Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “A General Strike”

“A General Strike”

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Originally published in All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework and the Wages Due. Falling Wall Press. [1975]

[Dalla Costa gave the following speech at a 1974 celebration of International Women’s Day in Mestre, Italy.]

 

Today the feminist movement in Italy is opening the campaign for Wages for Housework. As you have heard from the songs, as you have seen from the photograph exhibition, as you have read on the placards, the questions we are raising today are many: the barbarous conditions in which we have to face abortion, the sadism we are subjected to in obstetric and gynaecological clinics, our working conditions – in jobs outside the home our conditions are always worse than men’s, and at home we work without wages – the fact that social services either don’t exist or are so bad that we are afraid to let our children use them, and so on.

 

Now at some point people might ask, what is the connection between the campaign we are opening today, the campaign for Wages for Housework, and all these things that we have raised today, that we have exposed and are fighting against? All these things that we have spoken about, that we have made songs about, that we have shown in our exhibitions and films?

 

We believe that the weakness of all women – that weakness that’s behind our being crossed out of all history, that’s behind the fact that when we leave the home we must face the most revolting, underpaid and insecure jobs – this weakness is based on the fact that all of us women, whatever we do, are wearied and exhausted at the very outset by the 13 hours of housework that no-one has ever recognized, that no-one has ever paid for.

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, “Counter-Planning from the Kitchen”

“Counter-Planning from the Kitchen”

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici

Falling Wall Press, 1975. [PDF]

This article was originally written in reply to an article that appeared in the magazine Liberation, entitled ‘Women & Pay for Housework’ by Carol Lopate. Our reply was turned down by the editors of the magazine. We are publishing that reply because Lopate’s article seems to state with more openness and crudeness than most not only the fundamental assumptions of the left, but its specific relation to the international feminist movement at this moment in time. We must add that by the publication of the two articles which appear in this pamphlet we are not opening a sterile debate with the left but closing one.

Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the wage, that is, that the foundation of capitalist society was the wage labourer and his or her direct exploitation. What has been neither clear nor assumed by the organizations of the working class movement is that precisely through the wage has the exploitation of the non-wage labourer been organized. This exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hid it . . . Where women are concerned, their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital. (2)

It is certainly not accidental that over the last few months several journals of the left have published attacks on Wages for Housework. It is not only that whenever the women’s movement has taken an autonomous position, the left has felt threatened. It is also that the left realizes that this perspective has implications which go beyond the ‘woman question’ and represent a clear break with their politics, past and present, both with respect to women and with respect to the rest of the working class. Indeed, the sectarianism the left has traditionally shown in relation to women’s struggles is a direct consequence of their narrow understanding of the way capital rules and the direction class struggle must take and is taking to break this rule.

In the name of ‘class struggle’ and ‘the unified interest of the class’, the practice of the left has always been to select certain sectors of the working class as the revolutionary agents and condemn others to a merely supportive role for the struggles these sectors were waging. The left has thus reproduced in its organizational and strategic objectives the same divisions of the class which characterize the capitalist division of labour.
In this respect, despite the variety of their tactical positions, the left is strategically one: when it comes to the choice of revolutionary subjects, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Anarcho-Libertarians, old and new left, all join hands with the same assumptions and arguments for a common cause.

Judith Ramirez, “The Global Kitchen: A Speech on the Value of Housework Debate”

“The Global Kitchen: A Speech on the Value of Housework Debate”

Judith Ramirez, 1981 [PDF]

It’s 1981, and I think we can safely assume that all over the world this afternoon there are women who are cooking, and cleaning, and standing over washing machines or by streams, women who are gathering firewood and fetching water, looking after children, sick people and old people, and that in all the countries in which they are carrying out these activities they are not regarded as productive members of society.

They are working alongside men who are building roads and driving tractors, but they are not rewarded economically like their brothers. We live in a world which views women’s work in the home as a merely private activity which occurs outside the marketplace; women’s lives are shaped by this fact, development theories are based on it and national economies both capitalist and socialist – have it at their foundation. The position is succinctly expressed in the observation that ‘a male worker laying a pipe to a house in the city is considered to be economically active; a woman carrying a 40 kilo water jar for one or two hours a day is just doing a household task. (Impact 11/79).

