It gets into all the ways working class women get shat on by society, and all the shitty unpaid labour we’re made to feel guilty for not doing, and basically all the guilt and shame that gets piled on us. (The book is Formations of Class and Gender by Beverley Skeggs)
I think you don’t see more women in leftist movements a lot of the time because the class self consciousness societal messages force us to internalize make us too uncomfortable to admit we are and what that means, because the stigma around working class womanhood is SO nasty and intense.
Like for men admitting working class status doesn’t undermine their gender and can in fact be seen as enhancing masculinity (although prole men still exist in a subordinated and shitty position) whereas for women it calls womanhood into question and our class status means constant scrutiny of our sexual behavior, of our mothering, of our housekeeping,of our appearance, of everything, and working class women are utterly and completely pathologized as deviant, hypersexual, uncaring, vain (taking time for the self for the sake of yourself as opposed to for others), bad mothers, strident, demanding, unable to “keep a man” because of the aforementioned traits, essentially as pathological non-women, Lilith to the bourgeois Eve.
We’re utterly back footed, put on the defensive from day one, society sees us as a potential revolutionary threat, and so we are made to justify ourselves as decent, as respectable, as human every moment of every day. Unconstrained working class femininity is seen as a profound threat to capitalist order, or there would not be so much effort put into repressing it. Think of “teen moms” and “welfare mothers” and “sluts” (all class and often racially coded terms) being blamed for every social ill, for the collapse of society, and while society isn’t currently collapsing and if it is it certainly isn’t our fault, I think that if we fight back against their attempts to guilt trip us and shame us into compliance and silence, working class women might just be able to collapse this mess of a society if we get together and try, and that would be a damned fine thing.
Camille told me about a book about working class women and emotional labour and I super want to read it and now this as soon as I’m caught up with current trafficking research and global swer response.
Sex worker book club on labour theory/studies?
Yesssss
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 