Hi 👉🏽👈🏽 I distinctly feel like the least smart Girl in the room here... which means I'm in the right room.

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First... oh my. The drama. The histrionics.
And not even just drama and histrionics, but, dramatic histrionic claims that are just patently, laughably false. This is not the strongest way to open, especially not to open something labeled by the author as a 'lecture'.

This, for instance...

Capitalism's old dream to lengthen the workday, reduce wages, and maximize the unpaid labor accumulated is fully realized today in the United States.

oof...gurl maybe do a bit of fact-checking next time?

Just as one pointed counterexample. In the steel industry of the late XIXth and early XXth centuries, the standard work week was 84 hours—twelve hours a day, seven days a week—of hard graft, ALL of which was intensely physical with constant threats to life and limb (especially for sleep-deprived workers). Oh, and, there was nothing resembling today's health insurance or worker's comp; in the case of a work injury, you'd just be crippled and unable to work, and you and your family would be out on the streets hoping to survive on alms from passersby or possibly support from a church community... maybe.

Just in case any of You are thinking this was some easy-peasy, chill 84 hour work week where at least everybody worked the SAME 12 hour grind every damn day... hahah #nope. It worked like this:
• 7 days (Mon-Sun) of midnight to noon,
• 7 days (Mon-Sun) of noon to midnight.
Seven days is pretty much the exact amount of time that the average person's circadian rhythms need to adjust to a new time zone (or to newly constituted shiftwork)—so, these workers existed in a perpetual state of brain fog and unpredictable potential sleep attacks, with their day flipped on its head yet again as soon as they had a chance of having acclimated to the schedule. In perpetuity.
And, yes, You'll notice that, once every 2 weeks (at the end of the second bullet point above, going back to the first one), there's a 24 hour shift running from noon Sunday to noon Monday.

Steelworkers in the 1900s worked 12 hours a day, 363 days a year (364 days in leap years). Following the lead of robber baron Andrew Carnegie, the mills gave workers exactly 2 days off per year: January 1st and July 4th.

This kind of literally endless drudgery was exemplified by the U.S. steel industry, but certainly not limited to it—other industries were just as brutal (and remember that immigrants were streaming into the U.S. from Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Ukraine, and newly annexed parts of the brand-new Italy, among other things; meaning, inter alia, that work conditions in those places—where feudalism had died hard, and where capitalism was a relative upstart—must have somehow been incomparably, almost unfathomably, WORSE, to the point where that 84 hour Carnegie mill work schedule was still worth abandoning everything about the only place, life and culture that those Central Europeans had ever known.
Here's a more comprehensive survey of labor conditions across the U.S. steel industry in the Gilded Age (🇬🇧: mid-late Victorian + Edwardian eras)—lest anyone think I'm just cherry-picking the single most notorious anecData point I have. Spoiler: It was ALL that bad.

Other industries were just as brutal and unimaginably (by today's standards) exploitative... including primarily Female jobs in the garment industry, which operated on similarly inhumane constantly-fucking-with-you shift schedules, in buildings that were literal death traps in case of fire.

And please also note, when workers went on strike in 1900, the 'standard' response was to send trigger-happy state police or other enforcers who were all too quick to open fire. Going on strike back then carried about a 50/50 probability that you'd be dead by the end of the week.

BUT NOOOOO obviously labor conditions are worse, and we have less time overall, in 2024 than ever.🙄

I generally try to look for 'learning moments' from almost any interaction or reading with anybody anywhere—but, an opening full of claims THIS unserious and THIS obviously false, REALLY tested that tenet of the lipsy values system™.
but anws moving on.

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Life [...] for the majority of people, and Women above all [...] is nasty, brutish, and short.

Another completely unhinged, honestly fucking ridiculous hot take.
It is true that U.S. life expectancies hit an all-time peak between 2012 and 2014, and have been going down since then—but that's "down" by not even 1 full year between 2014-2019, followed by a 2 year drop during COVID to where we are now (about 2.7 years below peak—at 77.43 years overall average for the USA).
Still within three years of the longest human life expectancies in the entire history of the world (and we're still waiting to see whether the COVID drop corrects itself, as has happened for far deadlier pandemics).... definitely short, right? plus nasty and brutish obvi.

And what a remarkable thing to claim about Women—who are still outliving men by more than half a decade on average (80.2 years vs 74.8), as They alws have literally everywhere in the western world across the entire duration of modern recordkeeping.

For a Feminist writer—who presumably has the whole smorgasbord of REAL oppressions of Women readily available to choose from—to boldly (...recklessly) lead with patently false statistical claims that x < y ("life is ... short ... especially for Women") when literally everybody and their Sister's ex-goldfish's old drycleaner's boyfriend knows that x > y, is ... just stupefying. I'm reading the first two pages and getting that eerie premonition that there's a double agent in Our midst here, purposely writing outrageous and easily disproved., um, stuff to try and beclown feminism—in about the same way as those false-flag "neo-Nazi" cosplayers turned up at the Kellie-Jay Keen rallies in Australia but haven't existed at all before or since.

