Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal

by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Rafaella Capanna (Translator), Silvia Federici (Preface)

Written in the ten years following the publication of The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (1972) and the international organizing efforts of the Wages for Housework Campaign, Mariarosa Dalla Costa's Family, Welfare, and the State reflects on the history of struggles around the New Deal in which workers' initiatives forced a new relationship with the state on the terrain of social reproduction. Were the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state the saviors of the working class or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacity?
By analyzing the relationship of women and the state, Dalla Costa offers a comprehensive reading of the welfare system through the dynamics of resistance and struggle, the willingness and reluctance to work inside and outside the home, and the relationship with the relief structures that women expressed in the United States during the Great Depression.
Three decades later, revisiting the origins of this system on a sociopolitical level--its policies governing race, class, and family relations, especially in terms of the role that was delegated to women's labor power--remains vital for a deeper understanding of the historical relationship between women and the state, crisis and resistance, and possibilities for class autonomy.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2015

Reviews

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, "Family, Welfare, and the State" that takes the autonomist feminist critique first outlined in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation and turns it towards Keynesian Economics, Social Democracy, and the Liberal State through an examination of the New Deal and the Great Depression. The book reads as kind of racist in some parts (the italian was written in 1983) but I think that some of the racism comes from the translation and not Dalla Costa herself.

This book presents a critique of social democracy centered around Women and The Family and it was a refreshing take compared to the go-to critique of social democracy being one of anti-imperialism.

It would help if the reader has read Caliban and the Witch, at least, and understand's the autonomist analysis found in Tronti's Workers and Capital.

I would recommed this book to any marxist feminist, but I do not think that the general left will internalize the arguments outlined in the book itself as it reads more like history than theory -- which is the beauty of it.

[Ren Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This small 106 page volume is packed with information about the relationship between labor and the state from the 1929 stock market crash to the 1980s (when it was originally published in Italy). Find out how the political consciousness shifted to people looking to government to guarantee a basic income. The social movements, the desperation of the unemployment crisis, and all the acts that established welfare as we know it today- unemployment insurance, social security, temporary assistance for needy families, bank bail-outs. It’s all here and it’s riveting!