Introduction

“You work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live. But exploited as you might be, you are not that work.” Silvia Federici’s address to housewives in her 1974 essay “Wages for Housework” informs our teaching on gender norms, working-class struggle, and capitalist accumulation. Here, we propose an interdisciplinary course module exploring a historical context when industrial insubordination and feminist struggles were intimately connected–the 1970s in Italy. It draws on three main sources: Nanni Balestrini’s novel We Want Everything; Elio Petri’s film The Working Class Goes to Heaven; and a feminist pamphlet from the international “Wages for Housework” campaign, launched in Italy in 1972. This module prompts students to analyze how working-class struggles have been shaped by gender norms and in turn how feminist critics have questioned the boundaries of “work.”

We teach these pieces in our respective disciplines of anthropology (Morganne) and history (Luca). Both depict working-class struggles in Italian factories in 1969. The novel offers a first-person perspective of a work-averse man from Italy’s unemployment-ridden south who moves northward for work and gets involved in rebellions at a Fiat plant. The film focuses on the radicalization of a relentless bonus-chaser after suffering a workplace injury. Both sources belong to the cultural history of Italy’s 1969 Hot Autumn (autunno caldo), a period of industrial militancy when Italian workers blocked production on a level unseen elsewhere in the contemporary industrial world. One of the unique dimensions of Italy in this period was the intertwining  of industrial insubordination, Communist and leftist radicalism, and Italian feminism.

The boisterous energy of 1969 labor militancy is contagious. Students are piqued by Balestrini’s narrator’s affirmation that “all work is shit.” Petri’s film sparks discussions through his character Militina, a former factory worker whose institutionalization cannot mask the reason within his madness: “a man has the right to know what he’s doing, what he’s for.” We also analyze how the protagonists perform working-class virility and we grapple with their deplorable treatment of women in an Italy that in short order would become the site of one of the most powerful women’s movements in Europe. Based on our reflections of previous teaching experiences, we decided to consolidate our resources into this module on gender, work, and dissent.  

Our course materials depict a profit-driven Fordist factory permeating into male workers’ bodies, subjectivities, and homes to turn workers and their romantic partners into appendages of the factory. These stories feature workplace mutilations, sexual dysfunction, frustrated women, a mental asylum, and an apartment looming with plastic junk. And yet, these men and women are not fully determined by their work. The protagonists join their coworkers in the strikes that swept over northern Italy during a period of permanent industrial conflict. Women resist their sexualization and domestication at the hands of the same male workers who come home emotionally and physically abused by the assembly-line.

Course Objectives

The main objective of our course is to prompt students to engage with the anthropology of work and working-class history through the lens of gender. We ask how processes of production  inform gender both at work and within the domestic sphere; and stimulate discussion on how gender norms inform both the functioning of shop floors and patterns of resistance. For example, how does the ‘heroic’ protagonist of Balestrini’s novel conform to–and break from–historical patterns and figures of working-class virility? What does Petri’s film imply about the effects of the assembly line on working-class men like protagonist Lulu Massa? How does his girlfriend Lidia resist Lulu’s gendered expectations of her to care for his everyday needs and tantrums? Through these questions, we also ask how gender norms shape capitalism by engaging with feminist critiques.

Prefacing his classic collection of essays, Men and their Work (1958), sociologist Everett Hughes wrote that “A man’s  work  is  as  good  a  clue  as  any  to  the  course  of  his life,  and  to  his  social  being  and  identity.” A worker’s role in the division of labor organizes the worker’s life. For example, labor migration and rites of passage separate workers from their previous selves and socialize them into new occupations. Workers’ personalities change with the new meanings and practices of specific workplace cultures. However, Hughes, a Chicago man with a soft spot for fieldwork, was also driven to understand the interactional system in which work was situated; how the meanings of ‘work’ were negotiated alongside the introduction of new technology, organizational forms, and social movements. 

The strikes of the late Sixties and Seventies in Italy revealed such a shifting meaning of work among both men and women. Thousands of male workers had left their families in Italy’s southern regions to find better opportunities in the industrialized north, only to face harsh factory discipline. Their virile and sometimes violent rebellion on the factory floor inspired the Italian workerist concept of the operaio-massa, the ‘mass worker’ whose ‘refusal of work’ allegedly meant a radical rejection of the productivist norms that had hitherto been the basis for negotiations between Italian employers and trade unions. Work was exploitation, tout court. Feminists in the early 1970s built upon Italian workerism, redefining work and arguing that the 'love' of a housewife—washing clothes, preparing meals, marital sex, listening to a husband’s work woes—was also work.

