The Intersection of Gender, Sexuality and Class in the US and Italian Feminist Debate on Reproductive Rights and Labor

This Paper aims at analyzing the crucial role played by the debate on reproductive rights in Italy and in the United States in the 1970s feminist movements. In particular, I would like to emphasize how, within both the Italian and US feminist movements, gender, sexuality and class interacted in the analysis of the role played by reproductive rights and labor in the redefinition of power relationship in Western capitalist societies. In Italy, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and the Lotta Femminista Association pointed out how reproductive labor/domestic unpaid work had to be considered as an integral part of the Western capitalist development. From Italy those thoughts landed to the American shore, influencing the US feminist reflections on reproductive rights and domestic salary (Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, Selma James). In both cases, the focus on domestic work raised some questions on how gender and sexuality interacted with class and race differences in the construction of a biopolitical order. In the United States, more than in Italy, the analysis of the role of domestic unpaid work in the economic development was complicated, in fact, by the interaction between class, race, and ethnicity. As a consequence, domestic work divided white, middle-class women on the one hand and African-American and minorities women on the other. The emergence of hierarchical relationships among women, therefore, contributed to challenging the concept of sisterhood as a homogeneous identity. From this point of view, the 1970s US feminist debate could be considered as part of a global conversation on the problems of the relationship between gender equality, reproductive rights and development.