Liberating the Family?


Book Description

Examines the complex impact of the end of slavery in the Cape on other social relations.




Abolish the Family


Book Description

What if we could do better than the family? 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 polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition. Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.




Parenting for Liberation


Book Description

Speaking directly to parents raising Black children in a world of racialized violence, this guidebook combines powerful storytelling with practical exercises, encouraging readers to imagine methods of parenting rooted in liberation rather than fear. In 2016, activist and mother Trina Greene Brown created the virtual multimedia platform Parenting for Liberation to connect, inspire, and uplift Black parents. In this book, she pairs personal anecdotes with open-ended reflective prompts; together, they help readers dismantle harmful narratives about the Black family and imagine anti-oppressive parenting methods. Parenting for Liberation fills a critical gap in currently available, timely parenting resources. Rooted in an Afrofuturistic vision of connectivity and inspiration, the community created within these pages works to image a world that amplifies Black girl magic and Black boy joy, and everything in between. "Trina Greene Brown has created a guide for Black parents who want to raise fierce, fearless, joyful children. She knows what a challenge this is given the state of the world but argues that liberated parenting is possible if we commit to knowing and trusting ourselves, our children, and our communities. Anyone curious about how to walk with a child through tumultuous times needs to read this book now." —Dani McClain, author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood




Liberated Parents, Liberated Children


Book Description

The Companion Volume to How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk In this honest, illuminating book, internationally acclaimed parenting experts Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish bring to life the principles of famed child psychologist Dr. Haim Ginott, and show how his theories inspired the changes they made in their relationships with their own children. By sharing their experiences, as well as those of other parents, Faber and Mazlish provide moving and convincing testimony to their new approach and lay the foundation for the parenting workshops they subsequently created that have been used by thousands of groups worldwide to bring out the best in both children and parents. Wisdom, humor, and practical advice are the hallmarks of this indispensable book that demonstrates the kind of communication that builds self-esteem, inspires confidence, encourages responsibility, and makes a major contribution to the stability of today's family.




To Free a Family


Book Description

What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price—remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family’s fate. This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family—Susan and Peter Lesley—who protected and employed her. Sydney Nathans’s sensitive and penetrating narrative reveals Mary Walker’s remarkable persistence as well as the sustained collaboration of black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter. Unlike her more famous counterparts—Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth—who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker’s efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker’s journey, To Free a Family gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.




Liberating Economics


Book Description

Liberating Economics draws on central concepts from women's studies scholarship to construct a feminist understanding of the economic roles of families, caring labor, motherhood, paid and unpaid labor, poverty, the feminization of labor, and the consequences of globalization. Barker and Feiner consistently recognize the importance of social location -- gender, race, class, sexual identity, and nationality -- in economic processes shaping the home, paid employment, market relations, and the global economy. Throughout they connect women's economic status in the industrialized nations to the economic circumstances surrounding women in the global South. Rooted in the two disciplines, this book draws on the rich tradition of interdisciplinary work in feminist social science scholarship to construct a parallel between the notions that the "personal is political" and "the personal is economic." Drucilla K. Barker is Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, Hollins University. Susan F. Feiner is Associate Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, University of Southern Maine.




Family Values


Book Description

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.




Liberating the Nations


Book Description

The Bible teaches, and history confirms, that to the degree that nations have applied the principles of the Bible in all spheres of life is the degree to which they have prospered, been free, and acted justly. Learn biblical principles as they apply to various spheres of life. Examine the role of the church, the family, the media, and civil government in a nation, and learn what you can do to bring Godly reform.




Cain's Legacy


Book Description

Bonds between brothers and sisters are among the longest lasting and most emotionally significant of human relationships. But while 45 percent of adults struggle with serious sibling strife, few discuss it openly. Even fewer resolve it to their satisfaction.In Cain's Legacy, psychotherapist Jeanne Safer, a recognized authority on sibling psychology (and an estranged sister herself) illuminates this pervasive but hidden phenomenon. She explores the roots of inter-sibling woes, from siblicide in the book of Genesis to tensions in Frederique's family history. Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews with adult siblings struggling with conflicts over money, family businesses, aging parents, contentious wills, unhealed childhood wounds, and blocked communication, Safer provides compassionate guidance to brothers and sisters whose relationship is broken. She helps siblings overcome their paralysis and pain, revealing how they can come to terms with the one peer relationship they can never sever -- even if they never see each other again.A heartfelt look at a too-often avoided topic, Cain's Legacy is a sympathetic and clear-eyed guide to navigating the darkness separating us from our brothers and sisters.




Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members


Book Description

Cutting ties with a toxic family member is a crucial step away from a legacy of dysfunction and toward healing and happiness. This compassionate guide will help you embrace your decision with a sense of pride, validation, and faith in yourself; and provides powerful tools for creating boundaries, coping with judgment, and overcoming self-doubt. Do you have a toxic family member? Do you feel like cutting ties with this person—even as painful and scary as that may sound—would dramatically increase your well-being and improve your life? You’re not alone. Severing ties with a family member can be devastating; and cutting this toxic person out of your life may bring up feelings of guilt and uncertainty—especially if you feel judged by others regarding your decision. Fortunately, you can free yourself from this toxic family member in a healthy, responsible, and liberating way. In Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members, psychologist and toxic-family survivor Sherrie Campbell offers effective strategies for setting strong boundaries after ending contact with a toxic family member, and provides powerful tools to help you heal from shame, self-doubt, and stigma. You’ll find the validation you need to embrace your decision with pride and acknowledgement of your self-worth. You’ll learn how to let go of negative thoughts and feelings. And finally, you’ll develop the skills needed to rediscover self-care, self-love, self-reliance, and healthy loving relationships. Whether you’re ready to sever ties with a toxic family member, or already have, this book will help guide you, every step of the way.