Hello, ladies! I hope y’all are doing well. Today is the day to start our discussion of Lecture Two “Body Politics” in the Feminist Revolt from Silvia Federici’s Beyond the Periphery of the Skin. We will spend the rest of this week discussing this chapter, so if you haven’t finished the chapter that is alright! Jump in when you are finished and ready.

Federici begins lecture two by repeating her argument from the first essay that capitalism is a system that is designed to exploit all human labor, including women’s reproductive abilities to birth more workers. Then, she gives examples that illustrate how capitalists in the past have exploited women two-fold: physical labor outside and inside the home as well as the labors of procreation and sexual service to men.

This quote I took from the second paragraph reminded me of the novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison: “Enslaved women used their knowledge of contraception herbs to prevent conception and even killed their children at birth to ensure that they would not be enslaved.”

After Federici highlights some of the ways women have fought against the extreme violence and exploitation of our bodies and our reproductive abilities, she then discusses in detail how feminists used the concept of body politics to organize and fight for women’s rights on a mass scale in the 1970’s. From my personal understanding of what Federici wrote, I came to the conclusion that the concept of body politics gave women a way to explain that sex, procreation, giving birth, abortion, abuse from men individually and systematically, rape, etc. were not just private issues happening on a small scale, but were also public issues happening on a massive scale. Since male dominated governments pass extreme and thorough regulations on women and our reproductive abilities, that makes them political matters of utmost importance.

It is also explained that for women it is much more difficult to confront and overcome capitalist exploitation than it is for men. Men are able to face it collectively. Women, however, fight that exploitation individually because we are constantly around our oppressors, men as a class and men we know individually.

In the fifth paragraph, Federici argues that the politics of the feminist movement focused on the struggle for abortion and the rejection of feminine norms that are pushed on all women.

In the seventh paragraph, Federici writes, “The limit of the struggle for abortion was that it did not seek to enable all women to have the children we wanted.” She argues it was a political mistake of the mainstream feminist movement to focus mainly on women obtaining and maintaining the right to have abortions. According to Federici, the feminist movement did not take changing the material conditions of women’s lives as seriously as the struggle to have legal and safe abortion available for all women.

From my understanding of what Federici wrote in the eighth paragraph, the material conditions of women’s lives must mean being financially secure, independent from male influence. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children purpose and why it ultimately failed are explained here.

This quote comes from the eleventh paragraph: “To say that it is a structural problem means that women are set up to be sexually abused by the economic conditions in which the majority of us are forced to live!” I was so frustrated with Federici in this paragraph. She doesn’t name or place blame on who created the structural problems which gave rise to the economic conditions which we as women are focused to live in. Who created that structural problem that goes back thousands of years? Men as a class created it; they created the inequality between the sexes! Federici doesn’t even name the core problem, just an effect of the core problem.

In the twelfth paragraph, she also says it would be “devaluing and blaming the women who practice it” if we single “out sex work as especially degrading.” I disagree with her strongly, but what she wrote also reminded me of the Nordic Model and made me want to research more about it.

From what I read in the fourteenth paragraph to the final paragraph, I believe Federici thinks being a woman is an identity that can change over time to mean different things. I know what we are as women (adult human females) hasn’t changed over time, but what is expected of us as women by our culture and society has changed over time.

By reading the entirety of Federici’s second lecture, I became more aware of history I had never heard talked about before, but towards the end of this lecture I just became more and more confused about how she came to conclusions she did on prostitution, the concept of women being a fluid identity, and why misogynistic structural problems exist in the first place.