The feminist author Eurydice Eve calls on mothers worldwide to unite behind her proposal for Universal Mother Income. She predicts that if mothers in country after country became single-issue voters, and demanded a UMI, they could change the global economy out of patriarchy.
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. It takes away the monopoly of procreators and sells it to nonprocreators. The industrial revolution required mass worker mobilization and economic migration. It produced nuclear war, globalization, digital deracination and the triumph of scientism over religion. It let women out of the home to fill jobs. For this purpose it developed female birth control, artificial insemination. Cheap paternity tests were the final nail in patriarchy’s coffin.”
For the last twenty years, Eurydice has studied the history of procreative relations—the relations of people engaged in procreation—and compounded a long interpretative analysis of patriarchy’s rise and fall. She came to the stunning realization that the “full-time, highly skilled work of motherhood from conception to child maturation is the only unaccounted, unpaid and unvaluated essential job in mainstream economy.”
Eurydice is the author of the post-feminist cult classic f/32: The Second Coming, published with Virago Press, which examined the conflict between a woman’s mind and her body, and of Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier, published with Scribner, which linked the sexual state of the union to America’s ideological and political stagnation and moral decline. “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 and 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 hierarchy by procreative function, not gender. Patriarchy reverses the natural procreative order in Nature. A patriarch owns his wife’s uterus and sires its production. The system first appeared 6000 years ago with the rise of the border-dependent agrarian age. In our 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. A person who works unpaid, every day all day for decades, is a slave.”
Eurydice undertook the task of standardizing the value of motherwork. Procreation gave Eurydice the answer to a pressing question: How do we step out of patriarchy without tearing up our social fabric? And how do we help most women worldwide? Eurydice came up with a simple cultural update: 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 current brink of extinction.”
Eurydice proposes the UMI as a voluntary reorganization of our procreative relations supplemented by compulsory natural education aimed to move society out of its addiction to patriarchy, past its cultural wars and confusion. Central to her proposal is a worldwide adoption of a 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 to military recruitment opportunities offered by the Defense Department. She calls for a Department of Mothers to oversee it.
Motherhood is consistent among all cultures and eras, thanks to the supremacy of natural over cultural instinct. The liberation of motherhood can unite cultures. Eurydice uses her podcast and YouTube channel, her substack newsletter and her books to promote it.