Exercises and Assignments

This is a four- week module intended for a cross-listed course on Work and Gender. Prior to their sections in week one, students read We Want Everything and the chapter ‘Working-Class Virility’ in the volume A History of Virility (2016). In the second week, students view the film The Working Class Goes to Heaven and read the New York Wages for Housework pamphlet. The final assignment is devoted to a feminist ‘worker’s inquiry.’

Week 1.  ‘The Refusal of Work’

At the start of class students view a short documentary clip on Fordism. Ask students to draw out key components of Fordism, comparing it with the depiction of Fiat in the novel. Then, bring students’ attention to the Fiat owner’s speech in We Want Everything (Chapter 4, pg 64-65) and the narrator’s operaista monologue (Chapter 7, pg 115). We like to structure the discussion around the following questions: 

1. What idea of work is espoused in the Fiat manager’s speech? 

2. What kind of worker is idealized at Fiat in the novel?

3. What is the protagonist’s attitude towards work in We Want Everything? How do you know? 

As a review exercise, refer back to this discussion in Week 2 when introducing Petri’s film (i.e. apply these same questions to Lulu Massa’s workplace).

Week 2. Industrial Insubordination and Working-Class Virility

A second learning objective involves analyzing patterns of working-class behaviour through the lens of ‘working-class virility,’ a concept students will learn from a chapter in the edited volume A History of Virility (Columbia University Press, 2016).  In both the film and the novel, male workers’ behaviors can be analyzed in terms of gendered scripts. In We Want Everything, for example, the protagonists’ virile attitude is depicted as a potential subversive and revolutionary force. By contrast, Petri’s film implies that the assembly line is a source of male sexual dysfunction and fragility, perhaps working-class impotence that manifests itself both in sexual and familial contexts and an inability to live up to revolutionary agency. One way of structuring the conversation is to have students first analyze the concept of working class virility in the text and then prompt them to identify sequences in the film or the novel where the protagonists ‘act out’ working-class virility.

To prepare for the course, we ask students to respond to one of these pre-discussion reflections beforehand: 

1. What are some of the major themes in ‘Working-Class Virility’ by Thierry Pillon? How has the image of the working class shifted since the 19th century, according to Pillon, and why?

2. Imagine you are the author of the chapter ‘Working-Class Virility’. Describe how the protagonist in We Want Everything performs virility – refer to a particular paragraph or moment in the text and explain your interpretation. 

3. How does Lulu Massa act out a virile masculinity in the film? In what ways is this a successful (or failed) performance? 

4. What does Petri’s film suggest about the relationship between assembly-line work and working-class masculinity? How do you know? 

Week 3. Reproduction and the Labour of Love

Students arrive having read the “Wages for Housework” pamphlet. We recommend first focusing the discussion on the image of the woman pregnant with factories and workers as a way to jump into the campaign’s central argument and demand. 

Then, ask students what they think would have happened growing up if their caregivers had refused to do housework for a week. Who would have been affected? How? Could this have produced broader social change? At what level (e.g. individual, interpersonal, legislative) By what possible mechanisms? Morganne has successfully held this discussion as a large group, but if your class size is too big, this activity is great as a think-pair-share exercise. 

The Wages for Housework campaign proposes a contentious strategy for social change, and we recommend pushing for opposing views by asking students to provide arguments for and against this strategy. 

Week 4. Worker’s Inquiry

Students arrive having read this explanation of worker inquiry, as well as this charter school example.

As a classroom activity, students work in small groups on the charter school example to come up with

a) a list of questions the author may have made to get the information conveyed in their text (we recommend that students focus on the sections “Contracts” and “Whatever It Takes” and that you first model the exercise by generating questions together based on one paragraph)

b) Students then organize these questions into technical, political, and social components. They will notice that social components are thin. 

c) Instruct students to come up with three questions that would be “social.” 

d) Next, students identify possible campaign demands from the text. 

e) Lastly, students describe two points of interest in the text and briefly explain why.

f) These are uploaded in a Google doc accessible to all students. Draw students’ attention to the variety of questions proposed based on the same paragraph. You can ask students what may make a question stronger than another (e.g. directive vs non-directive questions, avoiding yes-no questions).

