ABSTRACT
In this chapter I seek to expose how ‘mainstream’ children’s rights scholarship has been eased into a false sense of ‘liberal security’ by relying on the works of John Holt and Richard Farson to define ‘children’s liberation’ as meaning ‘equal rights’ for children and adults. I argue that for this liberal iteration of children’s liberation, Holt and Farson both heavily relied on Shulamith Firestone’s call to abolish ‘the family’ and ‘childhood’ as part of her radical feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex, but not before stripping it from its feminist and revolutionary intent. By uncritically latching onto the version presented by Holt and Farson, the bourgeoning scholarly field of children’s rights allowed itself to adopt, critique and dismiss the notion of children’s liberation within the familiar parameters of the UNCRC, while at the same time effectively shielding it from Firestone’s radical pre-emptive and fundamental gender critique. The aim of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for critically addressing this bias, by reading and re-evaluating Firestone’s manifesto against that of Holt and Farson with the help of John Irving’s novel The Hotel New Hampshire.
