The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community

by Dalla Costa, Mariarosa; James, Selma (1973)

Key Passage

"Never as with the advent of capitalism has the destruction of woman as a person meant also the immediate diminution of her physical integrity. Feminine and masculine sexuality had already before capitalism undergone a series of regimes and forms of conditioning. But they had also undergone efficient methods of birth control, which have unaccountably disappeared. Capital established the family as the nuclear family and subordinated within it the woman to the man, as the person who, not directly participating in social produciton, does not present herself independently on the labor market. As it cuts off all her possibilities of creativity of the development of her wroking activity, so it cuts off the expression of her sexual, psychological, and emotional autonomy." pp. 30-31 (3rd Edition, 1975). ()

Keywords

Feminist Movement, Italian Context, Housework, Domestic Labor, Gendered Labor, Gendered Struggle, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Capitalist Family, Class Struggle, Wageless, Unpaid Labor, Exploitation, Reproductive Labor, Queer Politics, Surplus Value, Social Factory

Themes

Feminist Critiques of Work Centrality, Unpaid Labour, Exploitation

Links to Reference

• https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/215195199
• http://sduk.us/2011/dalla_costa_power_women_subversion_community.pdf

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