Did the New Deal save the working class or destroy its ability to struggle for the well-being of all?
“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
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.
About the Author
Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an influential feminist author and activist, whose seminal book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, coauthored with Selma James, is a keystone of social reproductive theory and the Wages for Housework campaign.
Silvia Federici (Preface) 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 (Foreword) is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine, a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, and a member of the translation collective Territorio de Ideas. She is a long-time translator of and participant in feminist movements in Latin America.