9. Children Grew Up In Communes Where The “Wild” Things Are
Since many of the women who joined all-female communes were running from toxic relationships with men, it shouldn’t be surprising that many of them show up with kids. Obviously, whether a child was a boy or a girl, they were all welcomed into the all-female communes, and they were collectively raised by a huge group of aunties.
In the 1970’s, The Women’s Liberation Movement encouraged women to escape the traditional nuclear family, and people were experimenting with all sorts of new options. Unfortunately, this lead a lot of young people to join cults, but sometimes, these communities were actually pretty great. There were newly formed feminist communes all over the English countryside in the 1970’s. Men were allowed to live there too, but only if they agreed with feminist ideas of sharing housework and having an equal partnership in raising their kids. Sometimes, there were even stay-at-home dads, if the woman had a better paying job. Some marries couples wanted to move to these communities simply because they didn’t want to feel judgement from their neighbors who thought a man was somehow less of a man if he stayed at home while the woman worked.
This idea that couples had to move to a remote commune in order for the dad to stay at home and raise the kids or to have an equal relationship shows just how much a few decades can drastically change society. Today, a lot of couples live this way, and they don’t need to go live in a remote commune in the middle of the woods to accomplish it.
But, at this time in the 1970’s, it only makes sense that the group took their philosophy to an extra level, and had hippie traditions. They decided that instead of taking the surname of the father or mother, they would just call their kids by the last name “Wild”, since they grew up in the wilderness, and they were not trying to place the man or woman’s surname as any more important than their partner’s.
These communities also embraced the African idea that “it takes a village to raise a child”. Some (but not all) of these relationships between men and women in these forest communities were open and polyamorous. In some households, kids were raised not even knowing who their actual biological parents were, since all of their last names were “Wild”. When they were a little older, they would learn who their biological parents were, of course.
For the kids who grew up as “Wild” children, they thought all of this behavior of their parents was normal, so it wasn’t exactly traumatizing or weird. Once they started joining normal society, some of them were embarrassed, and some even changed their surnames when they got married as adults. But for the most part, these hippie forest kids are pretty normal.