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The common strategy of these early essays — which extends throughout Federici’s work — is one of accounting: by recasting all the social activities women perform as “work,” Federici economizes them to the point of logical extremity. The point isn’t actually to put a price on perfunctory marital sex, or to max out categories of value so that their utility disintegrates; it’s to illuminate how supposedly noncapitalist activities shore up the economic system that structures and controls so much of our lives. It’s a conceptual trick to trigger political and feminist consciousness — and in the 1970s, when much of what needed revolutionizing stood in plain sight, in the form of one’s most intimate relationships, this trigger seemed enough.
But even while she relies on this flip of the switch to start a movement, Federici seems to recognize early that her ideas might suffer from conceptual ambiguity. Shifting the title from wages for to wages against housework, she reiterates that the goal is not reform but revolution: “To demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do this work. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want wages for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it.” In “Counterplanning from the Kitchen,” co-authored with Nicole Cox in 1975, Federici reiterates: “We do not say that winning a wage is the revolution. We say that it is a revolutionary strategy because it undermines the role we are assigned in the capitalist division of labor and consequently it changes the power relations within the working class in terms more favorable to us and the unity of the class.”
In the 1970s, Western women who were radicalized by feminism were women doing housework. They knew firsthand what that work was like: how strained and boring it was, what social obligations it involved, how it shored up their position in relation to men. Self-knowledge was fundamentally what made consciousness-raising — talking in a room to other women — such a powerful tool: it confirmed that your personal experience of sexism didn’t belong to you alone. It offered solidarity as well as a theoretical framework, a picture of social reality, on a scale that made the personal, as they say, political. The early work of people like Rosler and Federici — and Flo Kennedy, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Kate Millett, Valerie Solanas, and many others — allowed women, suddenly, to see their lives anew. It was like changing the lights in a room: all the furniture was the same, but, seen in a new cast, never quite the same again.
Decades later, the daughters of the predominantly white, middle-class women at the front lines of the WLM (if they had daughters) were no slaves to housework. If they valued it, they hired someone else to do it — and the people they hired were overwhelmingly women from the global south, pulled by the growing demand for domestic work in the West and pushed by structural and political forces in their home countries. This happened on such an enormous scale that an international division of labor emerged: maids, nannies, and nurses working in the US, Canada, Europe, and Saudi Arabia increasingly came from South Asia, North and East Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America, and the former Soviet countries — and still do. This was, and is, no mystery to employers, but what may seem mysterious is why these women left their countries to begin with.
Economists have known for a long time that women do a lot of work for free in times of social need. Remarkably, they have used this fact against women as part of the rationale behind massive neoliberal retrenchment: Why fund state services when you know that women will supply them for free? In the ’80s and ’90s, policy planners called this “crossing the desert,” a catchall for phenomena like maternal autostarvation (not eating and giving food to children), trekking to faraway water sources, and generally picking up the slack when state services retreat and infrastructure collapses. There’s another side to this sacrificial tendency of women, though, that doesn’t always compromise their health and well-being: during WWI, the British government discovered that income given directly to women, as opposed to men, raised the quality of life of an entire household. Later “experiments” in microfinance revealed the same. If the goal for neoliberal planners was to inflict the least damage on the tightest budget, you’d think this fact — sound enough to justify massive austerity programs — would also be sound enough to make the case for a universal income for women. In other words: wages for housework.
One answer ends in o: the first name of a man. Whether to goad Ferrante out of privacy or because they think it’s true, the Italian newspaper L’Unità has accused the novelist Domenico Starnone of penning her books. If Starnone is behind Ferrante’s work, I would like to meet him. No man I know would write so well and not take credit for it.
Olga’s youth, like that of many intelligent women, was marked by contempt for her sex. In the early days of her abandonment she recalls a figure from her childhood in Naples, a neighbor who lost her mind with grief after her husband left her. Every night the neighbor sobbed loudly. Olga’s mother and her friends whispered in pity, calling her “the poverella” — the poor thing. “The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man.” As a child Olga was disturbed, disgusted, by this woman. “A grief so gaudy began to repel me. I was eight, but I was ashamed for her.” Girls — imperious, unforgiving, not yet women — still believe in the choice to be otherwise. In high school, Olga reacts similarly to a novel assigned by her French teacher:
I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts. I was young, I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno. I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly. She, too, must have lost someone, something. And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me.
Becoming the poverella was Olga’s greatest childhood fear. That she should become this woman who despite her character, her intelligence, her work, constricts her existence to the shallow contentment of marriage — this is the betrayal. “What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life,” Olga thinks. The novel she hated in high school is the one she now begins to write in her head, though it contains touches of the “vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” she admired. For a moment she narrates her movements in the third person — then stops, fearing madness. “Don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip,” she reproaches herself. “Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He’s gone, you’re still here.”
The Days of Abandonment takes part of a long tradition of feminist writing about “crazy” women — one that runs from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, all the way to Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Often these works reimagine tragic figures of classic myth, and find in female madness an ecstatic dissolution or transcendence. Hysteria is reclaimed as an affirmation of woman unbound. These stories are fine, but not always for me; like Olga, I have too much pride to embrace the type. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante offers an alternative — one that doesn’t minimize the symbolic power of female malady but captures the double consciousness of a destroyed woman who doesn’t want to be “a woman destroyed.” Olga is, without doubt, a hysteric: she’s nervous, emotionally excessive, and prone to dissociation. But she resists this hysteria with a pride and tenacity I recognize. Becoming the poverella doesn’t mean breaking like a knick-knack in the hands of a man, as Olga once thought — it means seeking triumph in spectacular self-destruction, like Dido on the pyre. To resist the poverella is not to resist her fate, but to pass through it like a crucible: become the poverella, then become Olga again. A person with a name, not a martyr.
[...] Women of color couldn't be asked to wait for the white male capitalist class to fall before addressing the blight of racism or sexism on their lives - nor, for that matter, could men of color or white women. It was not solidarity to sweep internal issues under the rug util the real enemy's defeat. Nor was achieving a state of purity before doing politics. But a middle ground was possible. Feminism and antiracism shouldn't have to wait.
[...] Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I'd been prepared to believe. I'd have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.
Leftist men celebrated the fall of liberal male hypocrites, liberals the fall of conservative ones, conservatives and alt-rightists the fall of the liberals and leftists. [...] It seemed not to occur to them — or maybe just not to matter? — that any person, any woman, had suffered. [...] As the adage goes: in the game of patriarchy, women aren’t the other team, they’re the ball.