Women and the Subversion of the Community by Dalla Costa Mariarosa; Barbagallo Camille; Cleaver Harry

Author:Dalla Costa, Mariarosa; Barbagallo, Camille; Cleaver, Harry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Family and Welfare in the New Deal (1985)

Translated by Richard Braude

The Padua WFH committee’s musical group performs at a March 8, 1974, demonstration for wages for housework in Mestre, Venice.

“Was the New Deal a success or a failure?” Regarding this much debated question, I maintain that there was no doubt a crucially positive aspect to the New Deal in the United States. I see the New Deal as an important test case for the functioning of the modern family in times of crisis. One in which the woman—as housewife and administrator of the wage, primarily responsible for the good running of the family, but also as an external laborer, and as a laborer involved in unregulated work—must provide the family with sustenance in a context of overarching male unemployment, market instability, and the establishment of social security/assistance procedures.1

In the 1930s, female labor power—via processes that had unfolded over the preceding decades and involved a radical transformation in the family structure—was asked to serve a new function, a function that was central to the emergence of a new system of reproduction of the labor force. This emerged, on the one hand, through the establishment of ‘collective bargaining’ and the state’s new role in relation to the economy in order to ensure the size and increase of the wage and, on the other hand, through the establishment of social security to guarantee the reintegration of labor power during periods when it is not directly involved in the productive cycle—including policies for the elderly and the unemployed—or when it could not, in any case, be employed, for example, sick pay and, in a different way, aid to families with dependent children.

The spread of unemployment, which increasingly appeared to be connected with the new forms of the cycle of accumulation, gradually made the political establishment aware of the necessity to invest in human capital in order to regulate the market and raise labor productivity. The new role demanded of public funding and the acceptance of budget deficit were the political establishment’s response to the necessity to support the reproduction of labor power and a closer connection of its forms to those of the production of commodities. In this sense, we can say that in the 1930s the most progressive nineteenth-century recommendations advanced by many authors matured, especially Marshall’s proposed investment in the working class, finding concrete expression in the attempt to create a plan on both productive and social levels. By 1914, Ford’s “Five-Dollar Day” wage policy2 already guaranteed workers in the most advanced sectors the possibility to support a wife and have a house.

After the crisis of 1929, this ‘reproductive form’ of labor power had to be guaranteed on a much wider social basis, effectively a ‘general’ one, and the necessity to invest in human capital so as to raise and sustain its reproduction beyond the cyclical oscillation of employment opportunities became increasingly clear. The new social security/assistance measures formed the basic response. Yet within this framework of radically transformed social reproduction (the

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