Читать книгу Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women онлайн

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“In Chester County, a hilly rural area thirty miles west of Philadelphia, Howard planned to establish a ‘utopian community’ together with conscientious objectors and their families, a community that did not exclude persons of any racial background. We were a large, extended family and created our own rules in the settlement of Tanguy Homesteads. We simply wanted to ‘drop out of the rat race.’“

It was a totally new and fascinating world with professors, librarians, teachers, and nurses and their families. “Interesting people such as Martha Jaeger, the psychologist of the writer Anaïs Nin, lived with us. Exciting. I felt very much at ease. When a five year old girl came to me during my pregnancy and told me how I had made this child and how it would later come out of my belly, I thought that these were truly unusual people!”

The first members of the community lived in an old farmhouse. “Howard and I moved from the beginning into a house of our own; but we had many meals together. Few members of the community owned a car, the women shopped together, and we used vegetables and fruit from our large garden. The men built the houses. I felt at home there. Yet today I know: in reality I do not belong anywhere. I feel at home in the entire world. Wherever I live at the moment, I feel at home, and so also in our settlement.