The Work of Love The Role of Unpaid Housework as a Condition of Poverty and Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century

The translation into English of this text first published in Italian in 1978 and which has already appeared in 1991 in Japanese (A no rodou, Tokyo, Impact Shuppankai), comes not by chance, at a political moment when the debate over housework that is work of production and reproduction of labor power, the debate about violence have re-emerged with particular vigor at the international level.This feminist classic poses, at the centre of its analysis, the relationship which exists between physical (and specifically sexual) violence against women, and the role of women in performing housework, to which they remain primarily assigned in the capitalist division of labour (and which seeks to define all of their existence). It is brought out here that the first level of violence is in the labor relation itself which the woman lives to the extent that she is commanded to perform unpaid work in a wage economy. And the disciplinary function which physical violence assumes with regard to her is explained in connection to the peculiarity of such a work relationship.Reproduction work and violence constitute the two extremes of a relation which emerge as a determining one, not only with respect to the origins of capitalism to give substance and form to what in its system of production would be defined as the sphere of reproduction, but as a constant in its history and one featured in progressively dramatic dimensions in recent times.