A review by akemi_666
The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa
5.0
The family as the locus of women's alienation from men. Because housewives live in an isolated lifeworld from their children (at school) and their husbands (at work), identities develops through mutual resentment rather than mutual care.
Very much a product of its time but still relevant. Though its analysis takes place through a Eurocentric, heteronormative framework, its clarification of unpaid labour as vital to the commodity chain is brilliant. Essentially, if men have been made slaves to wage labor, then women have been made slaves to the maintenance of wage laborers. From the wife, to the husband, to the boss, we trace a line of exploitation, from the family, to the factory and the market. Henceforth surplus labour's ultimate source is in the sphere of reproduction, rather than production.
A call to recognise marginalised identities as not merely an appendage to the core socialist project (of big burly men who will 'lead' the revolution), but as equally important to understanding the material and phenomenological effects of alienation.
"We must discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence, since the problem is not only to stop doing this work, but to smash the entire role of housewife."
Very much a product of its time but still relevant. Though its analysis takes place through a Eurocentric, heteronormative framework, its clarification of unpaid labour as vital to the commodity chain is brilliant. Essentially, if men have been made slaves to wage labor, then women have been made slaves to the maintenance of wage laborers. From the wife, to the husband, to the boss, we trace a line of exploitation, from the family, to the factory and the market. Henceforth surplus labour's ultimate source is in the sphere of reproduction, rather than production.
A call to recognise marginalised identities as not merely an appendage to the core socialist project (of big burly men who will 'lead' the revolution), but as equally important to understanding the material and phenomenological effects of alienation.
"We must discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence, since the problem is not only to stop doing this work, but to smash the entire role of housewife."