The misery of growing up in a utopian community

In Home Is Where We Start, Susanna Crossman quotes one of Nadine Gordimer’s characters on the subject of utopias:

When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on Earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

At the unpalatable sounding communal meals, it was taboo for families to sit together

The book is a brave attempt to come to terms with the 15 years the author spent from 1978 onwards with her mother, her sister Claire and her unnamed brother in an ‘intentional community’ – as it was known by its fancifully named members. Their avowed aims were modest enough: to ‘explode’ the nuclear family, dismantle the patriarchy, save the Earth and revolutionise attitudes to class, sex, gender, money and childrearing – all in the name of those seductive but elusive ideals, freedom and equality.

The community was partitioned into Units, like ‘bees in a hive’, as a perspicacious visitor remarked, and socially divided into Adults and Kids. At the unpalatable sounding communal meals – the ingredients homegrown or bulk-bought from cash-and-carry stores – it was taboo for families to sit together. Instead of ‘Mum’, the Crossman children had to address their mother as ‘Alison’; and when the young Susanna was being overpowered by a stronger older boy, her mother was chastised for attempting to help her, since children must learn the hard way to stand up for themselves. At enculturation classes, the Kids were ‘force-fed “correct” usage, like foie-gras geese’ by the scary-sounding Barbara, because language is, of course, ‘a mechanism of male supremacy’.