Family, Welfare, and the State

Written in the ten years following the publication of The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (1972) and the international organizing efforts of the Wages for Housework Campaign, Mariarosa Dalla Costas Family, Welfare, and the State reflects on the history of struggles around the New Deal in which workers initiatives forced a new relationship with the state on the terrain of social reproduction. Were the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state the saviors of the working class or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacity?