Is homeschooling anti-feminist?

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Hello friends,

This is going to be a juicy one! Because whether you see yourself in feminism or not (and which kind of feminism you feel you’re part of), I think we do need to ask ourselves this question because the overwhelming majority of people who home educate their children are, in fact, women.

And when women make up the majority of anything - there are interesting questions to be asked about that thing.

But first, will you please answer a quick survey? There are only 2 questions!

Us at the bridge over the river Kwai

Okay, back to homeschooling and feminism.

Just to get it out the way, I think the answer to this is that it isn’t anti-feminist by definition, but yes, it CAN be anti-feminist. There are examples of women everywhere doing it out of a sense of duty to a higher power or to a person in authority, or as a way to martyr themselves or fit into the image of the ideal woman they have been sold. Motherhood is, after all, an institution and homeschooling can absolutely be part of fulfilling an idealized version of it. A way to almost institutionalize or legitimize our own expression of it.

And perhaps the issues arise from this, partly: that homeschooling in the United States has historically been associated with white, conservative, Christian families shielding their children from the big bad world and the evils of science and tv, or whatever the new ‘evil’ thing might be. (As an aside: nothing wrong with being white or Christian or benignly conservative, this is just an actual fact.)

Often these are also people who pull themselves by their bootstraps (or think they do) and are allergic to government interference of any kind (apart from when the government subsidizes their farm or like, funds a war.)

But let’s assume that things are changing (and I think they are!), and that home education is a diverse, growing movement, some of which is increasingly about equity, diversity and inclusivity.

In fact, the statistics show us this might be the case. (Bear in mind statistics on homeschoolers are notoriously difficult to gather and can be unreliable.)

Here are some interesting stats though.

As of May 2023, 5.4% of US students are homeschooled. That is a small, but significant, amount. One interesting point is that homeschooling is less popular among high-income families, which partially questions the assumption that homeschooling is only for the very privileged. The truth is, the very privileged often choose private school. (Read Never Enough by Jennifer Wallace to see what many of the very privileged in the US are upto. Note: it’s worrying.)

Another interesting statistic is that more than 1 in 10 Black and Latino students are now either in private school, or homeschooling. Also interesting is that when asked what the most important reason for homeschooling was, 25% of homeschoolers replied it was concern about the school environment - this was the most common single most important reason. In other words, it is not (only!) an obsession with fulfilling some sort of good mother or martyr mother role, but statistically, homeschooling is now also about deciding that home is a better environment than school.

I feel like so many of us could relate to this. Even those of us who don’t homeschool.

But still, how can something that essentially ties women to staying home with their children be progressive and about social justice?

I think part of the answer is that as women, we may see ourselves as part of a historically marginalized group (some of us more than others), but we often don’t recognize that our children are part of one such group too. This is because of adultism: the discrimination of children based purely on their status as children. It’s like sexism, but directed towards children. AND WE ALL DO IT. Not only do we all do it, but adult supremacy is also a structural issue.

This is a great piece about adultism if you want to go deeper

Partly also, white feminism is seen by many to be about self-actualization, and to some extent, joining the workforce and pursuing a career. As Koa Beck writes in her book, White Feminism, feminism has in recent decades had a massive re-brand, and is now portrayed as something along the lines of: “wealth and business will set you free.”

In other words, feminism has allied itself with capitalism, in the process throwing many women of color, immigrant women and poor women under the bus (once again - because this isn’t the first time it happens). For many women and femmes who are marginalized by society, a critique of colonialism and capitalism is integral to feminism, and viewing feminism through the lens of intersectionality is essential. Not only that, but they simply might not have the same access as more privileged women to win at capitalism, and therefore set themselves ‘free’.

When white feminists ally themselves with the powers that be, they are no longer aiming to question and chip away at the bigger systems of oppression. They no longer situate women’s liberation outside of patriarchy and capitalism, but within it. This also means that they fail to recognise the link between all of these systems and the liberation of children and young people.

Some of what we label as feminism is in fact only for some women. It encourages them/us to pursue success as framed by capitalism, rather than gather all feminists together to dismantle a system that is designed to divide us. And as Audre Lorde famously said, “the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house”(you can read the full essay here) - we cannot expect to dismantle the patriarchy by using its same tools of hierarchy, competition, capitalism and hyperindividualism.

In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker writes, “To work within a system, to play by its rules, inevitably reinforces that system, whether or not that’s what we intended.”

