Some fifty years after its inauguration, second-wave feminists celebrated the ‘first’ annual International (Working) Women’s Day, having casually dropped the word ‘working’ as if to efface the ceremony’s origins in the Second International. Whether intentional or not, the omission betrays longstanding tensions between, or the so-called ‘unhappy marriage’ of, feminism and Marxism. Says the feminist…
Tag: feminism
Women, Witches, Work: Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch
According to this new social-sexual contract, proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction, and a communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will. Echoes of this ‘primitive appropriation’ can be heard in the concept of the common woman which in…