The Terrain of Reproduction: Alisa Del Res

The Sexualization of Social Relations

Anna Culbertson September 12, 2012

In an era when the exploits of Silvio Berlusconis private life seem to have categorically obliterated any progress towards sexual
equality achieved during the Italian feminist movement of the 70s, it is essential to remember what was once accomplished.
Although second-wave feminism was already a well-established network of debates in the U.S. by 1970, Italian women influenced by
workerist writings of the feminist ilk, most notably Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma Jamess The Power of Women and the
Subversion of the Community (1972), set out to initiate battles over issues such as abortion and divorce. 1 Feminist currents both
from within and independent of workerist movements then spread with a fierce momentum that would endure through the decade.
From the inadequate patriarchal rubric of the New Left, from the ashes of male-dominated workerist organizations such as Potere
Operaio, and later Lotta Continua, women throughout Italy organized autonomously, on the basis of the inherent connection of
reproduction and gender roles to class struggle. 2 It was the problem of marginalization of women within these movements, along
with the larger question of unpaid domestic labor, that directed many feminist inquiries. Silvia Federici has said, reflecting on her
difficulty reconciling her experience as a woman with the rhetoric of these organizations, I was unwilling to accept my identity as a
woman after having for years pinned all my hopes on my ability to pass for a man. 3 An organized collectivity of women independent
of the uniform assimilation to a male-driven class perspective became necessary, since womens work was to this point largely
confined to the domain of reproduction, but remained an equally essential yet categorically unique form of production in the greater
sense.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa has described how, in the 1970s, Italian feminism largely took one of two positions: a kind of generalized,
overall self-awareness or a workerist-driven feminism. The latter took shape as Lotta Femminista, which organized into a more
substantial international movement. The focus of their attack, housework, was described in Federicis Wages Against Housework as
the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class. 4 In 1972, Dalla
Costa, Selma James, and others formed the International Wages for Housework Campaign around the notion that women held a
significant power as producers of the labor force itself and that through the refusal of this production, they engaged in a form of
social subversion that could lead to a radical transformation of society. 5
However, Federici has since acknowledged this kind of utopian thinking as damaging to the feminist movement:

One of the major shortcomings of the womens movement has been its tendency to
overemphasize the role of consciousness in the context of social change, as if enslavement
were a mental condition and liberation could be achieved by an act of will. Presumably, if
we wanted, we could stop being exploited by men and employers revolutionize our day
to day life. Undoubtedly some women already have the power to take these steps But for

millions these recommendations could only turn into an imputation of guilt, short of
building the material conditions that would make them possible.6
In an interview accompanying the volume Futuro Anteriore, Alisa Del Re describes how she began her own path towards the analysis
of women and work, initially as a political science student and research assistant to Antonio Negri in the late 1960s. 7 Encounters
with the methods of workers inquiry, and later the writings of Tronti and Marx, became points of reference that would inform Del
Res involvement with Potere Operaio until its dissolution in 1973. Without officially crossing over to Autonomia Operaia like many
of her comrades, Del Re remained in somewhat close proximity to the group, while beginning to address issues from a feminist
perspective that was unique for this period, particularly regarding social services and the relationship between work and personal
time.
Del Re reveals a subjectivity that informed her position on welfare programs a position that, stemming in large part from her own
need for subsidized childcare while navigating the workforce, would unintentionally oppose the views of Dalla Costa and others
driving the Wages for Housework movement. While Wages for Housework sought compensation for domestic labor, Del Re argued
for subsidized childcare and other such social programs so that a woman could have a life outside of working, both in and outside of
the home not because she disagreed with Wages for Housework, but because their demands did not apply to her own situation as a
woman choosing to subsist within the workforce rather than in the home. She describes how her very position as a working woman
assigned her to the margins of the workerist movement, while the women of Wages for Housework were demanding rights from
within their imposed terrain that of reproduction:

the issue of wages was perhaps more revolutionary but from the political practice that
Rosa [Dalla Costa] endorsed it was difficult to understand who was demanding these wages
and when maybe my issue was much more reformist even though it is true that we
annoyed a few people when we occupied local government meetings, demanding the
construction of nursery schools and proposing concrete forms of liberation from
housework.8
It is worth noting, however, that while the positions of Wages for Housework and Del Re were seemingly in opposition, they are
perhaps better described as parallel streams of struggle, progress in both arenas constituting a necessary condition for womens
autonomy. In the first place, Wages for Housework recognized housework as work, and thus, the strategy of getting a job as a
means of liberating women from dependence on mens wages, as Federici would later reflect, alienated women who worked because
their families need the added financial support and not because they consider it a liberating experience, particularly since having a
job never frees you from housework.9 Furthermore, Del Res view on the reclamation of personal time supported by state-funded
child care provisions offers the only possibility of relief from what would otherwise be a near-24/7 work week, waged or not, for
working-class women. Years after Wages for Housework, Federici recognizes the mutual dependence of these two conditions:

