What if mothers worldwide were single-issue voters?
The feminist author Eurydice Eve believes mothers of the world would unite behind her proposal for Universal Mother Income. And it could change the global economy.
“The patriarchy is dead,” Eurydice told us. “Science killed the patriarchy. The question is what’s next. Until we agree on how we revise our social contract, we will experience the current chaos, strife, futility, resignation, and mistrust. Universal Mother Income is our social bridge from patriarchy to the future. Only the UMI can rebalance culture to nature.”
On her eponymous podcast, Eurydice Eve discusses the history of how and why patriarchy became the dominant system of social organization and how and why it ended.
Eurydice Eve is uniquely positioned to understand both past and future. She grew up in a prefeminist agrarian world on Lesbos, Greece, in a town whose name and location are unchanged since Homer described it. Eurydice came to Los Angeles alone at fifteen, met a feminist librarian she calls her American mother and enrolled at NYU at sixteen. Her MA thesis was published into a book that became a post-feminist cult classic. Her literary career took off. Eurydice then published f/32: The Second Coming with Virago Press. Her books examined the intellectual conflict in patriarchy between a woman’s mind and her natural body. Spin magazine called Eurydice “the most authoritative and compelling writer of sex in the English language.”
Eurydice spent years researching her nonfiction book Satyricon USA: Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier, published with Scribner. Satyricon USA described an empire in cultural decline. Eurydice linked the sexual state of the union to America’s political and ideological stagnation. “Eurydice’s fascinating and thought-provoking Satyricon documents the lives of America’s sexual transgressors, a cast of naughty, narcissistic and occasionally frightening characters. The line between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ isn’t blurred, it’s obliterated,” wrote The Washington Post. “Eurydice turns up the heat (to) find furtive groping in the communities where it’s most covert and explosive, in the uncomfortably co-ed military and at the Vatican. She talks to cutters and body-piercers, bloodletters, e-mail sex addicts… However sad or admirable, scary or peculiar, Eurydice’s subjects are never boring,” wrote The New York Observer. “Eurydice elicits sweet nuggets of truth from her interview subjects, exposing the most private, transgressive behaviors… Her voice delivers unexpected erotic jolts, waves of repulsion, and glimpses of the human sexual soul,” opined The Village Voice Literary Supplement. In July 2022, the journalist Chris Hedges interviewed Eurydice Eve on Real News and recommended Satyricon USA as an important book on America’s decline.
Eurydice became a mother while promoting Satyricon USA. She applied her piercing intellect to her changing body. “As my body grew unfamiliar to me,” Eurydice says, “I became host for an alien whose life I instinctively valued more than my own, I realized it was not the first time this had happened to me.” Eurydice traced the changes of motherhood to puberty. “Overwhelming change had first happened in puberty when, seemingly overnight, my body blew up, sprouting breasts and curves that changed me, in the eyes of the world, from a kid who was the legal property of my father, to a bride ripe for taking.” Teenage Eurydice felt “mortified by my alien body with whom I no longer identified. I was a thinker repackaged as a sex object. Luckily, customs had changed since my mother, at nineteen, was married off to the man who asked her father for her hand. I could choose a mate for myself. This was revolutionary. Post-60s puberty gave me value outside my father’s worth. Strangers propositioned me. My newfound market value gave me the confidence to cross oceans and go to the most liberal place I knew of, Hollywood. In America, I encountered the fertile chaos of post-patriarchy. America encouraged me to question authority. So I wrote the body. But only when I conceived did my body make sense to me, through the rite of passage that is mothering.” Eurydice went on to study, record, decode, and interrogate the work of motherhood for the next twenty years.
Inspired by the MeToo movement, Eurydice Eve launched her podcast and YouTube channel as her direct link to audiences around the globe.
“Mothers’ value in the economy must account for their contributions,” Eurydice argues. “If we want to reverse our plummeting fertility rates, we must elevate mother value by qualifying mothers for income, pension, benefits. We must fight for Mothers’ Rights and Mothers’ Lib.”