ABSTRACT
This chapter provides three main types of enquiry: the analysis of a substantial body of published and unpublished writing on communes; observation of a quasi-participant nature of a snowball sample of communes — sixty-seven in all. A postal questionnaire sent to 700 members of the Commune Movement and supported by interviews with key members of the Movement. The antithesis between communes and an idea-typical notion of the nuclear family is frequently cited as a principal element in the case for communal living. Communes, that is, do not provide a social structure in which a re-working of gender relationships along more egalitarian lines is in any way unavoidable, a component of the structure. By far the most useful concept thrown up in recent discussions of the position of women is, in our view, the notion of ‘social secondariness’ suggested by S. Rowbotham.
