A presentation featuring Leopoldina Fortunati and Arlen Austin based on the archives of Lotta Femminista and Fortunati’s subsequent projects. As the primary feminist movement to emerge within the workerist culture of the Triveneto region of northeastern Italy in the 1970s, Lotta Femminista would form a basis for the international Wages for Housework movement internationally. We examine the texts and context of the group in relation to operaismo, factions of autonomia, the emergent global feminist movement and broader context of post-war anti-colonial thought and struggles, with particular focus on Leopoldina Fortunati’s essay “La famiglia verso la ricostruzione”; an essential study from 1975 that has remained untranslated and largely overlooked in an anglo-American context. To facilitate this examination, participants were sent a dossier of translations of movement ephemera from the newly digitized archives of the group’s co-founder Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the Biblioteca Civica di Padova in the days preceding the event.
Leopoldina Fortunati’s works occupy a central position in the development of Marxist feminism, feminist sociology and media theory. Throughout feminist struggles of the 1970s, she deeply engaged with the tradition of operaismo and other currents of the Italian extra-parliamentary left, interrogating the implications of their neglect of issues considered marginal to the core contradictions of labor and capital: the gendered division of labor and status of women as both ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ workers, in particular.
Arlen Austin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University whose research addresses the relation between post-war social movements and mass media. In 2016 he co-edited a collection with Silvia Federici of materials from the Wages for Housework movement in the United States and is currently working in collaboration with Sara Colontuono on a project to translate Leopoldina Fortunati’s ‘L’arcano della riproduzione. Casalinghe, prostitute, operai e capitale’.
00:00 – Introduction by Pagliacci Rossi
00:50 – Presentation by Arlen Austin
38:15 – Discussion with Leopoldina Fortunati
pagliacci rossi 