Family, Welfare, and the State : Between Progressivism and the New Deal

“Dalla Costa shows that with the New Deal, 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.”—Silvia Federici

In a groundbreaking study, Family, Welfare, and the State offers a comprehensive reading of the welfare system through the dynamics of women's resistance and class struggle. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a key figure in the International Wages for Housework campaigns, highlights how the New Deal concretized the central role of women and the family in ensuring the capacity for economic growth and the reproduction of labor power necessary for the maintenance of capitalism. As social movements fight for and secure government relief for mass unemployment in a way not seen for decades, it is essential to understand how the deals—especially governing race, class, and family relations—struck by earlier generations of activists have shaped our world. A new foreword makes clear Dalla Costa’s importance to understanding the functioning of social reproduction in a world ravaged by COVID-19.

MARIAROSA DALLA COSTA is a feminist author and activist, whose seminal book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, coauthored with Selma James, has been translated into six languages. Dalla Costa’s work is a keystone of social reproductive theory and the Wages for Housework campaign and she has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought in a wide range of anticapitalist movements. She is also, with Monica Chilese, the author of Our Mother Ocean: Enclosure, Commons, and the Global Fishermen’s Movement.

SILVIA FEDERICI, a lauded feminist, Marxist theorist, is the author of Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero and editor of Feminicide and Global Accumulation among other books.

LIZ MASON-DEESE is an editor of Viewpoint Magazine and a longtime participant in and translator for women’s movements in Latin America.