Word: communes
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...traditional family setup, or simply unable to cope with it, Americans by the thousands are seeking alternatives. One that has most captured the imagination of youth and that has an almost religious appeal to members of the counterculture is a family structure that is as old as antiquity: the commune. Utopians from Plato onward have visualized children as not being raised in traditional families but in various communal organizations; the instinct that pulls man toward a tightly knit "nuclear" family has often been counterbalanced by the dream of escaping from...
...third of which are in rural settings. "There are farms everywhere now, and we might go in any direction on compass to find warm bread and salt," writes Raymond Mungo in Total Loss Farm. Although Vermont, Oregon, California and New Mexico are still the favored states, some new commune clusters are cropping up in what Mungo calls "the relatively inferior terrain and vibration of Massachusetts and points south and west, and the huge strain of friendless middle America...
...Some communes actually form compromises with the nuclear family. Nowhere is this point better made than at Lama, a contemporary commune 18 miles north of Taos, N. Mex., which was re-revisited last week by Correspondent David DeVoss after an absence of 19 months...
Most of today's communes are in the cities, and they indeed do have appeal for many middle-class citizens. To Ethel Herring, 30, married to a Los Angeles lawyer and active in Women's Lib. a city commune seemed the answer to growing frustrations, which culminated when she realized that she was spending $60 to $70 a week for baby sitters; the Herrings had no live-in grandparents or nearby relatives to care for their three children while Ethel was attending her frequent feminist meetings. In effect, she says, "we were suffering from the nuclear family setup...
With six other sympathetic couples in similar circumstances, the Herrings scouted around and finally found a U-shaped, six-unit apartment building in southern Los Angeles. They purchased it last September, and converted it into a successful, middle-class (most of the men are lawyers) city commune. Knocking out walls and doors, they built interjoining apartments and a communal nursery, TV room and library. "The apartments open up so that the kids' rooms can run into each other," Ethel explains, "and yet there is still plenty of privacy for adults...