Until recently, the only acknowledgment of housework in discussions of development and economic productivity worldwide has been its lack of acknowledgment. In the United Nations’ ‘State of the World’s Women Report’, 1979 it states: ‘The long busy hours spent in the home where the new generation of workers is reproduced, fed, clothed and cared for are not quantified as work whether in the developed or developing countries. And in many parts of the developing world, women’s work in caring for the family extends beyond the home into other productive activities, particularly subsistence agriculture, which are not considered statistically because national statistics cover only the commercial sector, omitting the subsistence economy where the bulk of women’s work is carried out. ‘

Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (1999), Article 88

Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (1999)

Chapter V

Article 88: The State guarantees the equality and equitable treatment of men and women in the exercise of the right to work. The state recognizes work at home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to Social Security in accordance with law.

Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework”

“Wages Against Housework”

Silvia Federici

Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975. [PDF]

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.

More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.

Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the reduction of wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society.

Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework”

“The Politics of Housework”

by Pat Mainardi [1970]

(Editors Note: This article was originally published by Redstockings in 1970. Redstockings was an early women’s liberation group centered in New York and was responsible for a number of influential writings.)

Though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude; at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the power of the lords, but only of their tyranny. -John Stuart Mill On the Subjection of Women

Liberated women-very different from Women’s Liberation! The first signals all kinds of goodies, to warm the hearts (not to mention other parts) of the most radical men. The other signals-HOUSEWORK. The first brings sex without marriage, sex before marriage, cozy housekeeping arrangements (“I’m living with this chick”) and the self-content of knowing that you’re not the kind of man who wants a doormat instead of a woman. That will come later. After all, who wants that old commodity anymore, the Standard American Housewife, all husband, home and kids? The New Commodity; the Liberated Woman, has sex a lot and has a Career, preferably something that can be fitted in with the household chores-like dancing, pottery, or painting.

On the other hand is Women’s Liberation-and housework. What? You say this is all trivial? Wonderful! That’s what I thought. It seemed perfectly reasonable. We both had careers, both had to work a couple of days a week to earn enough to live on, so why shouldn’t we share the housework? So I suggested it to my mate and he agreed-most men are too hip to turn you down flat. You’re right, he said. It’s only fair. Then an interesting thing happened. I can only explain it by stating that we women have been brainwashed more than even we can imagine, Probably too many years of seeing television women in ecstasy over their shiny waxed floors or breaking down over their dirty shirt collars. Men have no such conditioning. They recognize the essential fact of housework right from the very beginning. Which is that it stinks.

Silvia Federici, “Putting feminism back on its feet”

“Putting feminism back on its feet”

Silvia Federici

Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60’s without Apology (Spring – Summer, 1984), pp. 338-346

Conducted in New York City, summer 1983, by S. Sayres. Questions have been deleted.

Almost fourteen years have passed since I became involved with the women’s
movement. At first it was with a certain distance. I would go to some
meetings but with reservations, since to a “politico” like I was it seemed
difficult to reconcile feminism with a “class perspective.” Or this at least
was the rationale. More likely I was unwilling to accept my identity as a
woman after having for years pinned all my hopes on my ability to pass for
a man. Two experiences were crucial in my becoming a committed feminist.

First my living with Ruth Geller, who has since become a writer and recorded
in her Seed of a Woman the beginning of the movement, and who
in the typical feminist fashion of the time would continually scorn my enslavement
to men. And then my reading Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s The Power
of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1970), a pamphlet that
was to become one of the most controversial feminist documents. At the
last page I knew that I had found my home, my tribe and my own self, as a
woman and a feminist. From that also stemmed my involvement in the
Wages for Housework campaign that women like Dalla Costa and Selma
James were organizing in Italy and Britain, and my decision to start, in 1972,
Wages for Housework groups also in this country.

