The door to the garden: feminism

Operaismo - Mariarosa Dalla Costa

and

A paper on the history of Italian Marxist feminism given at a seminar on Operaismo ('workerism') held
in Rome, June 2002 (3,000 words).
In the 1970s Italian feminism had two sides: one was self-awareness, the other was the operaista
feminism of Lotta Femminista (Feminist struggle) that eventually turned into groups and committees
for wages for housework campaigns. Lotta Femminista was militant at the national level and
particularly strong in regions such as Veneto and Emilia, whilst weaker in big cities such as Milan
where self-awareness prevailed and Rome where both groups existed. We had even gone as far as
Gela in Sicily where we had another group. Above all, since 1972, when we founded the International
Feminist Collective to promote debate and actions in different countries, we had a large international
network, particularly active in the US and Canada as well as some European countries, such as Great
Britain and Germany, so we often held international conferences to organise our actions in concert.
Afro-American women were part of this circuit. They used to say that the strong Italian presence in the
circuit had made it conceivable for them to take part in it, because Italian women had little power (a
kind of Third World women in their eyes). Had the network only included white American or English
women, they would have not taken part. I remember that since the beginning of the 70s I travelled
around the United States and some Canadian metropolises to carry our discourse on domestic labour
from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast (and I was robbed of the little money I had in El Paso). The flights
and coach travels were paid by American comrades who put $1 each towards getting me to speak to
them. Simultaneously, some universities, where The power of women and the subversion of the
community was adopted in the reading list as a feminist classic, invited me to conferences. So I got
some money from this too for the travel. A New York University in 73 offered me some teaching and
in order to formalise the appointment got me to sustain an exam interview with some lecturer so that I
could start the course as soon as the academic year began. But, once back in Italy, I wrote to them that I
intended to give up the post. I could not conceive of abandoning political work (Lotta Femminista was
a small group that I could not abandon to its own fate). They did not understand my reply and got very
angry. But all life choices were always subordinated to this work and political research. In this sense
too, Potere Operaio had marked me as a militant.

How did some womens departure from Potere Operaio give birth to Lotta Femminista? As far as Im
concerned, I must say that when I joined Potere Operaio an older comrade, Teresa R., asked me: Why
did you join? and without even waiting for my answer she said: A need for justice, wasnt it? Yes I
said. She had guessed right and the reply seemed obvious to me too. If I got asked why I left Potere
Operaio in June 1971 and gathered a group of women that was to become the first nucleus of Lotta
Femminista, I would reply: 'As a matetr of dignity. At the time, the relation between man and woman
was, particularly in the environment of intellectual comrades, not sufficiently dignifying for me. Thus, I
presented to these comrades a pamphlet that was to become Potere femminile e sovversione sociale: a
small book that the international feminist movement adopted immediately and translated in six
languages. I gave birth to the first act of autonomous organisation of women within the operaista trend,
but others soon joined us from other groups and from no groups too because obviously things between
men and women were not going well in general.
The second reason was the need for what was then called a process of self-identification. Women no
longer defined themselves, the autonomous process of construction of their identity, through the eyes
and expectation of a man. I remember an American document that circulated a lot, strangely entitled:
Woman identifies woman, but many others were on that wavelength. After salvaging our dignity and
identity (more psychically than temporally), the reasoning and reflection began on what the
mischievous source of our discomfort was, the origin of women exploitation and oppression. We
identified it in reproductive labour, free housework in so far as it is ascribed to women in the capitalist
sexual division of labour. Some of us, however, driven by the need to go further back in the study of the
origins of female misfortunes, also researched into prehistoric man-woman relations, matriarchy and
patriarchy, and these studies are there, but the operaista urgent task was to have an analysis that could
be useful to an intervention so we concentrated on capitalism. We revealed the arcane of reproduction
by analysing how production and reproduction of the labour force constituted the hidden phase of
capitalist accumulation. We revealed the arcane but not the secret.
Because I have to say that any reproduction worth this name has its own secret. We expanded the
concept of class to include women as producers and reproducers of labour force. We fundamentally
looked at proletarian and working class women. Behind the closed doors of the home, women provided
a labour that had no retribution nor labour time nor holidays, whilst actually almost occupying the
entire time of their lives. This labour consisted of material and immaterial tasks and conditioned all
their choices. We defined the family as the place of production in so far as it daily produced and
reproduced the labour-force; until then the others had claimed and still claimed that the family was a
place of mere consumption or production of use values or mere realm of reserve labour force. We said
that external labour neither eliminated nor substantially modified domestic labour, it rather added a
second master to the first represented by the very work of the husband. Therefore, emancipation
through external work was never our objective. Nor was it equality with men. To whom should we have
been equal, when we were burdened by a labour that man would not do? Moreover, at a time when the
discourse on refusal of work was so strong, why should we try and fight for something men were
attempting to refute?

