“So the question a feminist ought to be asking is this: Why do men and women have such an unequal relation to parenthood? Is it biology—we bear children, they don’t? Actually, this difference becomes inequality only in the context of a specific social system for rearing children—the family, or, to be more precise, familialism (since I’m talking about a system that affects us all, whether we’re in actual families or not). A familialist society assigns legal responsibility for children to the biological parents; the society as a whole has only minimal obligations to its children, and people rarely make deep commitments to children outside their families. This system puts women at an inherent disadvantage: Since it’s obvious who a child’s mother is, her parental responsibility is automatic; the father’s is not. And so the burden has always been on women to get men to do right by them. Loesch takes familialism for granted. Nearly everyone does.”

-Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays