A superb introduction to the prospect of opening our idea of the working class to include non-waged workers, specifically women who work in the home. A simple idea with profound revolutionary consequences. If the workers of the world are not all in the factory, and are not all men, where does that leave us?
In recent years there has been both a renewed interest in theories of social reproduction and an explosion of womens struggles and strikes across the world. This collection offers both historical and contemporary Marxist feminist analysis of how the reproduction of labor and life functions under capitalism, using Dalla Costas insights into the vibrant and combative womens movement that emerged in Italy and across the world in the early 1970s. Since the first publication of Women and the Subversion of the Community in 1972, Dalla Costa has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought. Her detailed research and provocative thinking deepens our understanding of the role of womens struggles for autonomy and control over their bodies and labor.
"In this provocative work full of intriguing female characters from tattoo history, Margot Mifflin makes a persuasive case for the tattooed woman as an emblem of female self-expression." —Susan Faludi Bodies of Subversion is the first history of women’s tattoo art, providing a fascinating excursion to a subculture that dates back into the nineteenth-century and includes many never-before-seen photos of tattooed women from the last century. Author Margot Mifflin notes that women’s interest in tattoos surged in the suffragist 20s and the feminist 70s. She chronicles: * Breast cancer survivors of the 90s who tattoo their mastectomy scars as an alternative to reconstructive surgery or prosthetics. * The parallel rise of tattooing and cosmetic surgery during the 80s when women tattooists became soul doctors to a nation afflicted with body anxieties. * Maud Wagner, the first known woman tattooist, who in 1904 traded a date with her tattooist husband-to-be for an apprenticeship. * Victorian society women who wore tattoos as custom couture, including Winston Churchill’s mother, who wore a serpent on her wrist. * Nineteeth-century sideshow attractions who created fantastic abduction tales in which they claimed to have been forcibly tattooed. “In Bodies of Subversion, Margot Mifflin insightfully chronicles the saga of skin as signage. Through compelling anecdotes and cleverly astute analysis, she shows and tells us new histories about women, tattoos, public pictures, and private parts. It’s an indelible account of an indelible piece of cultural history.” —Barbara Kruger, artist
This collection brings together key texts and previously unavailable essays of the influential Italian feminist author and activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In recent years there has been both a renewed interest in theories of social reproduction and an explosion of women’s struggles and strikes across the world. The collection offers both historical and contemporary Marxist feminist analysis of how the reproduction of labour and life functions under capitalism. Dalla Costa’s essays, speeches, and political interventions provide insight into the vibrant and combative women’s movement that emerged in Italy and across the world in the early 1970s. Since the publication of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), Dalla Costa has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought in a wide range of anticapitalist and feminist social movements. Her detailed research and provocative thinking deepens our understanding of the role of women’s struggles for autonomy and control over their bodies and labour. These essays provide critical and relevant ideas for anticapitalists, antiracists, and feminists who are attempting to build counterpower in the age of austerity.
With intellectual reference points that include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray, this is one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years and is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought.
At the time of its publication, a woman's sexual desire was thought to be muted, even nonexistent. Sexual pursuits of any kind were thought to be a man's game, left for a woman to indulge or deny. The novel and its author so obviously challenges the standing ideas of what desire looks like and who it can come from. The main protagonist disguises herself as four different women in her efforts to understand how a man may interact with each individual persona. She is intrigued by the men at the theater and the attention they pay to the prostitutes there, decides to pretend being a prostitute herself. Disguised, she especially enjoys talking with Beauplaisir, whom she has encountered before, though previously constrained by her social status's formalities. He, not recognizing her, and believing her favors to be for sale, asks to meet her. She demurs and puts him off until the next evening.... The story explores a variety of themes, almost none of which come without literary dispute and controversy. The protagonist's game of disguise touches on everything from gender roles, to identity, to sexual desire.
This book vividly evokes radical women's integral roles within France's revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune. It demonstrates the breadth, depth, and impact of communard feminist socialisms far beyond the 1871 insurrection. Examining the period from the early 1860s through that century's end, Carolyn J. Eichner investigates how radical women developed critiques of gender, class, and religious hierarchies in the immediate pre-Commune era, how these ideologies emerged as a plurality of feminist socialisms within the revolution, and how these varied politics subsequently affected fin-de-sià ̈cle gender and class relations. She focuses on three distinctly dissimilar revolutionary women leaders who exemplify multiple competing and complementary feminist socialisms: Andre Leo, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Paule Mink. Leo theorized and educated through journalism and fiction, Dmitrieff organized institutional power for working-class women, and Mink agitated crowds to create an egalitarian socialist world. Each woman forged her own path to gender equality and social justice.
An updated edition of the Sunday Times Bestseller Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template. A year on since the advent of #metoo, Beard looks at how the discussions have moved on during this time, and how that intersects with issues of rape and consent, and the stories men tell themselves to support their actions. In trademark Beardian style, using examples ancient and modern, Beard argues, 'it's time for change - and now!' From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.