Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader

by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Richard Braude (Translator), Harry Cleaver (Preface)

This collection brings together key texts and previously unavailable essays of the influential Italian feminist author and activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In recent years there has been both a renewed interest in theories of social reproduction and an explosion of women’s struggles and strikes across the world. The collection offers both historical and contemporary Marxist feminist analysis of how the reproduction of labour and life functions under capitalism. Dalla Costa’s essays, speeches, and political interventions provide insight into the vibrant and combative women’s movement that emerged in Italy and across the world in the early 1970s. Since the publication of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), Dalla Costa has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought in a wide range of anticapitalist and feminist social movements. Her detailed research and provocative thinking deepens our understanding of the role of women’s struggles for autonomy and control over their bodies and labour. These essays provide critical and relevant ideas for anticapitalists, antiracists, and feminists who are attempting to build counterpower in the age of austerity.

Genres: Feminism, Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy

288 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2019

Reviews

[aaamaaaliaaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The early polemics that foreground the debate around WFH are rhetorically and politically urgent & sharp, though there isn’t much analytic work done in this collection. I found the section from Dalla Costa’s thesis on the new deal welfare reforms and the family form under capitalism to actually be super compelling. The later essays take this turn towards an analytic or personal “autonomy” that somewhat obscures some of Dalla Costa’s early analysis regarding the relationship between unwaged domestic labor, labor power, and value. I see where the trans antagonism comes in towards the end. You would be wise to read Harry Josephine Giles’s Wages for Transition (2018) after.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another one of them dense, super detailed. It's the kind of book that makes me want to sit down with someone else who has read it, whip out our copies, and discuss until the wee hours. However, it's hard for me to put my thoughts about this book into written words. But I'll try.

I had never heard of Mariarose Dalla Costa until I got this book during one of PM Press's damaged book sales. I was intrigued by the title, and the book was super cheap, so I bought myself a copy. Turns out she's awesome and amazing, and had a lot of good thoughts that she was able to get out into the world.

The essays and speeches in this book span from 1972 until 2008, were translated from Italian, and mostly revolve around basic women's rights (like the right to have autonomy over their bodies, to choose whether or not to get married and have kids, to get paid as much as men with the same skills who are doing the same job, and the right to be compensated for when they choose to take care of the home and children.

The way the “family” has been split up at least since the start of capitalism is that the man's job is to go out into the world and produce goods for some rich dude, bringing home enough money to survive and reproduce. The woman's job has been to ensure reproduction, so that the ruling class has more workers. She does this by cleaning the house and cooking food for the man, doing emotional work to make sure her man stays sane enough to keep making money for the rulers, and have babies and make sure that they're healthy so that the overlords have more bodies to put in their factories, battlefields, and prisons. Many of Dalla Costa's words speak to this and propose a better way of life for us all (except maybe the billionaires).

She helped organize homemakers to demand a living wage and all the other things I mentioned above. This involved protests, recruiting, and—perhaps most importantly—strikes, because “if your production is vital to capitalism, the refusal to produce, the refusal to work, is a fundamental leveraging of social power.” She fought against those who said that the key to women's liberation is leaving the home and getting a job, because fuck capitalism.

I know how the medical industry treats women, but reading the pages of Women and the Subversion of Community made me angry all over again. From forced c-sections and hysterectomies to lack of abortions and other helpful care to just the general attitude of so many doctors towards women, especially women who take an interest in their health, this place is fucked.

Some of her later writings and speeches mention the disconnect between the folks who have been in the movement for a while and the people just getting involved. It's a tale as old as time, one that I've witnessed myself. Is it because people to get more conservative and stubborn (or “normie”) as they age and don't want to work with the young people? Or is it because young people think all their ideas are original and full-proof? Or, most likely, some kind of a mix of both. Whatever it is, we all need to figure it out though. The ruling class has generational and class solidarity through thick and thin.

[Ren Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book. Exhausted by a sense of working 24/7? Read this book. Feel frustrated that the “work day” doesn’t include housework and childcare? Read this book. Feeling despair at the political state of the world and don’t realize it’s all happened before? Read this book.

This collection of essays be Mariarosa Dalla Costa, an articulates the core arguments of the Wages to Housework Movement of the 1970s. Her core thesis is that the “unsustainable contradiction” for women is being classified as unwaged workers in a wage economy. She demonstrates how they used the political art of the demand to make social reproductive work visible- illuminating the reality that employers were “getting two workers for the price of one- and a low price at that.” Their goal was not to remunerate housework, but to leverage an attack on the entire wage system which they felt also exploited men. To accomplish this, women refused reproductive work. Today that is know as the 4B movement from South Korea. But this work shows how it has happened before- and to great and startling effects. Their objective was to obtain autonomy for women and establish a “threshold of unavailability” in order to reimagine themselves as social beings rather than “appendages.” We have divorce laws, our ability to be educated, domestic violence crisis centers, women’s clinics, ability to open a bank account in our own name, due to these women’s refusal of reproductive work in the 1970s. Written with clarity, precision, and fierceness- this book will revive you for the fight ahead.

[Jnoub101 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a great collection of essays, both as a workerist and a socialist-feminist text. Many of the essays in this work are great, the title essay "Women and the Subversion of the Community" is a must read for any one interested in mid-century Italian Marxism. There are, as can be expected, a few stumbling blocs in this work. As other reviewers point out there are occasional steps into gender essentialism. Additionally, Dalla Costa's discussions on Algerian women tend to be a double edged sword. On the one hand, her inclusion of the plight of Algerian women is laudable, as is general inclusion of Algeria as part of the Mediterranean world. However, often times the discussion of Algerian women will come with semi-racist assumptions -- i.e. of course, in her mind, Algerian women face greater oppression than their European counterparts, it is a well known part of Algerian and Eastern countries generally. However, these flaws are often tangential to the thesis of her work, and are easily excised.

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Dalla Costa's essays translated into English and assembled into one place.

I find the collection to be very compelling but the last two essays (especially the last one) are rough around the edges and could be taken as proof of older marxist feminists being unable to include trans people into their analysis.

That being said I would recommend this book to all that consider themselves to be feminists even if the language used is not what modern feminists would agree with (most of the essays are 50 years old)

Overall, I find this collection essay to scaffold a (trans)feminist politics off of given its exploration of reproductive labor and autonomy. It pairs well with other autonomist marxist texts and you would be wise to read Harry Josephine Giles' Wages for Transition after this.

[David Potsubay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any survey of radical Feminist Literature would be remiss not to include an essay or two from Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Impassioned, intellectual, and important to the history of Italian workerism and demanding equity for all working class women.

[Mills College Library]

305.42 D144 2019

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite informative about the history of Italian feminism but becomes repetitive in the last third, especially if one is familiar with Silvia Federici's body of work.

[James M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant collections of essays on workerism and feminism in Italy, the significance of immigration on social reproduction, and the links between European feminism and the militancy of women in Chiapas