Family, Welfare, and the State

Between Progressivism and the New Deal

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Rafaella Capanna

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781942173250
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

NOTES

PREFACE

1. M. Tronti, Operai e Capitale (Torino: Einaudi, 1966). See esp. 287ff.

2. AFDC is Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

3. See, for instance, two works on Argentina’s social struggles that emphasize self-organization: Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK Press, 2006); and Colectivo Situaciones, 19 & 20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions/Common Notions, 2011).

CHAPTER 1

1. For systemic issues relating to the Five-Dollar Day, see B. Coriat, L’atelier et le chronomètre: Essai sur le taylorisme, le fordisme et la production de masse (Bourgois: Paris, 1979), in particular chap. 4. See also: H. Beynon, Working for Ford (New York: Penguin Books, 1973) and A. Nevins, Ford: the Times, the Man, the Company (New York: Scribner, 1954). If 1914 was the year of Ford’s famous proposal on wages, it should also be remembered that 1913 was the year of the introduction of the automatic assembly line. Owing to the new pressures this innovation posed to laborers, the rate of abandonment of the workplace by the workers was such that, as a close collaborator of Ford declared, “To add 100 workers to the factory staff, you had to take on 963.” For this and other valuable information, see: P. Ortoleva, introduction to La mia vita e la mia opera, by H. Ford (Milan: La Salamandra, 1980), and P. Bairati, introduction to Autobiografia, by H. Ford, ed. S. Crowther (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1982).

2. Among reports that appeared in Italy, we should point out the numerous articles published in Primo Maggio: S. Tait, “Alle origini del movimento comunista negli Stati Uniti: Louis Fraina teorico dell’azione di massa,” B. Cartosio, “Note e documenti sugli Industrial Workers of the World,” and G. Buonfino, “Il muschio non cresce sui sassi che rotolano: grafica e propaganda IWW,” Primo Maggio, no. 1 (June–September 1973); P. Ortoleva, “Classe operaia e potere politico in Usa, 1860–1920,” Primo Maggio, nos. 3–4 (February–September 1974); Cartosio, “Storie e storici di operai americani,” Primo Maggio, no. 11 (Winter 1977–78); Cartosio, “Mosca 1921: Una intervista a ‘Big Bill’ Haywood,” which contains a) “Nostra intervista a Haywood Segret. Generale dell’IWW sulla situazione operaia negli Stati Uniti,” and b) N. Vecchi, “Il pensiero di Haywood Segretario Generale dell’IWW sulla rivoluzione russa”; and S. Ghetti, “Gli IWW e la ristrutturazione del capitale negli anni venti,” Primo Maggio, no. 16 (Fall–Winter 1981–82); Cartosio, “Gli emigrati italiani e l’IWW,” Primo Maggio, no. 18 (Fall–Winter 1982–83). See also: P. Ortoleva, “Industrial Workers of the World,” in P. Bairati ed., Storia del Nord America, Il mondo contemporaneo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), 147–156; G. Bock, P. Carpignano and B. Ramirez eds., La formazione dell’operaio-massa negli USA: 1898–1922 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976); K. Allsop, Hard Travellin’: The Hobo and His History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967).

3. The industrialists themselves openly declared that they believed in the stability of the home as a response to the social instability of those years. “People should invest their savings in homes so that they become their own. That way they won’t move and they won’t go on strike” (cf. P. Carpignano, “Immigrazione e degradazione,” in Bock, Carpignano and Ramirez, La formazione dell’operaio-massa, 221).

4. On the relationship between Fordism and family, see: G. Bock and B. Duden, “Arbeit aus Liebe, Liebe als Arbeit: Zur Entstehung der Hausarbeit im Kapitalismus,” in Berliner Dozentinnengruppe ed., Frauen und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Courage Verlag, 1977); G. Bock, “L’altro movimento operaio negli Stati Uniti,” and Carpignano, “Immigrazione e degradazione” (in particular, 218–221), in Bock, Carpignano and Ramirez, La formazione dell’operaio-massa. For some general observations on the relationship between deskilling of the labor force and family and social reproduction, see R.M. Titmuss, Essays on “The Welfare State” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 104–118.

