The feminist author Eurydice Eve believes that mothers worldwide would unite behind her proposal for Universal Mother Income; and it could change the global economy.
Eurydice Eve sees the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a wake up call for feminism. “Feminists misunderstood the patriarchy,” Eurydice says. “Patriarchy does not oppress all women. It oppresses mothers. Before the serial shocks of mass industrialization, economic migration, nuclear war, globalization, digital deracination and the triumph of scientism, patriarchy blanket-oppressed people capable of procreation. But the industrial revolution required worker mobilization and patriarchy let non-procreative women out of the home to fill jobs. Post WWII, with the advent of birth control, artificial insemination, and cheap paternity tests, patriarchy oppresses only the people who actually procreate. Whether a person becomes a mother by choice or by accident or circumstance, the full-time, skilled work of motherhood from conception to child maturation is unpaid and unvaluated in mainstream economy.”
For the last twenty years, Eurydice has studied the history of procreative relations—the relations of people engaged in procreative production—and compounded a long interpretative analysis of patriarchy’s rise and fall.
Eurydice is the author of the post-feminist cult classic f/32: The Second Coming, published with Virago Press, which examined the intellectual conflict in patriarchy between a woman’s mind and her natural body, and of Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier, published with Scribner which described America as an empire in cultural decline. Eurydice linked the sexual state of the union to America’s ideological and political stagnation. “Eurydice’s fascinating and thought-provoking Satyricon documents the lives of America’s sexual transgressors, a cast of ..narcissistic and occasionally frightening characters. The line between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ isn’t blurred, it’s obliterated,” wrote The Washington Post.
Eurydice became a mother soon after publication. She discovered firsthand “the vast difference between woman and mother,” she says. She dedicated herself to understanding that difference in history.
“Feminism failed women,” Eurydice now says on her eponymous podcast, “by ignoring and bypassing mothers. Patriarchy holds both men and women hostages to their love for their children. A patriarchy is a society organized around the authority of fatherhood. It’s hierarchy by procreative function, not gender. Patriarchy reverses the natural order in Nature. A patriarch owns his wife’s uterus and its produce, whom he sires. The system first appeared 6000 years ago with the rise of the border-claiming agrarian age. We are now in the open-border capitalist age. We have outgrown patriarchy. So we need to revise the economic roles assigned by patriarchy to procreators and nonprocreators. In our post-patriarchal age, owning the body of another is considered slavery. But a person who works unpaid, every day all day for decades, is a slave.”
Standardizing the value of procreation gave Eurydice the answer to a pressing question: How do we step out of patriarchy without breaking up society and tearing up our social fabric? “Motherpay” answered another question Eurydice pondered for years: How do we help women worldwide and not just the girl-boss types? Eurydice came up with a “simple cultural upgrade: Universal Mother Income.”
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the struggle to control procreation, or the struggle between procreators and nonprocreators,” Eurydice says. “Procreator and nonprocreator have coexisted in constant codependent opposition. Patriarchies devalue procreators and pass their value to nonprocreators. The exploitation of procreators by nonprocreators has brought humanity to the brink of extinction.”
Eurydice uses her podcast and YouTube channel, her substack newsletter and upcoming book to send out an update in our social programming, like a patch we can download to fix vulnerabilities raised in our social functionality. Eurydice proposes a voluntary reorganization of our procreative relations supplemented with compulsory natural education aimed to move society out of its addiction to patriarchy past this period of cultural wars and existential confusion. Central to her proposal is the gradual worldwide adoption of Universal Mother Income as legitimate pay for legitimate work available to mothers who qualify. Eurydice compares its terms of employment and allocation, rewards and responsibilities, educational enrollment and accreditation, formal conclusion and career transfer to the military recruitment opportunities offered by the Defense Department. She also calls for a Department of Mothers to oversee it.
Motherhood is consistent among all cultures and all eras, thanks to the supremacy of natural programming over cultural programming. So the liberation of motherhood can unite cultures. Think of it as Marxism for Mothers.
Eurydice Eve