Silvia Federici, “The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s”

“The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s”
Silvia Federici

the commoner N. 11 Spring 2006

The following is the text of a paper that Silvia Federici wrote in 1980 for a
Conference convened by the Centro Studi Americani in Roma on “The Economic
Policies of Female Labor in Italy and the United States.” The Conference was
held in Rome on December 9-11, 1980 and was co-sponsored by the German
Marshall Fund of the United States.

New York, (1980)

“If women wish the position of the wife to have the honor which they attach to
it, they will not talk about the value of their services and about stated incomes,
but they will live with their husbands in the spirit of the vow of the English
marriage service, taking them ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
sickness and in health, to love, honor, obey.’ This is to be a wife.” – New York
Times, August 10th, 1876: “Wives’ Wages”

“The most valuable of all social capital is that invested in human beings and of
that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the
mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish instincts.” – Alfred
Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890).

While it is generally recognized that the dramatic expansion of the female
labor force is possibly the most important social phenomenon of the 1970s,
uncertainty still prevails among economists as to its origins. Technological
advancement in the home, the reduction of family size and the growth of the service
sector are offered as likely causes of this trend. Yet, it is also argued that these factors
may be an effect of women’s entering the labor force and that looking for a cause
would lead us in a vicious circle, a “what comes first, the chicken or the egg”
problem. As this paper claims, the uncertainty among economists stems from their
failure to recognize that the dramatic increase of the female labor force in the 1970s
reflects women’s refusal to function as unwaged workers in the home, catering to the
reproduction of the national work force. In fact, what goes under the name of
“homemaking” is (to use Gary Becker’s expression) a “productive consumption”
process,1 producing and reproducing “human capital,” or in the words of Alfred
Marshall, the laborer’s “general ability” to work.2 Social planners have often
recognized the importance of this work for the economy. Yet, as Becker points out,
the productive consumption that takes place in the home has had a “bandit like
existence in economic thought.”3 For the fact that this work is not waged, in a
society where work and wages are synonyms, makes it invisible as work, to the point
that the services it provides are not included in the Gross National Product (GNP)
and the providers are absent from the calculations of the national labor force.

Selma James/Johnson-Forest Tendency, “On the Woman Question: An Orientation”

“On the Woman Question: An Orientation”

Selma James [Sept. 3, 1951]

Selma James delivered this report on behalf of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Selma James was an important figure in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a co-author of the pamphlet, A Woman’s Place, during the Correspondence period. In the 1955 split with Dunayevskaya, she sided with C.L.R. James and married him after he divorced Constance Webb. She eventually separated from James and became a leader in the radical women’s movement in Britain in the 1970s. She was also closely associated with the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the wages for housework campaign. She is involved now with the Global Women’s Strike organization (www.globalwomenstrike.net).

A new stage has been reached. We are finished with endless discussions on male chauvinism. We have no more time for individual attacks against individual men who are backward or against individual women who do not want to be “emancipated.” These people will reorient themselves and will be drawn into their own struggles.

Now for the first time we know where we are going. We did not develop accidentally. The ideas explicit in this document are the concrete manifestations of the movement of capitalism and the reaction of the masses of women today. It is this reaction that we shall attempt to concretize in this document.

Bebel and the other historians on the woman question have analysed women in other ages, other struggles, other cultures. But it is we who must express women in 1951, what they feel about their lives, what they want and how they plan to get it.

We counterpose this to any external plan of the bourgeoisie, put forth by social workers, magazine writers, psychoanalysts, and any section of women who place themselves not within the struggle of women but above it, and therefore in opposition to it.

Selma James, “Women, the Unions and Work, Or…What Is Not To Be Done”

“Women, the Unions and Work, Or…What Is Not To Be Done”

Selma James

Radical America Vol. 7 no. 4-5, 1973. [PDF]

This pamphlet has been published by the Notting Hill (a working-class district in West London -ed.) Womens Liberation Workshop group. It was written by one of our members and presented as a paper at the National Confer­ence of Women at Manchester March 25-26. 1972. While many of us have minor or major disagreements with the paper. we feel that the discussion which it generated at the conference was of such importance to the future of the movement that it should be widely read and the discussion continue.

