Spatial retreat to communes preserved the white middle-class and gender hierarchies

Evidence

Other ghosts of the “straight” world complicated the communes’ dreams of radicality. Like the hippie movement they came from, commune members were mostly middle-class and college-educated—a far cry from Epicurus’s radically reconstituted student body. They were overwhelmingly white; several times in Getting Back Together, Houriet mentions talking to “the only black” in a commune … The rural setting sometimes created “a natural impetus to revert to traditional roles: Women stay inside, cook, and look after the children, while men plow, chop, and build roads.” In What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm, Stephen Diamond states it outright: “None of the men ever washes dishes or hardly cooks.” A spatial move to the country, or into an isolated communal house, did not always equal a move out of ingrained ideologies. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 164

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s privilege critique — commune retreat was skewed white, middle-class, and college-educated, i.e. required privilege. — connects to: Suburban gender norms structured how the mobilizing movement operated. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 68