In the postfordist society of those years, we had revealed that production roughly revolved around two
poles: the factory and the house; and that woman, in so far as she produced, through her labour, the
necessary commodity for capitalism, i.e. labour force itself, she had in her hands a fundamental lever of
social power: she could refuse to produce. In this sense, she constitutes the central figure of social
subversion as we used to call it at the time, i.e. of a struggle that could lead to a radical transformation
of society. I have to say that despite the deep transformations that later occurred in the mode of
production, this cornerstone of feminine responsibility in the mode of production and the importance of
the labour of reproduction remain unresolved problems, thus reproducing the persistency of a
fundamental binarism.
But binarism, above the entire masculine and the feminine, is in my view inscribed in the universe.
Maybe we ought to better observe it to avoid regarding it so easily as on the path of extinction whilst
we attempt to make it less unequal. As I said above, for our interventionist activity we referred to
proletarian and working class women. But reproductive labour represented at a generalised level the
founding element of the feminine condition. Moving against this condition entailed first of all the
setting off of an attitude of refusal of such labour in so far as it was free and primarily ascribed to
women. It entailed opening up negotiations with the state so that a quote of produced wealth could be
destined to this labour, both in the form of money and services, so that time could be dedicated to it,
rather than pretending that it was an optional task easily combinable with external work. The refusal
obviously concerned both material and immaterial reproduction. Women were coming to substitute to a
femininity made of labour for others, of enormous availability to live as a function of someone else, a
femininity where all this was reduced to give room to a reproduction for themselves. The theme of
domestic labour was tightly intertwined with that of sexuality that had been made into pro-creationreproductive function. Thus the struggles on labour, sexuality, health and violence were extremely
intertwined. Some comrades carried out very insightful studies on this. At stake in reproductive labour
were bodies and with them also relations and emotions. We fought in the quartieri (good struggles for
housing, which was our first struggle and the only one for which we have no records), and in hospitals
and schools and factories. In Padua on the 5th of June 73 we set off the struggle for abortion by
turning a trial against a woman who had aborted into a political mobilisation. After years of activism
with the whole of the Feminist Movement we obtained in 1978 the 194 law that recognised the right to
voluntarily interrupt pregnancy with medical assistance. In 1974 in Padua we organised the centre for
womens health, a womens self organised counselling centre, the first in Italy. The experience of the
self managed centres, which opened up in the rest of the country, aimed to be an exemplary propulsive
moment in the reframing of the relation between women and medicine, in particular in the realm of
gynaecology, given the imminence of the law that instituted family planning centres in 1975, law 405.
In the hospitals, in the obstetric wards known at the time as maternity lagers we carried out great
struggles (I recall the ones in Padua, Ferrara and Milan). In the factory, the Solari struggle was
exemplary and used as a model for others, where the workers demanded that the master provided them
with paid time and medical services for gynaecological routine checks without having to lose days of
work nor give up looking after themselves. Of particular importance was a struggle in a village in
Veneto against a factory that polluted the airs and waters of the area.
As I was saying above, we had national and international organisational groups but what was striking
was the level of extreme poverty of the means with which all this activity was carried out. The means
of communication were mainly the leaflet and the paper, called Le operaie della casa (the house
workers). Such an exasperated and totalising militancy, that left no room for anything else in our lives,
was surely derived from the experience of Potere Operaio, but I think that at the time in other groups
the situation was similar to ours. This was obviously even harder for those of us who had a leading
role. And here it is important to underline something else. Towards the end of the decade we were
exhausted by that kind of life and activism. All our margins of reproduction had been eroded,

notoriously narrower than those men, comrades included, enjoyed.