The demands at the end of the paper aroused most interest at the conference. and were discussed. added to and modi­fied there. But there may have been some misunderstand­ing about their purpose. They are not a statement of what we want. finally. to have. They are not a plan for an ideal society. and a society based on them would not cease to be oppressive. Ultimately the only demand which is not co­optable is the armed population demanding the end of cap­italism. But we feel that at this moment these demands can be a force against what capital wants and for what we want. They are intended to mobilize women both “inside-and “outside-the women’s liberation movement. They could provide a perspective which would affect decisions about local and national struggles. After discussion and modifi­cation they could become integrated and far-reaching goals which the women’s movement could come to stand for. A vote taken on the final day at Manchester decided that the demands would be raised on the first day of the next conference. Many groups are planning local discussions before that time.

April 8, 1972.

Maxine Molyneux, “Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate”

“Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate”

Maxine Molyneux

New Left Review I 116, [July-August 1979]

It is nearly a decade since the first texts in the recent domestic labour debate appeared, and since then over fifty articles have been published on the subject of housework in the British and American socialist press alone.¹ This interest in domestic labour has arisen from a wide range of orientations, both feminist and Marxist, yet despite this variety they all involve a common underlying assump­tion: namely that investigation of this previously neglected topic can contribute to an understanding of women’s subordination and to the formulation of a politics adequate to its supercession. Two main concerns can be identified in this literature. The first aims to show how the subordination of women, variously described as oppression, subjugation or exploitation, is, although often seen as ‘extra-economic’, in fact founded on a material basis and is linked into the political economy of capitalist society. This approach has attempted to demonstrate housework’s economic contribution to maintaining the capitalist system by providing labour necessary for the reproduction of labour power. It has raised the question of to what extent the development of capitalism has itself created the present domestic system and has, in particular, created ‘housework’.² This perspective has often involved the attempt to apply to the sphere of housework concepts previously restricted to the analysis of the more general, conventional and public, features of the capitalist economy.

Women’s Work Study Group, “Loom, Broom and Womb: Producers, Maintainers and Reproducers”

“Loom, Broom and Womb: Producers, Maintainers and Reproducers”
Women’s Work Study Group
Radical America Volume 10, Number 2 [March-April 1976]

HISTORY: WOMEN’S WORK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
Women’s work and the development of American capitalism can
be examined in three historical phases: the pre-capitalist phase
prior to 1820; the phase of competitive capitalism between 1820
and 1890; and the monopoly capitalist phase from 1890 to the present.
In this section each period is briefly described in terms of the
organization of production and the implications of the organization
of production for the lives of women.

Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the family”

“Communism and the family”

Alexandra Kollontai

from Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai [1920]

Women’s role in production: its effect upon the family

Will the family continue to exist under communism? Will the family remain in the same form? These questions are troubling many women of the working class and worrying their menfolk as well. Life is changing before our very eyes; old habits and customs are dying out, and the whole life of the proletarian family is developing in a way that is new and unfamiliar and, in the eyes of some, “bizarre”. No wonder that working women are beginning to think these questions over. Another fact that invites attention is that divorce has been made easier in Soviet Russia. The decree of the Council of People’s Commissars issued on 18 December 1917 means that divorce is, no longer a luxury that only the rich can afford; henceforth, a working woman will not have to petition for months or even for years to secure the right to live separately from a husband who beats her and makes her life a misery with his drunkenness and uncouth behaviour. Divorce by mutual agreement now takes no more than a week or two to obtain. Women who are unhappy in their married life welcome this easy divorce. But others, particularly those who are used to looking upon their husband as “breadwinners”, are frightened. They have not yet understood that a woman must accustom herself to seek and find support in the collective and in society, and not from the individual man.

Nora Connor, “Welfare, Workfare, Alienation: Early Marx and Late Capitalism”

“Welfare, Workfare, Alienation: Early Marx and Late Capitalism”

Nora Connor

Bad Subjects Issue #53 [January 2001]

 

Welfare, Workfare, Alienation: Early Marx and Late Capitalism

---

In 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), making good on President Clinton’s campaign promises to “end welfare as we know it.” The changes brought about by this legislation are significant. This essay examines the new work requirements and the expansion of the “workfare” program resulting from the 1996 legislation as cases of alienated labor. After a description of the new rules of welfare and of some of the work that is performed under these rules, we move on to look at the concept of alienated labor itself. Some of the questions asked include, what aspects of Marx’s extensive theory are most useful for understanding the welfare reform-labor connection? How are the concepts of labor, production and commodity different for the contemporary example than for those examples Marx used? And, are there elements of the welfare/workfare situation that can’t be adequately critiqued as “alienated labor”?

