Reading through the Petroleuse Press pamphlets. I am collecting the moments where women’s role in various struggle is mentioned. I am working on a spreadsheet.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma Jones, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community:
When women are deprived of wide experience of organizing and planning collectively industrial and other mass struggles, they are denied a basic source of education, the experience of social revolt. And this experience is primarily the experience of learning your own capacities, that is, your power, and the capacities, the power, of your class. Thus the isolation from which women have suffered has confirmed to society and to themselves the myth of female incapacity. p. 12
Claire Fontaine, Human Strike Within the Field of the Libidinal Economy:
In her extensive research around the strike in the nineteenth century, Michelle Perrot talks about the birth of a sort of “sentimental strike” in the year 1890. May 4th of that year, in the newspaper from Lille entitled Le Cri du Travailleur (the worker’s scream) we can read that “the strikers didn’t give any reason for their interruption of the work…just that they wanted to do the same thing than the others.” In this type of movement, young people and women start to play a very important role, Perrot says. In a small village called Vienne militant women encouraged their female comrades, “Let’s not bear this miserable condition any longer. Let’s upraise, let’s claim our rights, let’s fight for a more honourable place. Let’s dare to say to our masters: we are just like you, made our of flesh and bones, we should live happy and free through our work.”
Amandine Vernet.
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a new obsession, as I do this, the moments where love, make love, love-force, sexuality, etc. shows up…
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma Jones, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community:
To make love and to refuse night work to make love, is in the interest of the class. p. 21
Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labor power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment. Sexuality after all is the most social of expressions, the deepest human connection. It is in that sense the dissolution of autonomy. The working class organizes as a class to transcend itself as a class; within that class we organize autonomously to create the basis to transcend autonomy. p. 26
Claire Fontaine, Human Strike Within the Field of the Libidinal Economy:
Lisa Cigarini and Luisa Muraro specified in 1992 in a text called Politics and political practice, “We don’t want to separate politics from culture, love and work and we can’t find any criterion for doing so. A politics of this kind, a separated one, we wouldn’t like it and we wouldn’t know what to do with it.” p. 5
The struggle-force, like the love-force, must be protected and regenerated. It’s a resource that doesn’t renovate itself automatically and needs collective conditions for its creation.
and then quoting Federici’s Wages Against Housework: Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife. p. 8 (in Fontaine)