5. Cf. Coriat, L’atelier et le chronomètre, in particular chap. 4.

6. Ibid.

7. Sociologist J.R. Lee observes that five dollars a day in the hands of some men would be a serious handicap along the narrow path of righteousness, and would make them a potential threat to society. So, from the outset, it was settled that any man who was unable to use the wage with wisdom and prudence would not receive this raise. “The So-Called Profit Sharing System in the Ford Plant,” Annals of the Academy of Political Sciences, vol. LXV (May 1916): 303.

8. “This double process—ruin of the domestic balance and production on a capitalist basis of necessary goods—is at the base of what will be indicated with the concept of new standards of worker consumption,” says B. Coriat, L’atelier et le chronomètre, who borrows the expression from M. Aglietta, Régulation et crises du capitalisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977), 130. He continues, “In short, they mark the passage from the dominion of not specifically mercantile conditions to precisely mercantile ones of reproduction of labor power.”

9. B. Ehrenreich and D. English, “The Manufacture of Housework,” Socialist Revolution, no. 26 (October–December 1975): 6. Cf. A. Oakley, Woman’s Work (New York: Vintage Books, 1976).

10. The most famous was Jane Addams. These middle-class women, who hoped to break free from the cult of domesticity through the work of housekeepers of the nation, helped to manage the Home Economics Movement. This movement, which developed after 1890, introduced new standards of “cleanliness, nutrition, family customs and efficiency in the kitchens primarily of the immigrant housewives, and measures and machines to save work in the kitchens of the wealthiest families, whose housekeepers preferred factory work to being personal house staff.… Making a science of the education of children was another highly promoted strategy. The militant feminist agitation for sex education, control and limitation of births, was reproached by the Socialists for producing a panic that would have caused women to lose all faith in men and to withdraw their capital—themselves—from the marriage market”; instead, on the side of capital, birth control could become a powerful instrument of state control over labor power. Bock, “L’altro movimento operaio negli Stati Uniti.” On the relationship between feminism and socialism, see: M.J. Buhle, “Women and the Socialist Party, 1901–1914,” in E.H. Altbach ed., From Feminism to Liberation (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1971); B. Dancis, “Socialism and Women in the United States, 1900–1917,” Socialist Revolution 27, vol. 6, no. 1 (January–March 1976); and M.J. Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). On domestic efficiency, see: M. Pattison, “Scientific Management in Home-Making,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 48 (1913); and C. Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), in particular chap. 5. Please note again, social workers came from that stratum of middle-class women who, by the turn of the century, had experienced a new degree of education and culture at a mass level. If the old productive functions were no longer needed, the new culture was still ghettoized in terms of “a ladies’ sitting-room.” Doing a job that was considered socially useful became a desirable outlet, even if it was almost always without pay, given that many women, in this vacuum of functions, were affected by hysteria and depression. Another outcome of the intellectual emancipation of women was the flourishing of women’s associations that often applied themselves to social issues.

11. Cf. M. Tirabassi, “Prima le donne e i bambini; gli International Institutes e l’americanizzazione degli immigrati,” the third article in the section entitled “Integrazione sociale negli Usa,” edited by M. Vaudagna in Quaderni storici, no. 51, a. XVII, (December 1982): 853–880. The article is very interesting for its careful discussion of the role played by the International Institute.

12. W.C. Mitchell, “The Backward Art of Spending Money,” American Economic Review, vol. II (June 1912): 269–281. Cf. A. Marshall, Principles of Economics, book VI, chap. IV (London: Macmillan, 1920). “The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings; and of that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish instincts.” In an analogous way, in the 1870s, articles appeared in The New York Times expressing concerns to dissuade women from claiming wages for their work: “If women wish the position of the wife to have the honor which they attach to it, they will not talk of the value of their services and about stated incomes, but they will live with their husbands in the spirit of the vow of the English marriage service, taking them ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, honor, obey.’ This is to be a wife.” “Wives’ Wages,” The New York Times, August 10, 1876. The quotation is from S. Federici’s paper, “The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the ’70s,” presented at the Economic Policies of Female Labor in Italy and the United St...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• List of 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
• Three Forms of Struggle and Aggregation of the Unemployed
• Four From Hoover to Roosevelt
• Five Women Between Family, Welfare, and Paid Labor
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author