"Reduced to its biological preconditions, the insular structure of the producer’s family announces and fortifies the rupture of the human community of producers. In this sense, the family is essential for the ideological reproduction of capitalist society as a whole. Yet, in the course of reinforcing the alienated relations crystallized in the commodity, the family—and more specifically, the woman—must also respond to real human needs. “Bourgeois civilization has reduced social relations to the cash nexus. They have become emptied of affection.” With due consideration of the factor of sublimation, the human need for affective bonds cannot be eliminated beyond an absolute minimum. If these relations were divested of all immediate expression, human beings could hardly survive the desperate struggle for existence. Love and interpersonal emotions in general are needs which cease to demand at least minimal fulfillment only when human beings have long since ceased to be human. In capitalist society, the woman has the special mission of being both reservoir and receptacle for a whole range of human emotions otherwise banished from society. This mission is directly related to her confinement, in labor, to the production of use-values."
—
Angela Davis, “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation”
Angela Davis, y’all. If more Feminists read Angela Davis, Feminism wouldn’t annoy me so much. This was in 1977, when she was in jail.
Anyway, this passage may be dense and hard to get through but last night it almost made me cry because I’ve been trying to articulate something like this, about the work that love and feelings are, the way that work becomes women’s work too often, the way people can simultaneously shut us out and beg us for help. The way I take all this work on myself, and the way, lately, I’ve learned to let a few people help me with it.
This whole essay…it’s brilliant.
(via champagnecandy)
(via guerrillamamamedicine)