Final assignment: Worker Inquiry through a Gendered Lens

In small groups (3-4), students analyze the world of work by conducting a worker inquiry that employs a gendered lens. The final paper is meant to offer a historical and anthropological approach to work by exploring how gendered experiences of work have changed (or not) since post-war Fordism. Students are encouraged to conduct these worker inquiries into their own current (or past) experiences or that of a family member or friend. 

Students’ inquiries must cover aspects of all three components:

1) The technical composition of the workplace:

For example - What is the organizational structure of the workplace and what contractual rights do people in different roles have? Are certain workplace roles gendered? What is the ideal worker for the job title of the interviewed worker? By what processes are the workplace’s objectives met? What tools are crucial to doing their work? What surveillance and repressive tools are used (e.g. movement-trackers, timesheets, docked pay) and on whom? How is time organized?

2) The political composition of the workplace: 

For example - What tactics do workers use to resist their employers (e.g. work slowdowns)? Are certain tactics gendered? What forms of organization exist (e.g. labor unions, political reading groups)?

3) The social composition of workers: 

For example - How does the worker access healthcare, education, food, entertainment, housing, etc? Are there geographic differences? Is this access gendered or racialized?

Students submit:

1. The list of questions the group asked and the answers for both interviews.

2. A group-produced, two-page pamphlet hypothetically distributed to workers in one or both of their interviewee’s workplace that calls workers to action along a set of demands.

3. An individually written 8-page paper that:

a) explains worker inquiry and their research design more broadly (e.g. what was their main question? Why did they choose this person in particular? Why those questions?) 

b) compares the worker’s experience with that of Lulu Massa in The Working Class Goes to Heaven in terms of the technical, political, and social composition of their workplace. Students should be reassured that they do not have to cover all the questions asked. Instead, they should draw out key differences and similarities in working class experiences of capitalism. 

c) an argument about what these comparisons suggest about the changing (or not) world of work

d) come up with one question for future research on work (and explain)

References

Required film

Elio Petri, director. The Working Class Goes to Heaven. 2023 (1971). United Kingdom: Radiance Films. 

Required reading

Balestrini, Nanni. We Want Everything. Translated by Rachel Kushner. New York: Verso, 2022 [1971].

Corbin, Alain, Jean-Jacques Courtine, Georges Vigarello, eds. A History of Virility. Keith Cohen, trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 

McIntyre, Julie. Superman’s Shop Floor: An Inquiry into Charter School Labor in Philadelphia. Viewpoint Magazine. 2013.

New Year Wages for Housework Committee. “The Campaign for Wages for Housework”. Undated-1972. 

Notes from Below. The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition. 2018.

Pillon, Thierry. “Working Class Virility” in Corbin et al., A History of Virility. 515-536. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Classroom materials

Chaplin, Charles. Modern Times. 1936. United States: Criterion. 

International Social History. “Fordism 1920s USA”. Online resource.

Zamarin, Roberto. Gasparazzo. Turin, 1977.

Extra Materials for the Instructor

Bracke, Maud Anne. 2013. “Between the Transnational and the Local: Mapping the Trajectories and Contexts of the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1970s Italian Feminism.” Women’s History Review 22 (4): 625–42. doi:10.1080/09612025.2012.751771.Hardt, Michael. The Subversive Seventies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Federici, Silvia. Wages against housework (pp. 1-8). 1975. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

Pizzolato, Nicola. “‘I Terroni in Città’: Revising Southern Migrants’ Militancy in Turin’s ‘Hot Autumn.’” Contemporary European History 21, no. 4 (November 2012): 619–34.

UCSD. 2012. “Quick Tips for Ethnographic Interviewing (A Guide for College Students)”. https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/resources/InterviewingTips.html. Last modified on May 2nd, 2024.

Author Biography

 Morganne Blais-McPherson is an anthropologist with an interest in work, migration, and gender in contemporary Italy, currently finishing her PhD at the University of California, Davis. Her doctoral research examines the interactions between sustainability and compliance apparatuses, state immigration policies, and industrial conflict in the Made in Italy fashion industry.  

Luca Provenzano is a historian of modern Europe specializing in protest and working-class politics in the Sixties and Seventies. His most recent research focuses on the relationship between  feminist, countercultural, and revolutionary politics in the Seventies in Italy and West Germany. In 2022-2024, Dr. Provenzano was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Sciences Po, Paris. Luca will hold a postdoctoral researcher fellowship at KU Leuven in Belgium in the 2024-2025 academic year.

Image credits: The authors would like to thank Fabio Panerai for generously permitting the use of his photographs in this article.