Women and the Subversion of the Community - by Mariarosa Dalla Costa (Paperback)

About the Book

In recent years there has been both a renewed interest in theories of social reproduction and an explosion of womens struggles and strikes across the world. This collection offers both historical and contemporary Marxist feminist analysis of how the reproduction of labor and life functions under capitalism, using Dalla Costas insights into the vibrant and combative womens movement that emerged in Italy and across the world in the early 1970s. Since the first publication of Women and the Subversion of the Community in 1972, Dalla Costa has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought. Her detailed research and provocative thinking deepens our understanding of the role of womens struggles for autonomy and control over their bodies and labor.

Book Synopsis

This collection brings together key texts and previously unavailable essays of the influential Italian feminist author and activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In recent years there has been both a renewed interest in theories of social reproduction and an explosion of women's struggles and strikes across the world. The collection offers both historical and contemporary Marxist feminist analysis of how the reproduction of labour and life functions under capitalism.

Dalla Costa's essays, speeches, and political interventions provide insight into the vibrant and combative women's movement that emerged in Italy and across the world in the early 1970s. Since the publication of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), Dalla Costa has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought in a wide range of anticapitalist and feminist social movements. Her detailed research and provocative thinking deepens our understanding of the role of women's struggles for autonomy and control over their bodies and labour. These essays provide critical and relevant ideas for anticapitalists, antiracists, and feminists who are attempting to build counterpower in the age of austerity.

Review Quotes

"This book is a further testimony to the great contribution Mariarosa Dalla Costa has made to feminist thought. It will be read for years to come."
--Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero

"This publication is a major step in the constitution of a subversive feminist historiography. Mariarosa Dalla Costa's contribution has been at the vanguard of the theorization of the relation between the oppression of women and capitalism."
--Morgane Merteuil, researcher, coeditor of Pour un féminisme de la totalité

"That capitalism organizes society to be divided into a 'private' sphere of the home and a 'public' sphere of the workplace is commonly acknowledged by all. What is not recognized is how capital consistently tries to depoliticize the 'private.' Even revolutionaries have sometimes been in thrall of this particular obfuscation, limiting their anticapitalist strategizing to the workplace alone. Mariarosa Dalla Costa's works, since the 1970s, have unfailingly pierced this veil. By theorizing the reproduction of labour power to be the precondition for capitalism's functioning, Dalla Costa has always illuminated for us the immense political potential of the private. Connecting unpaid labour in the home to the paid work of the wage worker, and by linking the naturalization of women's work to the capitalization of nature, Dalla Costa, in her scholarship and on the streets, continues to model for us an insurgent, irrepressible, anticapitalist feminism."
--Tithi Bhattacharya, editor of Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression; national organizer for the International Women's Strike

"The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Mariarosa Della Costa is a small but mighty read. I carry it in my purse and love to read people passages about the capitalist function of the uterus."
--Lyz Lenz

About the Author

Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an influential Italian Marxist feminist and activist whose works launched the "domestic labor debate" by redefining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capitalism. Camille Barbagallo is a feminist activist and researcher. She is the coeditor of The Commoner, no. 15, Care Work and the Commons, with Silvia Federici. Harry Cleaver is an American scholar, Marxist theoretician, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Reading Capital Politically.