“• • • The role of housewife, beyond whose isolation
is hidden social labour, must be destroyed. But our
alternatives are strictly defined. Up to now, the
myth of female incapacity, rooted in this isolated
woman dependent on someone else’s wage and
therefore shaped by someone else’s conscious-
ness, has been broken only by one action: the
woman getting her own wage, breaking the back of
personal economic dependence, making her own
independent experience with the world outside the
home, performing social labour in a socialised
structure, whether the factory or the office, and
initiating there her own forms of social rebellion
along with the traditional forms of the class. The
advent of the women’s movement is a rejection of
this alternative.
Capital itself is seizing upon the same impetus
which created a movement - the rejection by millions
of women of woman’ s traditional place to
recompose the work force with increasing numbers
of women. The movement can only develop in
opposition to this. It poses by its very existence
and must pose with increasing articulation in action
that women refuse the myth of liberation
through work.
For we have worked enough. We have chopped billions
of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes,
scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words,
wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of
nappies (diapers - ed.), by hand and in machines.
Every time they have ‘let us in’ to some traditionally
male enclave, it was to find for us a new
level of exploitation.”
—
WOMEN AND THE SUBVERSION OF THE COMMUNITY
by Mariarosa Dalla Costa (& Selma James [???])
(Source: wordswillnever)
