Zukunftsmusik
11th November 2013, 10:21
Article at Libcom by Italian feminist/workerist Leopoldina Fortunati. (http://libcom.org/library/learning-struggle-my-story-between-workerism-feminism-leopoldina-fortunati)
Not sure where to post this, but it's mainly a personal account of an activist in both Potere Operaio ("Worker's Power") and Lotta Femminista ("Feminist Struggle") in Italy in the seventies. It's not groundbreaking in any way, but I found it interesting. It's a pretty short article and probably an okay intro to the debate and struggle around women and housework and work/the working class in general in the seventies.
Some quotes:
So Potere Operaio’s discourse was very advanced in considering the new factories, the new workers’ role in the contemporary capitalist system, but it was very poor in considering housework, affects, emotions, sexuality, education, family, interpersonal relationships, sociability, and so on.
The personal struggles that many women had engaged in, for their own sake and in order to change society, were in need of a sounding board and a uniting force that would increase their power. This force was the discovery of class consciousness on the part of women, which would serve as the engine of political organization for their social struggles. Lotta Femminista brought the workerist experience to the feminist movement.
We needed to clarify and explain, first of all to ourselves, and then to the entire movement, why militants needed to go beyond the Marxian categories and in which sense. For example, in which terms could women be considered working class? Which women?
I especially find the following interesting. I've heard very little about the demand for "wages for housework", and think the critique of the opposite demand and its result is an interesting position:
Lotta Femminista had always been a minority tendency within the broader feminist movement, because women in the feminist movement were at first rightly wary of any political theory developed in masculine political traditions. The irony is that the broader feminist movement would have become much stronger and more robust if it had taken up our political proposal of “wages for housework” (i.e., “domestic labor,” including parenting, caretaking, etc.), rather than assuming, without knowing it, the Leninist strategy of fighting for work outside of housework as the means of assuring a wage for women. But it was very difficult for the Committees for Wages for Housework to find consensus on their proposal, because feminist women in general thought it was better to reject domestic labor in toto and leave their homes.
In this period, we workerist feminists were not able to convince the whole feminist movement that the refusal of work must be managed within a process of wage bargaining, or otherwise domestic work would return in another manner alongside work outside the home, which we were also struggling over. In other words, the feminist movement never included, in its general political program, our objective of first obtaining social recognition for the value of housework by claiming money for it. The strategy that feminists applied to housework was simply to invite women to refuse it. But after a while it became clear that this strategy was inefficient, because it was not able to make housework disappear on a mass scale.
However, as we had anticipated, the problem of “housework” or domestic labor did not disappear from the political agenda of women. Unfortunately, a reflection on the failure of this strategy has not yet been made. New generations of women need to learn from this political error and understand that housework, in its material and immaterial aspects, must be socially recognized as productive labor.
Not sure where to post this, but it's mainly a personal account of an activist in both Potere Operaio ("Worker's Power") and Lotta Femminista ("Feminist Struggle") in Italy in the seventies. It's not groundbreaking in any way, but I found it interesting. It's a pretty short article and probably an okay intro to the debate and struggle around women and housework and work/the working class in general in the seventies.
Some quotes:
So Potere Operaio’s discourse was very advanced in considering the new factories, the new workers’ role in the contemporary capitalist system, but it was very poor in considering housework, affects, emotions, sexuality, education, family, interpersonal relationships, sociability, and so on.
The personal struggles that many women had engaged in, for their own sake and in order to change society, were in need of a sounding board and a uniting force that would increase their power. This force was the discovery of class consciousness on the part of women, which would serve as the engine of political organization for their social struggles. Lotta Femminista brought the workerist experience to the feminist movement.
We needed to clarify and explain, first of all to ourselves, and then to the entire movement, why militants needed to go beyond the Marxian categories and in which sense. For example, in which terms could women be considered working class? Which women?
I especially find the following interesting. I've heard very little about the demand for "wages for housework", and think the critique of the opposite demand and its result is an interesting position:
Lotta Femminista had always been a minority tendency within the broader feminist movement, because women in the feminist movement were at first rightly wary of any political theory developed in masculine political traditions. The irony is that the broader feminist movement would have become much stronger and more robust if it had taken up our political proposal of “wages for housework” (i.e., “domestic labor,” including parenting, caretaking, etc.), rather than assuming, without knowing it, the Leninist strategy of fighting for work outside of housework as the means of assuring a wage for women. But it was very difficult for the Committees for Wages for Housework to find consensus on their proposal, because feminist women in general thought it was better to reject domestic labor in toto and leave their homes.
In this period, we workerist feminists were not able to convince the whole feminist movement that the refusal of work must be managed within a process of wage bargaining, or otherwise domestic work would return in another manner alongside work outside the home, which we were also struggling over. In other words, the feminist movement never included, in its general political program, our objective of first obtaining social recognition for the value of housework by claiming money for it. The strategy that feminists applied to housework was simply to invite women to refuse it. But after a while it became clear that this strategy was inefficient, because it was not able to make housework disappear on a mass scale.
However, as we had anticipated, the problem of “housework” or domestic labor did not disappear from the political agenda of women. Unfortunately, a reflection on the failure of this strategy has not yet been made. New generations of women need to learn from this political error and understand that housework, in its material and immaterial aspects, must be socially recognized as productive labor.