(This premonition was soothed a bit by the later pages here, but... just wow? Wow.
I flipped over to the About The Author page, hoping to discover some nugget of personal history [or lack thereof, more like] that might explain this all—thinking I might discover that She was an ivory-tower lifer who'd whiled away all of Her days without ever leaving her little rural Midwest college town—and... well, boy was I wrong😅 and it turns out that Ms. Federici has lived decades in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in NYC. So, highly educated AND exceptionally well traveled.
And now everything makes even less sense than before.)

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Suicides are growing among all sectors of the population, Women included.

True statement in the broad-brush sense, in that suicides did indeed proliferate (by 37%} from 2000 to 2017.

Still an interesting claim to put forward in a book published 2020—after a remarkable turnaround and then a drop in suicide rates from 2018-2020, which the author ignores (or doesn't know about).
In fact, a steeper drop than the worrying gains that preceded it. (5 percentage points over 2 years is a substantially faster rate of change than 37 percentage points over 17 or 18 years).

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The despairing picture painted for old folks is (for the first time in this chapter) absolutely true. The U.S. has alws been a youth-worshipping culture with much less respect for, ahem, lived experience than almost any other culture in the world (only Australia comes to mind as being obviously even more youth-obsessed than the U.S.), so that's a centrally structural problem that is not going away anytime real soon—just as middle-aged and younger U.S. families aren't about to pull their grandparents out of nursing homes and into their spare bedrooms, as Italians notably do, anytime soon.

So, some truth. The rest of that paragraph is mostly accurate, too (with one sorta nit-pick: the author says suicides need to be "added to" a list of supposedly "other" factors that include gun violence—which neglects the fact that ca. 40% of American gun deaths ARE suicides.)

And yet... this just might be the single weakest opening to any persuasive piece I've read in many years—because nearly every single individual statistic / measure of life quality the author mentions (including, strikingly, ZERO more traditionally Feminist measures of progress, such as population proportions of educated or financially self-sufficient Women) is currently either at, or very very close to, the most auspicious level ever in all of history.
Female suicides, taken separately, also betray the point of including them here: the Female suicide rate is still almost 25% lower than its peak in 1970, which has never even remotely been approached again in the intervening 50+ years (Women's rates are the bottom, black-colored, time series in the graph at the top).

But let's see where this takes us.

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Domestic work inequalities (pp. 36-37)

100% on point.

In fact, Ms. Federici severely understates the MASSIVE gulf in housework throughput between men and Women. In other words, in the one section of this paper where even the most putatively wild-eyed hype statements turn out to be TRUE... we have an uncharacteristic absence of hype🤦🏽‍♀️.

especially 2 incredible, but factual, FACTS:

• Married / cohabiting heterosexual Women with children do more housework than SINGLE MOTHERS do,

AND

• Even unemployed or stay-at-home husbands / male partners STILL do less housework on average than their Wives/Gfs WHO WORK FULL TIME.
Bewildering to see neither of these facts, which would both be HUGE exclamation points underlying this part of Ms. Federici's thesis.

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Women are closer to destitution than ever before (paraphrased):

Definitely hyped up. Until the post-WW2 period, Women of virtually all class and educational backgrounds were often forced to turn to prostitution if Their husbands' ability to work (or the husbands themselves) were to perish; by comparison this has been true only vanishingly rarely since the 1950s for Women above the working poor.

But, also with a kernel of truth—because costs of living (esp housing) have soared for the 40≈ years since the 'stagflation' of 1980 (+/–) while real wages have merely treaded water relative to inflation.

Nowhere has this been more true than in public-sector jobs—dramatically illustrated by the transformatively huge drop in the standard of living attainable to a U.S. postal worker, a career that in 1975 was a reasonable road to the "American Dream" (detached house, car, family with a significant-if-not-posh level of disposable income). (From 1911 to 1967, the USPS also offered full-service "postal banking"—a subsidized, basic-tier service that kept the poor from being unbanked, just as postal banking still does in many other countries worldwide—but, after 1967, #nope.[§]) In more recent years—and especially since the 2008 financial crash—postal employment offers no reasonable chance of a track to homeownership or longer-term security.

The fact that public-sector jobs have been uniquely suffering here, of course, is also a BIG strike against Ms. Federici's later call for more government dollars to Women. I mean if they can't even give more dollars to the actual government employees...

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Other Women's comments here have handled the other material better than I can (and I'm running out of time to type this), but, the part about "growing exploitation of animals"—especially in industry—is another plain contradiction of actual fact. FAR fewer industries in 2025 use animal products or testing than in the '70s—almost entirely because the (GASP) capitalist incentives to exploit the animals were overtaken by the potential profitability of more humane technologies. I know right...