Donna Haraway: “The ‘homework economy’ outside ‘the home'”

“The ‘homework economy’ outside ‘the home'”

Donna Haraway

from “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1991. [PDF]

 

The ‘New Industrial Revolution’ is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collectivities, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in advanced industrial societies have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, education, and language.

Angela Davis, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”

“The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”

Angela Davis

Chapter 13 of Women, Race and Class [1981]

The countless chores collectively known as “housework” – cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping etc. – apparently consume some three to four thousand hours of the average housewife’s year.^[1] As startling as this statistic may be, ir does not even account for the constant and unquantifiable attention mothers must give to their children. Just as a woman’s maternal duties are always taken for granted, her never-ending toil as a housewife rarely occasions expressions of appreciation within her family. Housework, after all, is virtually invisible: “No one notices it until it isn’t done – we notice the unmade bed, not the scrubbed and polished floor.”^[2] Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative – these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

Silvia Federici, “Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work”

“Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work”

Silvia Federici

excerpt from “Precarious labor: A feminist viewpoint” lecture  [2006]

Another criticism I have against the precarious labor theory is that it presents itself as gender neutral. It assumes that the reorganization of production is doing away with the power relations and hierarchies that exist within the working class on the basis of rage, gender and age, and therefore it is not concerned with addressing these power relations; it does not have the theoretical and political tools to think about how to tackle them. There is no discussion in Negri, Virno and Hardt of how the wage has been and continues to be used to organize these divisions and how therefore we must approach the wage struggle so that it does not become an instrument of further divisions, but instead can help us undermined them. To me this is one of the main issues we must address in the movement.

Roberta, “The hand that rocks the cradle should be paid”

“The hand that rocks the cradle should be paid”

Roberta

Pittsburgh: Know, Inc

Women without an independent source of income in a society which celebrates the acquisition of wealth occupy a very special position. The appeal of a future where everyone is employed at socially productive, personally fulfilling work is undeniable. Unfortunately, that future isn’t in the immediate offing. Consequently, we must deal with the present.

Housewives’ trade union Santa Fe, Argentina, “Women’s manifesto”

“Women’s manifesto”
Housewives’ trade union Santa Fe, Argentina
Off Our Backs,  Mar/Apr 2002

The people of Argentina have undergone severe economic and political shocks in the past few months. The government has frozen all bank accounts and people cannot withdraw their money. This is particularly severe in Argentina because people don’t tend to use credit cards.

There have been popular protests in response. Two governments resigned because of the protests and Argentina had three presidents within one week. However, bank accounts are still frozen. In addition, the government has said that the money in the accounts, when people can withdraw it, will be available only in pesos, which are worth less than dollars, even though many people had saved the money in dollars.

In the face of the increasingly serious situation of our people, we feel we have the responsibility and also the renewed hope for our voices to be heard. Here is our proposal.

-Sindicato de Amas de Casa

Cindy L’Hirondelle, “Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”

“Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”
Cindy L’Hirondelle
Off Our Backs,  Jan/Feb 2004

I’ve worked laying sod, painting cars, selling donuts, and flipping burgers. I have also lived and felt the invisibility of being “only a mom.” Nothing compares with the stress of looking after small children, cooking for them and cleaning up after them. Housework gets no recognition, no status, and is the most wearing job I have ever done.

But the subject of household labor is seen as dull, and gets ignored even by progressive groups. Paid work gets recognition; it is “real” work. Yet the most common, exhausting, and tedious work is done for free and is invisible to those who fight against capitalism for social justice. As an anti-capitalist activist, I have attended countless meetings and protests, read stacks of alternative magazines-but I was unaware of the role that domestic labor played in the larger economic picture.