because [female] biology makes us naturally vulnerable, we believe that we will be happier if only we can be more like men.” Her answer, however, is not a thoughtful exploration of how humans—in solidarity, seeking each other’s good, acknowledging our interdependence—could collectively weave a container of care strong enough to hold us all, through all the changing seasons of our lives. No, the heart of her answer is tiresomely familiar. “Feminism has made women’s autonomy an idol. What is needed, however, isn’t more focus on career and outside productivity, but on motherhood.” Or, back to the nursery women!

Only two options seem available:

A) Because women’s propensity for care has been used to oppress us, we must shrug it all off

or

B) Because we all need care and women can (and often want to) provide it, that must be our entire, defining role.

Both positions are reductio ad absurdum, a failure to let multiple things be true. Barely visible is the possibility that men might both be capable of, want and flourish through the mutual provision of care. Motherhood is central to women, it seems, in a way fatherhood cannot be to men.  

My vision of the common good, a vision we are trying, deeply imperfectly, to step closer to in our house, is one where we stop pretending to be imaginary autonomous individuals and live more fully into our irreconcilable interdependence. In practice, that looks like a cascade of care. Care flowing through a set of concentric circles we all participate in, which overlap and through which we dance between giver and receiver, more intense and less intense seasons. In this vision (which does not require a radical household like ours) we recognize our collective need for care and are invited to contribute according to our gifts. We care for each other according to the season we are in and the spare capacity we are currently holding. Some of this maps onto our biological sex, some does not. Sometimes physical strength, height, menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and breastfeeding are factors in what care we need and can offer, sometimes they aren’t. Biological sex is one salient element we cannot ignore, but neither should it be defining. 

Why do so many of the conversations about feminism struggle to hold onto this both/and?

Care-less lives can skim over the surface of what it means to be truly human, lacking access to the deep intimacy that comes from needing and being needed.

Instead of this dance of giving and receiving over a lifetime, in our atomized society we have care deserts followed by care pileups. Throughout their twenties and thirties, many people either avoid or are offered no opportunities to care for others, instead pouring all their capacity into work, leisure, and self-development. We see our friends and our family, who ask very little of us, only when it’s convenient. This can continue unendingly, often driving a sense of untethered meaninglessness. Care-less lives can skim over the surface of what it means to be truly human, lacking access to the deep intimacy that comes from needing and being needed. Eventually, the necessity to care and be cared for is forced upon us, either when we (or someone we love) gets sick, or we have children. Then we care relentlessly, mainly alone and in pairs, navigating an unnecessary layer of shame at finding it overwhelming.

There must be better options. Given the pressure the family comes under, it’s no wonder some are calling for its abolition. Sophie Lewis believes our interdependence can and should be distributed, our need for care communalized—that we must “let go of kinship altogether” and push forth with “the relations we might call comradeship, or kith.”

For most of history “the family” has meant something much less hermetically sealed, much more sprawling and interconnected with others.

I share Lewis’s concern about the patchy distribution of care, but not her prescription. The New Testament teaches me to be somewhat skeptical about the primacy of biological family, but I suspect most of us will still care and be cared for by those given to us through marriage, lineage, or adoption. Nonetheless, I see how an expanded vision of “family” could help us, closer to the biblical conception of the household than the 1950s couple-and-2.4-children-alone-behind-a-white-picket-fence. That archetype of family was the exception, made possible by a passing set of economic and political conditions. For most of history “the family” has meant something much less hermetically sealed, much more sprawling and interconnected with others. I’m interested in questioning social scripts that tell us to cluster in small units behind closed doors, never asking for help but outsourcing and purchasing care via the market, which in practice usually means via poorer women. I’d love us instead to open ourselves up again to being fuller parts of our communities and neighborhoods, acknowledging we always and already need each other.

I believe the flourishing of women and of men—and of people with complex or painful relationships with those labels—depends on this shift. We can have strong families that share care according to their capacities and gifts, enabling each other’s freedom; this creates the conditions where we have the space to serve and strengthen our communities, who in turn support and nourish the family.

I have written myself around to wondering whether the concept of feminism, however we nuance it, is even what we need. It certainly wasn’t what inspired our household. Is the battle against individualism enough? Perhaps what I am describing is just humans living as the interdependent, particular creatures that we really are, growing towards each other rather than splintering into smaller and smaller embattled tribes.

I want a feminism of interdependence, what bell hooks calls a “beloved community” contributing to a “wise and loving politics” for all.

I find I do still want to hang onto this word feminism, at least for now. Without some eye to the risks which make individualist feminism seem the only option for women, an acknowledgement that the burden of care often defaults to an unjust distribution, we can’t reach a genuinely common good. I want a feminism of interdependence, what bell hooks calls a “beloved community” contributing to a “wise and loving politics” for all. Black feminism has long fought for a more interdependent anthropology, been much clearer about the impossibility of avoiding care. This form of beloved community, hooks says, “cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion….A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.”

The work of hooks encourages me to go beyond the more policy-safe word “care” and say what I really mean: love. Common good feminism as part of a more interdependent life should help us abandon the rivalrous instinct to dominate or scapegoat one another, to blame each other for all our ills. It should invite us to lay down the urge to change others into our own image or use them for our own ends, but instead to care for and seek to liberate each other, in all our particularity and fragile, ridiculous, vulnerable, beautiful humanity. To learn, again, to love each other.

Elizabeth Oldfield is a communicator, coach, and consultant, and host of The Sacred.