For instance, glue used to be widely made from animal hoofs, not that long ago. In 2025 you cannot even find animal glue in the United States unless you are turning over every pebble in a search for extremely authentic vintage restoration techniques... and even then maybe not.

I also got a chuckle out of "Nazi-like cruelty" to animals... because uh
um
this is awkward...
because guess which political party was THE single most progressive on animal rights out of all political parties in modern western history? Two guesses, first one doesn't count.

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[§]: A stroll through XXth century American history reveals that a whooooole lotta stuff—especially stuff that helped buoy the poorer classes and insulate them from inescapable cycles of destitute penury—just kinda went away during a surprisingly short period of years: 1965 to 1970.
Huh? What happened?

Actually the proper question is what DIDN'T happen anymore. Specifically, the EXTREME, genuinely (in good faith) SOCIALIST, redistribution of wealth by taxation.

From 1946 to 1963, the U.S. Federal income tax brackets stood unchanged at rates that ran all the way up to an eye-watering 92%.
NINETY
​ ​ ​ ​ -TWO
​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ PERCENT

Under no less than Harry S Truman (during whose term a lot of those funds went to help the UK rebuild from the bombings of the air war) and, especially, General 'Ike' Eisenhower—the one, the only, the military, the basically conservative—the United States embarked on a generation-long, audaciously BIG socialist experiment in which the nation's top earners kept as little as 8 cents on the dollar.

that's why the 1950s and early 1960s saw...
• the Interstate system and modernization of transport more generally
• the establishment of most state universities, esp non-flagship campuses
• building of unprecedented numbers of public and semi-publiic/publicly-subsidized hospitals, public libraries, and other public or essentially-public institutions
• an uptick in health-insured Americans, from just 9% in 1946 (!!) to more than 60% in 1965
• MASSIVELY subsidized homebuyer assistance programs (much more expansive, relative to the cost of housing at the time, than ACORN of more recent fame/infamy)
etc etc.
• Under that known pinko, commie, leftist radical, ((checks notes)) um, General Dwight Eisenhower. (Just wait'll You all find out [which other known pinko, commie, leftist radical Russki agent was the only U.S. President to have ever been a serious proponent of Universal Basic Income, and indeed to have gotten to the very doorstep of implementing it nationwide. Don't peek until You guess which other crazy shitlib president THAT was.)

So I really liked the opening sentence:

Changing our body, regaining control over our sexuality and reproductive capacity, is to change the material conditions of our lives.

But then soon came to this:

Capitalism’s old dream to lengthen the workday, reduce wages, and maximize the unpaid labor accumulated is fully realized today in the United States.

I understand she is a Marxist. I guess I am not because I judge Marxism by looking at various governments and how their own citizens, including women, have been treated. Too much authoritarianism. Look at Venezuela or Cambodia or...

I do not believe that adopting Marxism will result in less exploitation of women.

This is true, because we know what a struggle it can be to find childcare or for mothers (or any parent) to gay time off for a sick child:

most jobs assume that workers are free from family commitments or have someone at home taking care of housework.

This line started out interesting...

But it is to recognize that “choice” and control over our bodies cannot be achieved only by reducing the number of the children we have or gaining the right not to have children and working for a wage.

Then went on to this:

It is building the power to force the state to relinquish the resources that we need for our families and communities, so that we do not have to take two jobs, spend all our time worrying about money, or give up our children in surrogacy or adoption because we cannot support them.

While I agree that we need to support families more, I think there are limits. "Resources" don't come from no where, they are extracted from the natural world or built by other humans.

Capitalism has made us lose sight of the magic of life.

I don't think our economic system determines how we see the magic of life. I don't think there is much of anything more dour than Soviet era architecture. People in Cuba would love it if they didn't need to stand in line for hours and hours to buy basic goods.

And then this (tell me you have never studied biology or even used the Google machine to look up floral pigments):

Nature too is magical. One day the soil is brown and next flowers are generated from it of all colors. How these colors or the forms of the flowers were produced by this same soil no science has yet explained.

Slavery and racism and genocide were found throughout human history, not just in America:

Despite so many social movements, social struggles, and so much celebration of human rights, we have not been able to address the main crisis on which American society has been built—the consequences of centuries of slavery and genocide, which like an ocean of blood affects and distorts everything that is done on this continent.

While I am enjoying reading this, I find her arguments weak or incompletely formed. I am hoping for more.

Good lord, the holidays really got me behind on my reading. I'm going to have to play catch-up tonight and see if I have anything to add to the discussion tomorrow!

