To Have Children

Mothers' meetings and playgrounds, shared flats and ICE trains are the places where precise observations condense like pieces of a puzzle into an analysis whose object of knowledge is having children. In short, self-contained sections, Heide Lutosch theorizes in a way that is as radical as it is full of relish and as curious as it is unerring, with Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytical training, while remaining relentlessly close to her own experience. She speaks out what seems unaddressable: the travails, the frustration, and the very individual sense of failure at the resolution to do everything differently-especially differently from one's own mother. She angrily asks why feminists are still struggling with the same problems today as they were fifty years ago, why so few couples continue to succeed in the equitable distribution of care work, and what can be gained if we try to solve these supposedly private issues socially. For hidden in the seeming obviousness of having children is a powder keg that presses for progressive change in society as a whole.