The attack on welfare was, and is, an attack on our class autonomy, structured to maintain a patriarchal and racist order, drive divisions, and disrupt our ability to collectively refuse capital’s exploitation and the state’s discipline. Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Family, Welfare and the State powerfully reminds us that the welfare system can only be understood through the dynamics of resistance and struggle, and women have been at the center of it. In reflecting 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 , Dalla Costa asks if the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state were saviors of the working class, or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacity? Family, Welfare and the State offers a comprehensive reading of the welfare system through the dynamics of women's resistance and class struggle, their 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. Revisiting the origins of this system today 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 and ongoing relationship between women and the state, crisis and resistance, and possibilities for class autonomy.
Оглавление
Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Family, Welfare, and the State
FAMILY, WELFARE, AND THE STATE
ABBREVIATIONS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
ONE. MASS PRODUCTION AND THE NEW URBAN FAMILY ORDER
TWO. THE CRISIS OF 1929 AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE FAMILY. THE CRISIS
THE DISRUPTION OF THE FAMILY
THREE. FORMS OF STRUGGLE AND AGGREGATION OF THE UNEMPLOYED
FOUR. FROM HOOVER TO ROOSEVELT. THE HOOVER ADMINISTRATION
THE NEW DEAL: THE FIRST WELFARE MEASURES
THE NEW DEAL: TOWARD A SYSTEM OF “SOCIAL SECURITY”
FIVE. WOMEN BETWEEN FAMILY, WELFARE, AND PAID LABOR
WOMEN’S ACTIONS IN RESISTANCE AND STRUGGLE DURING THE DEPRESSION
WOMEN AND PAID LABOR
TOWARDS STRENGTHENING THE FAMILY
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES. PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MORE FROM. COMMON NOTIONS
Отрывок из книги
Between Progressivism and the New Deal
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
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As for the social sciences, from 1905 to 1909 the American Journal of Sociology saw a rise in the percentage of population studies (on immigration) to the level of nine percent compared to one percent for the period 1900 to 1904. With the outbreak of the war in Europe, American sociologists focused their discussions on the need to control immigration. Mostly based on criteria put forward as scientific, they denied the possibility that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe could be assimilated, and pressed for the urgent restriction of immigration. This is especially true of the time of the United States’ entry into the conflict, as is evident in the AJS, which officially defined what sociology was. The other fact which was emphasized was the absolute exclusion from the journal of socialist- or radical-inspired materials which, however, found hospitality in other large-circulation journals and newspapers.25
The family ideology was arguably perfected in the 1920s. The affectionate and “disinterested” nature of women, along with their unpaid work, was increasingly and subtlely put in opposition to the cooperative nature of work in a factory, labor that accumulated and took advantage of social knowledge and loaded itself with potential for revolt.
