Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an influential Italian Marxist feminist and activist. She is the coauthor of the classic feminist text The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, with Selma James. This text launched the “domestic labor debate” in the early 1970s by redefining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capitalism and as work that has been rendered invisible by its removal from the wage-relation. Her research has been translated into multiple languages and published in journals, edited collections, and monographs.
Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader
SKU: 9781629635705
Author: Mariarosa Dalla Costa • Preface by Harry Cleaver • Edited by Camille Barbagallo • Translated by Richard Braude
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629635705
Published: 3/2019
Format: Paperback
Size: 6 x 9
Page count: 288
Subjects: Women’s Studies-Feminism / Politics-Marxism
Praise
“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
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