When women agree to attempt to succeed within a system that was not built with all women’s success in mind, they are reinforcing the very system that keeps all people, including the ones it claims to serve, bound to it.

Staying home with our children and essentially forgoing what white feminism sees as the key to women’s independence, success and freedom, is automatically seen by mainstream culture as not feminist.

Feminists are supposed to want to seek equity with (white) men, right? And what are the men doing? Most of them are not looking after the children or engaging in domestic or care work, that’s for sure.

(Never mind that there are still people looking after and educating our children while we work, and those people are still mostly women, and still underpaid and undervalued.)

Maybe, when we stay home, rather than ‘giving up’ something that only some of us have access to, we are actually embodying what feminism REALLY is about: the freedom of all women and all children and all carers.

Perhaps, we’re not looking in the right places for our definitions of what it means to be a feminist, or what it means to engage in liberated carework and mothering (in the broadest sense of the word mothering).

And for me, the liberation of children is tied up with my own sense of freedom as a woman in the world. The two are not mutually exclusive.

This is not the main reason we home educate, but it is the reason homeschooling is viable for me: because my own fulfillment, sense of self-worth and understanding of success are baked into it.

They are not in opposition to the freedom, fulfillment and success of my children.

They are also not tied up with a need to achieve in ways that are rewarded by our dominant systems.

(I’m not saying that homeschooling should be fulfilling for everyone, or that careers shouldn’t be fulfilling, or that homeschool is even right for every child. Not at all!! I am only sharing my experience.)

I want to add that many mothers who homeschool, also work from home or outside of the home for pay (and not for pay). The two do not need to be mutually exclusive. I spoke to Susan Gray about her experience working full-time and unschooling on my pod, and there are so many others who make this work in various ways (including myself, to a small degree!!).

I think this is a generally glossed-over point. Many homeschooling parents are also working parents, often in more ways than one. Many of us volunteer and do a ton of unpaid work within and outside of the home.

Any kind of work should not have to be mutually exclusive with homeschooling, and the fact that feminism doesn’t seem to include those who choose to stay home or to home educate, AND continue to work in other capacities, really says it all about what the priorities of mainstream feminism. The fact that white feminism doesn’t validate unpaid labour and unpaid work outside the home, also speaks volumes.

It also says a lot about the idealized version of the homeschool mother we see online or on social media. Even when we know that parent works, we don’t often see it (and that’s a whole other topic!!)

But back to collective freedom.

I think part of the reason we cannot see past the whole “If my child isn’t in school how do I actually have a life?” is because of the ways society really really wants us to follow that line of reasoning, and that path.

Societal structures and institutions are literally built so that most of us cannot work AND home educate. Homeschooling is seen as this weird phenomenon that only social outcasts, religious fundamentalists or very privileged white people do.

The 9-5 work week is built so that school will (almost, but not quite, because that would be too easy) cover the time parents are at work. Because our children seem so busy at school, we are led to believe we couldn’t possibly provide them with the same kind of educational business, rather than questioning what is actually being learned in school (and separating teaching from learning as two very very distinct activities).

Our societies are structured in ways that essentially manufacture the need for a full school day, in order to serve capitalist interests.

The blind unquestioning of the ways we need to perform feminism in the workplace, lays down the perfect justification for the existence of school as an institution. I don’t think we can separate capitalism from schooling, domination from forced education.

THERE IS A DIFFERENT WAY TO SEE THIS.

I see mothering and home educating and pretty much everything at least partially, through the lens of consent and consent-based-ness, which in its most basic form is our ability to make free, informed decisions and come to collaborative, mutual agreements. But of course there’s much more to it than that. Consent is the antidote to all of the -isms, to structural inequity, to “might is right.” I’ve written more about that here.

AND.

I refuse to view my own pursuit of freedom, fulfillment and belonging as in any way diametrically opposed to my children’s pursuit of freedom, fulfillment and belonging. In order to see this, I have to return again and again to the idea of consent-based relationships as collaborative, rather than a giving and taking of permission.

There are voices I am prepared to listen to and be inspired by, who don’t see the raising of children as separate from the freedom of mothers (and I am using the words mother and mothering in as spacious and inclusive a way as is possible, in the way Angela Garbes defines mothering ie. as carework that is not gendered), and who in fact see the liberation of mothers and children as intricately linked.

These are the voices I want to listen to, because they speak to my intuitive understanding that freedom and dignity has to look like freedom and dignity for all.

My act of unschooling my children sets both myself and my children free. It also recognizes our collective responsibility to others.