Re-tagging as a reminder: @scriptcrone @Gray @fixingentrophy @RNPhalarope @radiante @being @Supervagine @LapisLazuli @PiquedInterest @StrawberryCough

Some things that caught my eye: Having the state provide resources for women...last time I checked, the "state" is you and me and our working wages providing tax revenue. I disagree with her here but do think our tax money could be spent more wisely to help women. I did like the section on the 'magic of birth-giving women' and was surprised to learn about assembly-line birthing practices. I haven't been part of or attended a birth in many years so I have no direct knowledge, but this is a really sad state of affairs. Yes, common gardens and community gardens could be useful. It gave me hope to learn this is being done. We have a local resource in our state that encourages seed saving and provides free seeds to indigenous people. I have been looking out for the vegan movement and note that vegetarianism and veganism are immensely popular and much easier to do now than ever before. As an older woman, I saw the resurgent era in the 1960s and beyond, and this is another area that gives me hope. Carol J. Adams is a wonderful writer, if you are interested in how feminism and veganism intersect. Federici makes excellent points here. Finally, in her conclusion for this lecture, she makes the important point that resources should be used to help education. I wholeheartedly agree with her here. I enjoyed reading this lecture. Looking forward more discussion! Edit: formatting

I was not particularly impressed with this chapter. I was on board with the introduction - current conditions have changed (overwork, debt, health problems, depression) and therefore it's necessary to "rethink the feminist agenda". Okay. However, it seems that in the end she's saying that every single issue is a feminist issue. Which I think is true, but I found the feminist analysis lacking. What makes these things a feminist issue particularly? And how are we supposed to prioritize when everything is a feminist issue?

Furthermore, this chapter in general was not especially well-focused. The title is "The Body in Today's Reproductive Crisis" but the reproductive crisis was not woven through the rest of the text enough, imo. The increasingly "mechanical process of production" of birth today was briefly explored, but could have been more. She also briefly references chickens and female pigs, which seems like a proto-vegan-feminist analysis, but just sort of trails off. What about milk cows? Lots to talk about there.

For example: "We must reappropriate resources, work less, regain control of our lives, and take responsibility for the well-being of a broader world than that of our families." Okay. How do we do that? Volunteering? Women already do the vast majority of volunteering.

I liked that she went briefly into the "liberation" of women incarcerated for "survival crimes" but that section too could have been more closely linked to the topic. Also, I wish people wouldn't throw around terms like "the carceral system" without being more specific about what they hope to change, and the fact that this project needs to be sex-segregated. Let's lock up more rapists, please.

Finally, although Federici mentioned several interesting tidbits, I found this chapter overall a shallow overview, and especially it featured little discussion of what makes something "a good feminist project and a good feminist demand" - the line used in the final sentences.

This chapter was relatively short.

I liked that Federici pointed out that while some women are the sole providers and some have partners who are employed outside, somebody still has to do domestic work and that this often leads to women working 60-90 hours per week. Obviously, this is not news for me, but I see how it might be eye-opening to someone who is new to feminism.

I do not agree with her, though that a job can destroy your body just because you have to stand up all day. In my opinion what is damaging is that women are often forsed to wear high heels in those jobs. But if you ask me, I'd say a job where you have to walk a lot and you can wear comfortable shoes is much better for the body than one where you have to stare at the screen all day. And I know what I am talking about: I worked as a waitress in my youth and we were allowed to wear flats and I never thought of this job as physically taxing.

I did like her point that because of outside jobs many have to depend on paid daycare and fast food. And while my country (Russia) is not the best one, at least there's a paid maternity or paternity leave (paternity leave is a rare thing, though). I just wonder how are young mothers supposed to survive, if they don't have support network (e.g their parents) to help with the baby?

A different thing made me feel relieved I don't live in the USA - is the mentioning of gun control. Living in a country where owning a gun is legal is terryfying.

But alas, in my country, like in US, fortunes are spent on military instead of programs that can stimulate children's creativity.

Another thing I liked she pounted out is "survival crimes". Again not news for me, but a lot of people equal female murders to male murders.

Also while I agree that some issues are not actually feminist, I am happy she raises them. I am also devastated that we have no time for love and friendship. Or I like her pro-vegan and pro-sustainability stance.

And I loved how she describes giving birth as something magical. But since I have never had children, I am not sure if it's good or bad that nowadays the emphasis is on efficiency. I mean she writes that children are pulled out of "sensationaless bodies", but why is it bad if it can save a woman from the pain of labour? Again, I am not a mother, so can't really pass judgment here.

By what date should we read the next part?

@scriptcrone @Gray @fixingentrophy @RNPhalarope @radiante @being @Supervagine @LapisLazuli @stern-as-steel @PiquedInterest @StrawberryCough @rkin @TheChalicelsMightier @Luna_Lovegood @faerieclaire @sealwomyn @RegularFeminist @jelliknight @Lipsy @Feministunderyrbed @BisonInvoice