Communal living flourished in United States during the Countercultural movement in the 1960s and early 1970s [1, 2]. The members of the communes had rejected the unsatisfying institutions of the American society [1, 3, 4], and were seeking a new community structure that would meet their existential and philosophical needs [1, 6], including gender equality [5].
However, male and female members of most communes were treated differently in the general distribution of manual labour and traditional gender roles were reinforced. The female members were assigned the domestic labour, such as cleaning, cooking and sewing [2, 6-12], while men were in charge of the physical job including the harvest of crops, carpentry, hunting, the construction of infrastructures, tin work and transport of heavy loads [6, 11, 12]. Furthermore, in the communes ‘Eagle Ranch’, ‘The Family’, ‘The Farm’ and many more, the organization and leadership was often done by male members[6, 12], reinforcing male dominance and authority.
It is worth mentioning that there were exceptions of communes that moved outside the traditional gender roles. The remarkable expert in countercultural communes Timothy Miller explains the system of job division of a particular commune called ‘Twin Oaks’, were
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The communes created a novel collective child rearing system, where the children were considered part of the ‘communal family’ [2, 8, 13, 14]. Parents usually retained primary responsibility for the well-being of the children [6, 8], but it was unusual for the biologically mother to have to take care of her children by her own. However, in ‘The Family’, the mother had more responsibilities than any other communard in the child care [6], and in ‘The Farm’, males were discriminated as only female members were allowed to assisting in pregnancies and the delivering of