I do not see myself in white feminism because white feminism has essentially aligned itself with the powers that be, and unschooling, or intersectional unschooling at any rate, is about doing the opposite of that. Unschooling, as Akilah S. Richards says, is healing and liberation work.

Angela Garbes speaks to the way elevating the domestic sphere, rather than rejecting it, is a feminist issue. She sees mothering as an act of social change, and insists we see domestic and care work within “a global and national context of care—the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color.”

I love the way Garbes dismisses parenting advice on the grounds that it is another way we hyperindividualize our experience, and focus solely on our individual responsibility to parent our individual child, rather than looking at the structural issues that make parenting within the nuclear family so incredibly hard, and the way mothering has always been a collective pursuit.

She speaks to the tediousness of a lot of domestic work, and also to the ways the repetitive but essential nature of it has the potential to bring us together. I really feel how both those things, and many more, can exist at once.

In practice, this can only be imperfect. Many of us find ourselves isolated, stretched, and tired. I don’t think it helps to deny that homeschooling and mothering and carework often, and for many, do feel thankless. But I think society plays a huge part in persuading us that what women have historically done is by definition thankless, and we absorb these narratives and continue to perpetuate them. At the same time, society tells us that what men have positioned themselves as doing, is what we should be aiming for - that THAT is the fulfilling work, when in reality, there is not inherent hierarchy of labour or work.

That too, is simply something we’ve constructed and now mostly believe.

When we begin to see how essential carework is, how essential partnering with our children is, it’s a huge paradigm shift.

Garbes echoes bell hooks in her writing about feminism and motherhood. hooks wrote, “Had black women voiced their views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women.” hooks’ views contrast those of white feminists of her time, because she stated what all Black, immigrant and poor women have always known: they have always worked.

It made sense that she saw carework as “humanizing”, and work outside of the home as “degrading. She located the freedom and self-expression of women within the domestic sphere rather than the workplace.

Does this mean I don’t have conflicting feelings about being home and sort of, mostly, giving up a hypothetical career?

Well, yes I do. But there are a few things here.

Firstly, I don’t see this as an individual choice, as we like to frame it.

It is structural. We shouldn’t have to make this so-called choice. I don’t feel like I should have to choose between my children’s need to live and learn without coercion, and my own need to pursue my own interests, paid or unpaid.

I feel like many women are being asked to choose between their own desire to pursue work outside the home, and our children’s most basic rights to autonomy. Between our own freedom, and our children’s.

Not only that - but I’m sure I’m not the only woman whose male partner never for a single moment considered that his pursuit of fulfilling work might be at odds with our children’s pursuit of a fulfilling childhood.

Second, I don’t know that we all need to focus so hard on a career.

Yes - we do need enough money so that our needs are met. Yes - we do need to find our way, to paraphrase Blake Boles. I cannot speak to growing up poor or massively disadvantaged, and how that might put added pressure on people to view winning at capitalism as the most important thing. I just don’t think it’s how we support our own or one another’s freedom, ultimately. I am not perfect, and I’m still working on finding ways to divest from these mindsets and system. But I can see them for what they are: a way to keep us tired, fearful and divided.

Third, the language we use doesn’t help.

There is a lot of “giving up” and “sacrificing” and that is not how I feel. I don’t mean to diminish the experience of those who do make huge sacrifices, and often not because they want to, but because they have to. I just don’t feel like positioning myself as someone who sacrifices themselves, just because I am homeschooling. It is tough, but it’s not a sacrifice. And if we do not sacrifice, then do our children sacrifice their freedom for the adults to pursue theirs?

Either way, I think this is also a very hyperindividualistic way of framing our stories. It puts the onus back on us, and sets up a dichotomy where it’s either our freedom or our children’s, and you can’t have both.

And yeah, sometimes I wish I had more free time.

But again, this is systemic. I wish society was set up to give mothers more of a break, so that we could advocate for ourselves, AND our children and neither of us had to lose out. I wish we lived in ways that allowed us to work together for collective wellbeing, rather than individual achievement.

And also, I wish we would talk about why it is still overwhelmingly women having these conversations. Why is it mothers who do so much of this work? The parenting, the inner work, the teaching and educating? (That’s another post in the works!)

I don’t think I’ve finished answering this question, because I haven’t finished thinking about it.

But what I can say right now, is that we can and should absolutely support feminism as a movement for collective liberation, that intrinsically centres the freedom of all women, especially more marginalized women, and the rights of all children.

Thank you for reading!

Sending you all the love,

Fran x