My friend Elizabeth Oldfield has that rare and precious thing: a village. Hers is in the middle of London, contained within a generously sized family house that is now home to Elizabeth, her husband, their two children, a single female friend and another couple they befriended at church some years ago.
The five adults share the costs of running the house, as well as cooking and other domestic tasks. Elizabeth’s children are never without babysitters, and when or if another baby comes along, everyone will help out. The household regularly hosts dinner parties, many of which I’ve been lucky enough to attend. This being a Christian community — a mini-monastery, almost — the evening usually ends with prayers in the makeshift chapel at the end of the garden. The atmosphere is friendly and busy. No one ever seems lonely at Elizabeth’s house.
We modern people often like to imagine ourselves as autonomous individuals, but in the natural human life cycle we spend a large proportion of our lives dependent on others: as babies, in old age and when sick, pregnant or caring for young children.
During those stretches of dependency, we often feel a longing for something like a village: a group of people who are physically present in our lives and on whom we can depend. This is especially pronounced among the college educated, relatively affluent Americans who moved away from their extended families in pursuit of career opportunities, only to regret that distance when the illusion of autonomy becomes harder to maintain.
This longing finds modern shape in the real estate platform Live Near Friends, which invites users to purchase what is described as “multiplayer housing” — properties that can accommodate more than one family. It manifests in the fascination with The Birds Nest: a female-only community in Texas recalling the 1970s experiments with feminist community building, including lesbian separatist projects. Meanwhile, “mommune” has sprung up as a new word to describe an old thing: mothers raising their kids together.
And yet such experiments remain rare. Even though forming communities like Elizabeth’s would solve many of the economic and practical problems the exhausted and the lonely face, very few of us make the attempt. We claim to want a village, but I suspect that what we actually want is something closer to a paid service — a community that we can subscribe to when it’s convenient and back out of when it no longer works for us.
Those who ask, “Where is my village?” are right on one point: It’s not normal for parents to raise their children in isolation. For more than 95 percent of our species’ history, we were hunter-gatherers, commonly living in small bands and constantly surrounded by others. Traditionally, it was often postmenopausal women — especially maternal grandmothers — who were most deeply involved in the support of young parents. In fact, some researchers believe that is why humans undergo menopause, a phenomenon seen in only a handful of other species. Our babies come into the world so helpless and the mother-child dyad is vulnerable for such a long time that our ancestors relied on allomaternal assistance to keep their children alive. In other words, they relied on the village.
To get a sense of how different the motherhood experience was even just a few centuries ago in the West, consider the experience of childbirth for a woman living in early modern England or the American colonies. It is from this setting that we get the word “gossip” — which was originally used to describe a godparent but came to be used for the women who attended a woman during labor.
Some accounts suggest that every female friend and relative was expected to attend, crowding into the birthing chamber to spectate and support, sometimes arguing with the midwife or with one another. The room was conventionally kept dark, with the doors and windows shut and any draft plugged, even the keyholes. In this gloomy, noisy, cramped, stifling space, the pregnant woman gave birth, and she remained in the birthing chamber for weeks afterward, tended to by her gossips.
It certainly wasn’t a lonely experience, but it can’t have been an easy one, either. One of the great downsides of the village is villagers — intrusive, imperfect people who interfere in our lives and place demands on us.
People whose families still adhere to the old ways can find themselves at odds with the dominant culture. That is the experience of Zahira Patel, a 35-year-old British Indian lawyer of my acquaintance who writes about growing up between both kinds of cultures: the enmeshed, communal one of her Indian family and the atomized British one of her friends and neighbors. Child care “is spread out across grandparents, aunties, sisters and cousins,” she writes of her extended family culture. She adds:
On the opposite end of life, multigenerational households meant my own grandmother spent all of her aging years living with her sons and her grandchildren. Eventually, when she did pass, she did so surrounded by four generations — all of whom were able to split care shifts into a rota. Extended family from across the rest of the U.K. traveled to see her in her final days. She did not spend one moment of those last years alone.
Ms. Patel cherishes many aspects of the traditional Indian way of doing things, but she’s keen to emphasize that it has its challenges. As the eldest of six, she was frequently called on to help in the care of her younger siblings, as well as older relatives. “As you can imagine, that left little time for a typical Western teenage life,” she told me. “I have to say, now that the children are older and no one is currently unwell, I am enjoying a period of atomization.”
Elizabeth’s mini-monastery is a long way from the truly traditional household. All of the adults are there because they have chosen to be and because they believe in a communitarian vision rooted in faith. The domestic tasks are shared equally between the men and women, and everyone brings home a paycheck. The project demands endless discussion and negotiation to avert conflict, but so far, they’ve managed just fine.
The big downside to this arrangement is that it’s fragile. Duties to one’s friends will never feel as compelling as duties to one’s flesh and blood. When conflicts inevitably come along, the community will probably dissolve.
In the real village, it’s not so easy to opt out. Your freedom is restricted in a way that most modern Westerners would find intolerable. But that also means that when you find yourself in a position of dependency, there will almost certainly be people on hand who feel it their duty to look after you.
Feminism has encouraged women to reject this sense of duty, and not without cause. During those periods of life when we are less dependent on others, atomization feels good. For every mother grieving the loss of her village, there is a younger sister or a cousin or a grandmother who now has more time to herself — time to devote to her education, career or hobbies. I’m not sure if the mothers of young children lamenting their lack of support always realize that a culture of interdependence would eventually demand reciprocation: If you want a village, you have to be willing to act as a villager.
As a working mother of two young children, I now think wistfully of the amount of free time I had as a teenager and young adult — endless hours to lie around reading novels or to hang out with friends. Sometimes I want to reach back in time, pull that girl away from her idleness and ask her to hold the baby for a moment while I get dinner going. I fantasize about recruiting her to my village. I also worry that she would say no.
Louise Perry is a journalist based in Britain. She is the author of “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” and the host of the podcast “Maiden Mother Matriarch.”
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