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AS THE END OF THE WELFARE STATE is calling for a reassessment of the politics of the New Deal—its main point of origin in the United States—the publication of a U.S. edition of Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal could not be more timely.

Originally published in Italy in 1983, as the welfare state was already undergoing an historic crisis, the book centers on the new relation that the New Deal instituted between women and the state, and the development of a new reproductive regime in which the working-class housewife plays a strategic role as the producer of the workforce and manager of the worker’s wage.

This is an aspect of New Deal politics that to this day remains understudied. It is crucial to an understanding of not only the limits of the welfare state, but also the paths to be taken in the construction of alternatives to it. Even the theorists of Italian Operaismo, who described the New Deal as a turning point in the management of class relations and as capital’s first conscious integration of the class struggle in its development plans, have ignored the central relationship of women and the state underpinning this historical change in class relations. The New Deal, for Operaist political theorists like Mario Tronti, marked the institutionalization of collective bargaining and the transformation of the state into an agent of economic planning.¹ It was part of a Keynesian deal in which wage increases would be exchanged for and matched by labor productivity, with the state and the unions acting as guarantors of the equilibrium to be achieved.

What Dalla Costa shows, however, is that the complex social architecture upon which the New Deal relied was at all points dependent on a reorganization of the reproduction of the workforce and the integration of women’s domestic labor and the family in the schemes of American capitalism. According to the New Dealers’ plans, it was the woman’s task to ensure that the higher family wage, which workers would gain through their newly acquired collective-bargaining power, would be productively expended and actually contribute to the production of a more disciplined, more pacified, and more productive workforce. As such, the “house-worker” was the strategic subject on which the success or failure of the New Deal depended, while essential to the exploitation of her work was the invisibilization of her labor.

Like many historians before her, Dalla Costa acknowledges that the New Deal continued trends that had been developing on both sides of the Atlantic since the last decades of the nineteenth century, culminating on the eve of WWI with Fordism. As she argues, there is no doubt, that the wage contract stipulated in the Ford factories in 1914—with its revolutionary introduction of the five-dollar-a-day wage and the reorganization of domestic life it promoted—was the model for the welfare and labor provisions of the New Deal. Fordism was the laboratory for the rationalization of domestic work that the New Deal required. In the Fordist “deal,” the housewife was no longer expected to contribute to the production of consumption goods, which could now be produced industrially on a large scale, but to provide wise management of the wage and the socialization of the new generation—innovations that, in the Progressive Era, became the object of the new science of rationalization.

With the New Deal, for the first time, the state assumed the responsibility for the social reproduction of the worker, not only through the introduction of collective bargaining, but also through the institutionalization of housework—smuggled in, however, as “the work of love.” As Dalla Costa shows, it was only with the New Deal that the state began to plan the “social factory”—that is, the home, the family, the school, and above all women’s labor—on which the productivity and pacification of industrial relations was made to rest.

Dalla Costa’s guidance through these historic developments—with a narrative spanning from the Fordist era to the Great Depression and the enactment of the Social Security Act of 1935—and in particular, her analysis of the social forces these developments responded to, including their implications for worker-capital relations and for relations within the working class, is one the greatest merits of Dalla Costa’s work. But there are many other aspects of the book that make it a major contribution to a feminist analysis of the New Deal, as well as a critical intervention advancing the ongoing debates on the role of the “public” and the construction of the “common.”

First, Dalla Costa’s reading precludes any celebratory interpretation of the New Deal as the “benign father” or “parental state” that some feminists in recent years have advocated. Family, Welfare, and the State leaves no doubt that the New Deal was not only the last resort to “save capitalism” from the danger of working-class revolution, and was in essence a productivity deal, it was also structured to maintain a patriarchal and racist order. Social Security was reserved for waged workers while domestic workers, even when working for pay, were excluded from it. Racial discrimination, exploitation, and domination too were pervasive in every aspect of its administration, from job creation to the disbursement of the only Social Security funds houseworkers would receive, namely Aid to Dependent Children (ADC, AFDC).² Dalla Costa nevertheless acknowledges the importance of this social security provision for women, as it opened a new terrain of confrontation with the state that in the 1960s was to assume mass proportions. This provision enabled women to achieve a degree of autonomy without relying on the male wage and inspired an international Wages for Housework Campaign of which Dalla Costa was one of the founders and main promoters.

An additional merit of Dalla Costa’s work is that it highlights the prominent creative role that women played in both the social and factory struggles of the 1930s and its transformation of family relations. Family, Welfare, and the State brings attention to another important, but still ignored, aspect of the New Deal regarding the social context in which it was hatched. This is the great variety of initiatives that workers across the U.S. put in place to create autonomous forms of self-reproduction. To this day, little has been written about this impressive surge of self-organization, which reached proportions exceeding the experiments with self-management that we have witnessed in Argentina, with workers taking over factories to produce the necessities of life.³ This is a history that today must be revisited as we ask whether our energies and our movements should concentrate on restoring or defending the welfare state, or constructing more autonomous forms of 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 capacities? As this question is presently coming to the center of radical political debate, at least in the U.S., an evaluation of the “reproductive” politics of the New Deal is more important than ever, and Dalla Costa’s work is a powerful contribution to it.

Silvia Federici

Brooklyn, NY