as long as housework goes unpaid, there will be no incentives to provide the social
services necessary to reduce our work, as proved by the fact that, despite a strong womens
movement, subsidized day care has been steadily reduced through the 70s. I should add that
wages for housework never meant simply a paycheck. It also meant more social services
and free social services.10
In a later piece entitled Women and Welfare: Where is Jocasta?, Del Re describes the labor of reproduction as a specific relation
between women and the State that is separate from the labor market and that has been inadequately supported and studied. 11 The

welfare system, despite its limitations on the quality of life, she proposes, liberat[es] the labor of reproduction from its
dependence on another persons salary, in other words, the labor of production. 12 Thus, Del Re proposes that since women control
the means of reproduction, we must find a way to present [our] bill by making visible the labor of reproduction in its totality
and by underlining its centrality with respect to production and the market. As she has continued to assert, this begins with a
reorganization of ones time.13
Interestingly, situated upon this same imposed terrain were both the subjects and objects of a year-long research study regarding
work and family, culminating in the publication of Le sexe du travail: structures familiales et systme productif (Grenoble: Presses
Universitaires de Grenoble, 1984). In an article for the journal Primo Maggio, Del Re examines this work with a favorable view on
their investigations, as women researchers, into the sexual and social divisions of labor. Translated here, Del Res piece represents in
itself an evolving vision of these divisions that does not, as she writes, signal a marginality.
In Women and Welfare, Del Re elegantly states the importance of the womans role as both subject and object:

It is crucial, therefore, that womens lives their existence, their nature, as well as their
activities become an integral part of philosophical and intellectual discourse, so that the
acknowledgment of female subjectivity, constructed as it is in multiple symbolic and

material loci, can reveal the partiality of a vision of the world that even today is considered
universal.14
Like other projects of the workerist movement, Primo Maggio as a publication reveals conceptual layers ranging from
historiographical record to scholarly periodical to political organization. As Primo Maggios Sergio Bologna writes in his review of
Steve Wrights Storming Heaven, the journal focused on maintaining a subject position within a network of initiatives of self
organisation at the level of political culture and formation at the service of the movement.' 15 In an interview with Patrick
Cuninghame, Bologna describes Primo Maggios search for new methodologies, in contrast to the efforts at party organization by
Negri and Autonomia Organizzata:

Primo Maggio was not even a political elite. Rather, we had refused our role as a political
elite to put ourselves instead in the role of that techno-scientific intelligentsia which
excavated within the disciplines. So, we wanted to excavate within the historical disciplines
to make history in another way. You read Primo Maggio and it is not a political journal, in
the sense that it is a journal for the transformation of historical methodology. In the
sense of transformation also of historiographical language which has an enormous
importance in political language.16
The idea of a woman-science, women (and sexual divisions of labor) as a topic of research by women researchers, is the product of
this strategy, reconstructing a subject through its methodologies.

1. See Jacqueline Andall, Abortion, politics and gender in Italy, Parliamentary Affairs 47:2 (1994).
2. Lotta Continua, in fact, aided in its own demise through its betrayal of female LC militants by sabotaging an abortion march in
Rome in 1975. See especially Red Notes Italy 1977-8: Living with an Earthquake, chapter 19, and the Big Flame Womens Group
pamphlet Fighting for Feminism: the Women Question in an Italian Revolutionary Group.
3. Silvia Federici, Putting Feminism Back on its Feet, Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338.
4. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975), 2.
5. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Door to the Garden: Feminism and Operaismo, reprinted on libcom.org.
6. Federici, Femnism, 339.
7. Interview with Alisa Del Re 26th July 2000, trans. Arianna Bove, Futuro anteriore. Dai Quaderni rossi ai movimenti globali:
ricchezze e limiti delloperaismo italiano (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002).
8. Interview with Alisa Del Re.
9. Federici, Feminism, 340.
10. Federici, Feminism, 341
11. Alisa Del Re, Women and Welfare: Where is Jocasta? trans. Maurizia Boscagli in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics,
eds. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, (Minneapolis: U Minn. Press, 1996), 101-2.
12. Del Re, Women, 108
13. Del Re, Women, 110
14. Del Re, Women, 101
15. Sergio Bologna,A Review of StormingHeaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Strategies:
Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics, 16:2 (2003).
16. Patrick Cuninghame, For an Analysis of Autonomia: An Interview with Sergio Bologna. Mexico City, June 1995.

Anna Culbertson is a special collections librarian at San Diego State University, where she has taught
courses on using primary sources to research feminism and gender roles.