After about ten years, the body of women - even militants have a body, much as it is often denied - felt
that the biological clock was marking other deadlines. For instance those women who wanted to have a
child, and it was already late, had to decide with whom and in which life environment to raise him
[sic]. As social transformation was not at the same level of the new feminine individuality, the process
of surrendering began. Many had to give up. How much and how depended on the money these women
had at their disposal, the free time they had and the kind of job they had to do to get that money. The
old problem of women's lack of money, on which we had fought so hard, revealed to us once again,
especially in that phase, all of its dramatic dimensions.
Close to that moment of crisis, repression arrived and with it - especially by left female sociologists and
historians - total cancellation of our feminist current, its struggles and its actions. Polda and I, however,
had taken care to document - usually sacrificing Saturday, Sunday and the other bank holidays - all the
moments of struggle and mobilisation, as well as the issues that had been raised in the debate, in
organising pamphlets, collections of papers and in the newspaper. And that material is still there. In the
80s, years of repression and normalisation, a fundamentally cultural brand of feminism would replace
those great struggles and those demands, and this had the function of controlling and selecting women's
demands and voices. We were indicted. In a very tiresome way, given the circumstances, some
historical and theoretical works were completed by some comrades; works that had originally been
conceived in the 70s as part of a comprehensive projects which could no longer be realised. To say that
those works' circulation was obstructed would be to use an euphemism. They basically disappeared
(except from the moment of existence consituted by my university teaching). They were submerged by
an adverse political will and by a profusion of studies on the feminine condition from a different
perspective. Our production was also largely expropriated from us and domesticated. On the study of
the feminine condition, institutions used all their power, funding was redirected, networks and research
were carefully channelled. Fictitious institutions and initiatives were set up. The problem of
reproductive work was not addressed. The discourse about the retribution of domestic work was also
indicted. That question would have found a very partial and false resolution with immigrant labour
power, which in turn leaves behind tragedies of reproduction (for instance young children who, having
stayed behind with their grandparents, no longer want to join their unknown parents, and the
grandparents who go mad if, having remained alone with the grandchildren, then see their sons coming
back to take them away from them for good).
At some point in the dark 80s, when I had to face some life problems - militants also have a life, much
as it is repressed - I felt the need to reflect, from other points of view, on the previous period, and
subject that period to the unfailing test of emotions. I had to admit that neither in my militancy in
Potere operaio, nor in that in the Feminist movement, I ever had a moment, I mean even a single
moment, of joy. I only remembered an enormous, immense fatigue. [...]
Why? As regards the feminist movement I have tried to take everything into account, evry the
melancholy caused by the break with my prior belonging. After all, as I said before, I was born and
grew up in Potere operaio, so I was weary of the total separation from that debate. As a result of which
male comrades, who knew nothing about the development of our discourse on the themes that were
central to us, were left behind, and when they met us they could only give us answers at the level of
barbarians. At the same time, we were left in the dark about their debate while, as I was saying, we
would have needed to confront our discussions on some of the questions that were becoming
increasingly important. I, at least, felt this need. So, it would have been necessary, even in our
autonomy, to have moments of exchange. I don't know if and how much this would have been possible
in those years in Italy, but I have never had any problem in discussing with my American comrades of
the group Midnight Notes, for instance. Though that was a group that had been formed as a result of the

emergence, in the US, of WfH (Wages for Housework) groups, and that had reoriented its debate about,
and approach to, the reading of capitalist development on the basis of the centrality given to
reproduction work. So they were scholars who, in their formation, had digested our feminist analysis,
which they mastered very well. These are comrades who have continued until today to produce very
insteresting studies and significant political initiatives.
The fact is that as I was trying to find the cause of my lack of joy, I had to admit that the context within
which I had struggled in the 70s, in front of the factories or in the houses - basically the coupling timemoney [...] constituted a ground which had failed to move my deep currents in order to produce fluxes
of energy. This is the reason why I had felt no joy [...]. What I missed was something which could
positively generate emotions, a strong imaginary, which could open different scenarios. I needed to
encounter other questions and new subjects, who desired and were able to effectively think a different
world. Therefore for part of the 80s I continued to wander around, from room to room, in the house of
reproduction. Until, at a certain point, I saw the door to the garden, I saw the issue of the earth.
[enter Vandana Shiva and eco-feminism]